Special issue: Reimagining teacher education for the future – global perspectives at the intersection of change, hope and crisis
Introduction: the narrative imperative in a time of crisis
Storytelling is a universal human endeavour for meaning-making (Landrum et al., 2019). From ancient oral traditions to digital social media, narratives have shaped how communities understand their past, navigate their present and imagine their future. In education, storytelling is arguably the oldest pedagogical method, a means of encoding cultural wisdom, ethical norms and historical memory. As Bruner (1990, 2002) hypothesises, narrative is a primary cognitive structure, a fundamental mode of constructing reality itself. We think, remember and anticipate in story form.
Global citizenship education (GCE) is a transformative, active learning approach that empowers learners of all ages to understand, critically analyse and address interconnected global issues such as racism, injustice, inequality and environmental degradation. It aims to foster empathy, solidarity and the skills needed to take action for a more just, peaceful and sustainable world (Dillon et al., 2025). GCE is often described along a ‘soft-critical’ continuum, a framework first introduced by academic and educator Vanessa Andreotti. At one end of the continuum are soft approaches, which emphasise raising awareness about global issues, promoting individual behaviour change and pursuing charitable solutions to global inequality. Mainstream or soft forms of GCE tend to emphasise personal responsibility, empathy and intercultural awareness (Andreotti, 2006, 2011). At the other end of the continuum are critical and transformative approaches, which examine the deeper historical, political and economic causes of global inequality, including power relations and systemic injustice. Critical GCE foregrounds systemic inequalities and power imbalances, encouraging transformative action and decolonial perspectives (Giroux and Bosio, 2021; McLaren and Bosio, 2022). These critical approaches encourage learners to question dominant narratives and reflect critically on their own role within global systems. They also foster capacities to navigate uncertainty, imagine alternative futures and take collective action toward systemic change.
Today, the world grapples with interconnected wicked problems, including climate breakdown, escalating inequality, resurgent authoritarianism, epistemic chaos and the lingering wounds of colonialism. Dominant stories of endless growth, human separateness from nature and civilisational superiority underpin these crises (Damico et al., 2020).
This article contends that story is the essential, yet often under-theorised, connective tissue between transformative learning and critical GCE. I argue that a narrative approach addresses key limitations in current practices, such as the cognitive-emotional disconnect, the persistence of single stories (Adichie, 2009) and the reproduction of paternalistic or saviour complexes (Andreotti, 2011; Cole, 2012). Stories, as both method and content, can humanise abstract global issues, create ‘disorienting dilemmas’ (Mezirow, 1991) and provide the imaginative scaffolding for learners to unlearn dominant assumptions and reach out in ethically grounded solidarity.
The article proceeds in six parts. First, I establish the theoretical foundations, examining the intersections of transformative learning theory and narrative knowing. Second, I analyse the contemporary narrative landscape, identifying dominant stories we live by and their consequences. Third, I delve into the pedagogical mechanics of story, exploring its function as a mirror, window and sliding glass door (Bishop, 1990). Fourth, I introduce the critical framework of ‘learning to unlearn’ through postcolonial and decolonial lenses. Fifth, I synthesise narrative and GCE through specific methodological frameworks (Andreotti, 2006; Dolan, 2014) that prioritise respect, understanding and ethical action. Finally, I conclude by envisioning a narrative pedagogy of global citizenship, one rooted in critical hope, relational accountability and the courageous task of restorying our world. In an era defined by global interdependence, a polycrisis (Dolan, 2025) and urgent social-ecological challenges, education must move beyond the transmission of decontextualised knowledge toward the cultivation of critical, compassionate and globally minded citizens.
Theoretical foundations: transformative learning and narrative knowing
The transformative learning project
Globally, there have been persistent calls for a transformative approach to address today’s social and environmental challenges (d’Abreu et al., 2025). Transformative learning is not a new concept, it has been developed since the 1970s, originating in adult education (Singer-Browdowski, 2023). A key figure in this field is Jack Mezirow (2000), often described as the father of transformative learning. He defined it as
the process by which we transform our taken for granted frames of reference (meaning, perspectives, habits of mind, mind-sets) to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action. (Mezirow, 2000, pp. 7–8)
Mezirow explains that true learning transformation happens when we participate in open dialogue, compare our reasoning with others’ realities, and ultimately make decisions grounded in the deeper awareness this process reveals. This approach requires both individual and collective engagement, encouraging ‘a reconstruction of narratives and one’s frames of reference, to be critically reflective and challenge one’s own assumptions’ (Mezirow, 2000, pp. 19–20). According to Mezirow, transformative learning can take various forms, from developing new ideas and ways of thinking to engaging in reflective processes and questioning one’s own and others’ assumptions.
However, as the field evolved, scholars critiqued an over-reliance on rational critical reflection. O’Sullivan (2002) expanded the vision, defining transformative learning as ‘a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions … a shift of consciousness that alters our way of being in the world’ (p. 11). This holistic view embraces the role of the unconscious (Boyd and Myers, 1988), emotion, imagination and embodied experience (Dirkx, 2001; Lawrence and Cranton, 2015). Transformation is not only cognitive but can also be affective, physical and spiritual.
Narrative as the gateway to transformation
Here, narrative theory provides a crucial bridge. If transformation involves re-authoring one’s relationship to the self and world, then story is the native language of this process. Lawrence and Cranton (2015) argue that fiction and storytelling are uniquely suited to explore the imaginative and emotional dimensions of transformation that evade traditional empirical methods. Stories operate as simulated disorientating dilemmas. For instance, a learner does not need to physically migrate to experience the dislocation in a migrant’s story. They can encounter it vicariously, within the safe yet provocative container of narrative. Narrative theory can be a crucial bridge between transformation and meaning-making, integration and sustained agency in GCE (and transformative education more broadly). It addresses the how and why transformation sticks and moves from a momentary experience to a changed worldview and practice (Bruner, 1991; McAdams, 1993).
When a student engages with a narrative that centres marginalised perspectives – for example, an Indigenous community’s resistance to extractivism – their dominant assumptions about progress, development and sovereignty may be profoundly unsettled. This disjuncture (Jarvis, 2008) creates the fertile ground for critical reflection. The story provides not just the dilemma, but also the metaphorical and emotional scaffolding to process it, allowing learners to ‘try on’ new perspectives and identities (Kroth and Cranton, 2014). Thus, storytelling and transformative learning are symbiotic. Transformation often requires a story to catalyse and guide it, while profound stories inherently possess extensive transformative potential. Opportunities for mining this rich transformative potential however, lie in the hands of the educator in dialogue with the learner.
The narrative landscape: dominant stories and the danger of a single story
The stories we live by
To understand the transformative potential of counter-stories, I first recognise the dominant narratives of our time. Damico et al. (2020), conceptualise these as stories we live by, often-invisible narratives embedded in language that shape our perception and behaviour. Two such pervasive and harmful stories are: anthropocentrism (the story of human separation from and superiority over nature, which legitimises exploitation) and consumerism (the story that well-being and identity are achieved through the consumption of goods and resources).
These stories, amplified by media, education and political discourse, normalise unsustainable and unjust social-ecological relations. They function as a form of epistemic hegemony, marginalising alternative worldviews. As Freire (2000) argued, dominant groups maintain power not only through force but by shaping the very narratives through which reality is understood. Reading the world, therefore, must precede and inform reading the word (Freire and Macedo, 1987).
The single story and the ethics of representation
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2009) seminal concept of the single story powerfully captures the dehumanising effect of narrative reductionism. When Africa is portrayed only as a place of catastrophe, or refugees only as victims, complexity and agency are erased. Adichie (2009) notes that ‘power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person’ (n.p.). This power dynamic, which she calls nkali is central to colonial and neo-colonial relationships.
The single story is the seed of stereotype. As Pickering (2001) argues, stereotypes are not merely falsehoods but incomplete narratives that flatten complexity and reinforce group hierarchies. In GCE, the single story often manifests as the saviour narrative (Flaherty, 2016) or the white saviour industrial complex (Cole, 2012), where privileged actors are framed as heroic rescuers of passive, suffering others. This narrative, however well-intentioned, depoliticises injustice, obscures historical responsibility and reproduces colonial power relations (Andreotti, 2011; Pashby, 2012).
Story as pedagogy
The selection of stories shared with students is not a neutral act. Rather, it is an inherently political practice that shapes knowledge, identity and the distribution of power. The stories we choose to tell influence how societies imagine themselves and how individuals come to understand their place within the world. The choice of story thus becomes a site where ideology is either reproduced or contested, where the status quo is maintained or alternative worlds are envisioned (Dolan, 2014; Kofinti, 2025).
The mediums of story are vast: oral storytelling, literature (especially picture books, which are sophisticated multimodal texts), film, graphic novels, digital stories and community testimony. Each medium engages different senses and literacies. Picture books, as Dolan (2014) compellingly argues, are particularly influential for GCE. Their interplay of image and text, their accessibility and their affective immediacy can make complex global issues tangible for learners of all ages. Digital storytelling, for instance, empowers learners to become creators, not just consumers, of narratives about their own lives and communities.
Nussbaum (1997) champions the narrative imagination as essential for democratic citizenship, as it trains us to see the world from another’s point of view. This is not mere sentiment, but a rigorous exercise in intersubjectivity, the shared construction of meaning that is foundational to social life (Bruner, 2002).
Bishop’s (1990) influential metaphor of books as mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors offers a powerful analytical framework for understanding how narratives shape learners’ identities, perspectives and capacities for global engagement. When extended to GCE, this framework illuminates how stories help learners see themselves, understand others and enter new worlds of meaning and action. Bishop (1990) argued that students benefit from literature in three distinct yet interconnected ways. Mirrors allow students to see their own experiences, cultures and identities reflected in the stories they read. When students recognise themselves in literature, they validate their own experiences and foster a positive sense of self-worth. Windows, by contrast, provide glimpses into the lives, traditions and perspectives of others, promoting empathy, understanding and cultural awareness. Finally, sliding glass doors metaphorically enable readers to step into other worlds, fully inhabiting experiences beyond their own reality and fostering transformative learning. This conceptualisation provides a critical lens through which the value of diverse literature can be assessed, emphasising the ways in which books serve to reflect, illuminate and expand the experiences of young readers.
Applying Bishop’s (1990) framework to the curation of students’ literature necessitates intentionality and balance. A diverse multicultural collection should not merely include stories with characters from various racial or ethnic backgrounds but should ensure that these narratives avoid stereotypical or tokenistic portrayals. Practical strategies for assembling such collections include evaluating texts for authentic representation, considering authorship and cultural context and ensuring a variety of genres, formats and thematic content.
A critical GCE pedagogy requires a deliberate balance of all three elements of Bishop’s (1990) framework. Relying on any one element in isolation within GCE can lead to significant dangers and distortions. Windows can turn people and cultures into distant objects of observation with a risk of voyeurism or a superficial tourist approach to diversity. Mirrors alone can lead to insularity. If students only see their own culture, values and experiences reflected, it reinforces the idea that their worldview is central and sufficient. This is the antithesis of GCE. The act of stepping through sliding doors can become performative if not grounded in critical reflection (mirror) and deep understanding (window).
GCE aims to build connectors, critics and ethical agents. This requires a pedagogical framework that consciously integrates self-interrogation (mirror), rigorous knowledge of the world (window) and opportunities for responsible engagement (door) in a continuous cycle. The danger of relying on one in isolation is the production of a global citizen who lacks either self-awareness, plural and critically examined knowledges or the capacity for ethical action ultimately undermining the transformative goals of GCE itself.
Colonialism: recognising the elephant in the room
Colonialism began, and continues, with the objectification of the Earth and its resources, separating humans from nature, from other beings and from each other. Coloniality refers to the persistent patterns of power emerging from colonialism that still structure knowledge, culture, labour and relations (de Sousa Santos, 2014; Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 2007).
In Legacy of Violence, Elkins (2022) reveals a racially grounded British doctrine that sanctioned sustained aggression to secure colonial possessions over two centuries. When Britain could no longer contain the violence it had legitimised, it withdrew, often leaving power to local governments dependent on colonial structures. The 1917 Balfour Declaration exemplifies this: Britain promised a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine, a land not Britain’s to give, disregarding existing inhabitants. This led to the dispossession and ongoing persecution of Palestinians, the 1948 establishment of Israel, and the Nakba (Catastrophe). Britain then abdicated responsibility to the UN, triggering the 1948 civil war, the Palestinian refugee crisis and the enduring Arab–Israeli conflict (Nasaw, 2021). Gaza remains the epitome of this prolonged colonial crisis: a besieged enclave of displaced people whose political aspirations have been thwarted first by the British Empire, then by Israel with international complicity.
President Trump’s MAGA policies represent colonialism on steroids (Nungak, 2017). With USAID’s demise, the US has initiated authoritarian rule, withdrawing from 66 international organisations, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the WHO, UNRWA, the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO (Igini, 2026). This à la carte approach to UN funding, alongside threats to seize Greenland and military actions against Venezuela, disregards international law and the UN Charter.
No critical examination of GCE can proceed without confronting colonialism’s persistent, unacknowledged legacy, the ‘elephant in the room’ (Fricke, 2025, p. 3). Evasion risks what Tuck and Yang (2012) call a ‘settler move to innocence’ (p. 4): protecting learners (especially from former colonial powers) from confronting their positionality within ongoing dispossession.
Children’s literature has long been implicated in colonial projects, promoting Eurocentric views. A postcolonial perspective challenges this, giving voice to marginalised peoples and analysing how colonial legacies sustain inequality and cultural misunderstanding. As Andreotti (2014) notes, postcolonial theory makes it ‘impossible to turn our back to difficult issues, such as our complicity in systemic harm’ (p. 20). Through restorying and resistance, children’s texts can unsettle colonial assumptions and invite young readers to imagine just futures.
Postcolonial literacy recognises that stories are never neutral. It equips readers to detect power relations and othering, treating groups as fundamentally different. Yet GCE is often critiqued for reproducing the hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. Superficial, charity-oriented GCE programmes depoliticise structural causes, privilege Western saviourhood and marginalise Global South agency (Andreotti, 2011; Kapoor, 2013).
Learning to unlearn: a postcolonial and decolonial imperative
To move beyond single stories and saviour complexes, GCE must incorporate the difficult work of unlearning. Drawing on postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (1999, p. 12), Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (2006, 2011) frames learning to unlearn as a core disposition. It is the process of critically interrogating the assumptions, privileges and narratives one has inherited, particularly those rooted in colonial, imperial and modernist paradigms.
Unlearning is inherently disorienting. It involves confronting one’s complicity in systems of harm and relinquishing the desire for easy answers or moral purity (Andreotti, 2014). It asks learners: Who am I in this story? What biases and histories shape my gaze? How do I benefit from the very structures I am learning about? This reflexive work challenges the universalisation of Western experience and opens space for epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous communities.
When GCE fails to explicitly name and analyse colonialism and coloniality, it inadvertently depoliticises global inequality; reinforces the ‘White Saviour Industrial Complex’ (Cole, 2012, n.p.), perpetuates epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and obscures complicity. Poverty, conflict and ‘underdevelopment’ in the Global South are framed as technical problems or internal failures, rather than as outcomes of centuries of external extraction, slavery and imposed structural adjustment (Escobar, 1995). Without a colonial analysis, action in GCE defaults to charity and paternalistic ‘helping’. Learners from the Global North are positioned as benevolent rescuers of passive, suffering others, reproducing the very power dynamics of the colonial mission. International curriculum documents continue to prioritise Western theorists, case studies and solutions, silencing the epistemologies and political analyses from the Global South, essential for understanding and dismantling global power structures (Sondarjee, 2023). It allows learners to see themselves as disconnected, innocent bystanders to global problems, rather than as beneficiaries of a global system built on colonial foundations.
Naming the elephant: decolonising story
A narrative and transformative approach to GCE is compelled to make colonialism and coloniality central, not peripheral, to its analysis. Colonialism should not be a single, isolated unit in a history curriculum. It must be the analytical starting point for examining every major global issue from climate change and economic inequality to migration patterns and global health disparities. Counter-narratives are essential for exposing the colonial matrix. Literature, such as Things Fall Apart (Achebe, 1958), does not just add an African perspective; it fundamentally reframes the colonial encounter, making visible the violence, epistemicide and social disintegration that accompanied so-called civilisation. Similarly, Indigenous storytelling about land and relationality directly challenges the colonial ontology of separation and ownership.
Mignolo (2011) invites educators to practise epistemic disobedience. This means deliberately delinking from the assumption that Western frameworks are the sole source of valid solutions. It involves centring texts, theories and storytellers from the Global South and Indigenous communities. It requires what Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) calls ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (p. ii); approaches to knowledge that respect and revitalise other ways of knowing. Learners must also be guided to trace the lines from colonial plantations and mines to contemporary supply chains, corporate wealth and their own material comforts. This moves understanding from abstract guilt to concrete analysis of systemic benefit and responsibility.
In essence, to truly engage in learning to unlearn, learners must unlearn the master narrative of history that positions colonialism as a regrettable but concluded chapter. They must instead learn to see the world through the lens of coloniality, to recognise how the room they are in, the knowledge they value and the global problems they study are all shaped by the elephant that has been there all along. Transformative GCE has the courage not just to acknowledge the elephant, but to study its anatomy, trace its footprints through history and imagine how to build a room, a world designed on entirely different principles. This is the uncomfortable but necessary work of a genuinely critical and hopeful GCE.
The urgency of unlearning is starkly visible in climate justice. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022) has formally recognised colonialism as a historical and ongoing driver of the climate crisis. Dominant climate narratives often obscure this, focusing on technical solutions or individual carbon footprints while ignoring historical responsibility and systemic injustice. Hailing from Kampala, Uganda, Vanessa Nakate is the founder of the climate action groups Youth for Future Africa and the Rise Up Movement. In 2020, the 23-year-old activist had appeared at a joint press conference in Davos with other prominent climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson. But when the Associated Press published a picture of the event, Nakate was cut from the image, which showed only the four white activists (Nakate, 2023). This cropped image is a potent metaphor for the coloniality of climate discourse. Similarly, while Greta Thunberg is a powerful advocate, the disproportionate focus on her can perpetuate a ‘hero narrative’ (Walsh, 2020, p. 1) that marginalises frontline voices. A decolonial narrative pedagogy would share the stories of Pacific Islanders, Indigenous land defenders and African climate farmers, framing them not as victims but as agents of knowledge and resistance (Smith, 2012; Todd, 2016).
Synthesising frameworks: narrative methodologies for critical GCE
Storytelling can be used as a transformative pedagogy within and beyond GCE. Depending on choice of story and methodological approach, storytelling can maintain the status quo. Alternatively, it can serve as a critical methodology for learning to unlearn (Andreotti and de Souza, 2008). By engaging with counter-narratives (Ender, 2021), stories told by marginalised communities, Indigenous groups or individuals in the Global South, learners are confronted with perspectives that disrupt simplified or stereotypical representations (Adichie, 2009). Through narrative encounters, students witness the partiality of dominant stories and are invited to ‘disinvest from the desire for control and certainty’ (Andreotti, 2011, p. 12). Storytelling thus becomes a pedagogical tool for interrogating the taken-for-granted dispositions within the story.
By affirming identities, broadening perspectives and enabling imaginative entry into new possibilities, stories cultivate the knowledge, dispositions and ethical sensibilities necessary for global citizenship. In an era marked by cultural diversity and global interdependence, narrative-based pedagogies provide essential tools for preparing learners to engage thoughtfully and responsibly with the world. Such pedagogies shift GCE from a content-based model to a process-orientated model, where transformation emerges from questioning rather than absorbing knowledge.
Multicultural stories for students should provide opportunities for engagement with literature as a mirror, window and sliding glass door (Bishop, 1990). True GCE requires a dynamic, iterative interplay of all three. Additional models proposed by Dolan (2014) and Andreotti and de Souza (2008) build on Bishop’s (1990) foundation to introduce a more explicitly political and transformative agenda. Dolan (2014) articulates a clear, practice-oriented framework that positions picture books as powerful pedagogical tools in GCE. This framework is based on three dimensions: respect, understanding and action. Dolan argues that picture books, often underestimated within educational discourse, have distinct affordances, they are accessible, multimodal, affectively rich and capable of addressing complex global and social issues in developmentally appropriate ways. Her framework provides educators with a structured yet flexible method for engaging children critically and ethically with themes such as diversity, inequality, human rights, migration and global interdependence.
The integration of story, transformative learning theory and critical GCE constitutes a synergistic pedagogical triad with profound potential for fostering both personal and social transformation. While each element possesses independent educational value, their intentional convergence creates a recursive, holistic process that addresses learners cognitively, affectively and existentially. This triad operates through a dynamic interplay: story provides the affective and narrative doorway into lived experience; transformative learning supplies the theoretical architecture for perspective shifts; and critical GCE offers the political-ethical compass for collective action toward justice.
Four dispositions for ethical engagement
Andreotti and de Souza’s (2008) influential model, first articulated in Learning to Read the World Through Other Eyes, proposes four interconnected dispositions learning to unlearn, learning to listen, learning to learn and learning to reach out. These dispositions are designed to challenge dominant narratives and promote ethical relationality in global learning. For Andreotti and de Souza (2008), learning to listen requires an ethical stance of humility. True listening, in their view, requires suspending one’s own frameworks of understanding and the impulse to immediately judge, categorise or assimilate the other’s view into one’s own. Storytelling practices nurture this deeper mode of listening. Whether through oral histories, community narratives or dialogical story circles, storytelling invites learners to engage with the complexities, ambiguities and emotional textures of lived experience. Such engagement encourages what Andreotti (2014) calls hospitable listening, an openness to being unsettled by others’ stories without appropriating or simplifying them. In this way, storytelling becomes a site where learners practise decentred, ethical listening essential for critical GCE. Learning to listen is at the core of a critical GCE approach. It aims to understand the world from the others’ location and on their own terms, as a basis for solidarity by acting with others in their struggles for justice, rather than for them.
Learning to learn involves an openness to unfamiliar epistemologies and an acceptance of uncertainty, recognising that learning is relational, contextual and contested (Andreotti and de Souza, 2008). This disposition counters the idea of the learner as a neutral consumer of objective global knowledge, instead highlighting the co-construction of meaning across difference. Storytelling aligns naturally with this orientation. Narratives introduce multiplicity and resist closure; they allow competing truths and layered interpretations to coexist. As learners engage with stories from diverse cultural and epistemic traditions, they develop the capacity to navigate complexity without reducing it to simplified moral lessons. Experiences with Indigenous storytelling, for example, foreground relationality, temporality and non-Western forms of knowledge (Smith, 2012). Such encounters cultivate the epistemic flexibility that Andreotti (2011) identifies as fundamental to ethical global citizenship. The final disposition, learning to reach out, concerns ethical action grounded in humility, responsibility and relationality rather than saviourism or paternalistic intervention. It emphasises solidarity, reciprocity and co-created futures.
Andreotti and de Souza’s (2008) model learning to unlearn, listen, learn and reach out offers a powerful conceptual lens for rethinking GCE. When applied to storytelling methodologies, it enables pedagogies that foreground epistemic humility, ethical relationality and transformative engagement with global complexity. Storytelling becomes not merely a pedagogical technique but an epistemic and ethical practice that supports students in ‘learning to read the world through other eyes’ (Andreotti and de Souza, 2008, p. 7) and developing forms of global citizenship grounded in justice, reciprocity and co-creation.
Storytelling-based pedagogies support this orientation by providing a foundation for cross-cultural dialogue and collective meaning-making. Participatory storytelling projects, co-authored narratives and community-led story exchanges foster relational action rooted in collaboration rather than charitable impulse (Dutta, 2016). Through shared storytelling processes, learners experience how global citizenship can be enacted through dialogue, mutual recognition and the collective imagining of more just and sustainable futures.
Methodology for ethical story exchange
Narrative 4 (N4 – https://narrative4.com) is a not-for-profit with a mission to equip young people to harness the power of stories to drive change in their communities. Founded by artists, educators and students, the organisation is established in 12 countries across Africa, Europe and North America, with over a million stories shared to date. N4 offers a powerful, practice-oriented methodology of structured story exchange designed to foster empathy, critical understanding and social change (McCann and Keylock, 2018; Rodriguez and Chen, 2020). Its methodology operationalises many of the theoretical principles of transformative learning, critical GCE and ethical listening advocated by scholars like Andreotti (2011). The N4 model is built on a scaffolded process that moves learners through key stages of narrative engagement: story sharing; active listening; story capturing; and connecting and reflecting (Kubin et al., 2025). In safe, small-group settings, participants are invited to share a personal story in response to a carefully crafted prompt related to a universal human theme (for example, belonging, fairness, resilience). This activates the mirror function, allowing participants to see their own experience as part of a shared human condition and to practise vulnerability. Listeners are given strict protocols focused on non-judgmental, attentive listening without interruption or immediate response. This stage rigorously practices Andreotti’s (2006) disposition of learning to listen. It teaches participants to receive another’s story on its own terms, fostering humility and resisting the urge to immediately compare, correct, or offer advice. This directly counters saviour mentalities. The listener then retells the storyteller’s narrative back to them, aiming for precise, empathetic recall. This step is profound. It validates the storyteller’s experience and demonstrates to the listener whether they have truly heard. It makes the act of listening visible and accountable. Finally, the group engages in facilitated dialogue, moving from the personal stories to explore patterns, differences and connections to broader systemic or global issues. This is the critical pivot from the personal window to the sliding glass door and the fourth stage of narrative. The facilitator guides questions like: What systemic forces shaped these individual experiences? How do our positions of privilege or marginalisation affect our stories? What responsibilities emerge from hearing these narratives?
The N4 methodology holds significant potential for critical GCE for several reasons. By providing clear steps, it manages the emotional and cognitive risk of sharing and listening across difference, creating a ‘brave space’ for difficult conversations about identity, injustice and global inequality. The protocol equalises participants as each person is both storyteller and listener. This democratises the classroom and challenges the notion that knowledge about global issues flows only from expert (often Western) sources to passive learners. Hence, hierarchies of knowledge are disrupted. It begins with emotional and personal engagement (the story), which then becomes the raw material for critical, systemic analysis. This follows the transformative learning arc from disorienting dilemma (hearing a peer’s challenging story) to critical reflection, thus bridging the affective–cognitive gap. The strict listening protocol is a practical training in suspending one’s own frame of reference, a core component of ‘unlearning’. Participants experience first-hand the complexity of another’s truth. Action arising from this process is less likely to be charitable or paternalistic because it is grounded in deep, relational understanding of specific human experiences within systems. It answers the ‘what happens next?’ question from a place of connection rather than distant pity.
In practice, an N4 exchange in a GCE classroom might begin with prompts about ‘home’ or ‘fairness’. A student sharing a story of familial displacement due to climate change, and another sharing a story of privileged mobility, creates immediate, human-scale material. The subsequent facilitated reflection can then expand to analyse global climate migration, loss and damage finance and differentiated responsibility, moving seamlessly from the intimate story to the global political frame. Thus, N4 provides a tangible, replicable method to enact the theoretical imperatives of critical narrative pedagogy. It turns the abstract call for ethical listening and story-sharing into a disciplined practice, demonstrating how structured narrative exchange can be a direct pathway to the empathetic, critical and relationally accountable GCE, for which this article advocates.
Additional narrative frameworks for GCE: a landscape of approaches
Beyond Dolan’s (2014) and Andreotti’s (2011) frameworks and the structured methodology of N4, educators can draw on a rich landscape of other narrative-based approaches, each with distinct emphases that align with the goals of transformative GCE.
Digital storytelling for participatory action research
The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) model, pioneered by Lambert (2013), provides a structured process for individuals and communities to create short, first-person video narratives. In a GCE context, this shifts learners from consumers to producers of narrative. The seven-step process (owning your insights, owning your emotions, finding the moment, seeing your story, hearing your story, assembling your story and sharing the story) is itself a transformative practice of critical reflection and agency. When applied to GCE, digital storytelling can amplify marginalised voices. Learners from marginalised communities or those in Global South partnerships can create and share their own narratives, directly challenging the single story. Thus digital storytelling can also foster an appreciation for Andreotti and de Souza’s (2008) learning to learn. The collaborative editing and sharing process requires negotiating meaning and perspective, building epistemic humility. Sharing these stories across borders creates a platform for dialogue grounded in personal testimony rather than abstract statistics, facilitating Andreotti’s (2011) ethical listening.
The story circle method
Rooted in Boal’s (1979) principles of the Theatre of the Oppressed, the story circle method is a storytelling approach designed to deconstruct personal and community narratives to address issues of power and oppression. The rules are simple: speak from your own experience, listen without interruption and hold stories in confidence.
Story circles build critical consciousness by transforming personal unease into collective analysis (Fernández-Peraza et al., 2025; Fletcher et al., 2021; Sellami, 2025). In a circle of four to eight people, each person shares a lived experience in response to a carefully designed prompt, such as ‘Tell a story about a time you were treated unfairly because of who you are’. No one interrupts, advises or debates. Deep listening replaces debate.
This structure enables six key shifts. First, naming an experience turns a private trouble into a public issue. Second, hearing contradictory stories problematises what once seemed normal. Third, dialogue without experts unlearns hierarchy and builds solidarity. Fourth, noticing what is left unsaid reveals sanctioned ignorance – what society trains us not to see. Fifth, emotion (grief, rage, shame) becomes valid data about structural violence. Finally, the group moves from reflection to collective action, however small, closing the loop between thought and practice.
Unlike debate or lecture, story circles do not deposit knowledge from above. They generate insight from below, honouring lived experience as legitimate epistemology. Over time, participants develop what Freire (1970) called conscientisation: the ability to perceive economic, political and social contradictions and to act against oppressive forces. A story circle will not end colonialism, but it can help a group recognise its operations in their own lives and take the first step toward transformative action together. In Boal’s Forum Theatre, personal stories become the basis for scripting and rehearsing interventions against oppression, directly linking narrative to praxis.
Restorying and counter-storytelling from critical race theory
Derived from critical race theory (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2005), counter-storytelling amplifies marginalised voices silenced by dominant narratives. Restorying recasts existing narratives in resistant forms to challenge deficit perspectives. For critical GCE, this framework directly targets structural racism and coloniality. It offers a methodology for unlearning – deconstructing dominant stories of ‘development’ or ‘the migrant’ and replacing them with narratives of resilience and resistance from the Global South. Learners interrogate who tells which story, to what effect, then actively create correctives to historical misrepresentation.
Herstory projects (Johnson et al., 2025; Lerner, 1979) amplify women’s and marginalised genders’ experiences. They do not merely add women to history, they transform what counts as history, evidence, power and remembrance. Herstory moves from countering (seeking a place at the existing table) to restorying (building a new table entirely). Integrated into GCE, herstory cultivates citizens who do not simply inherit a world shaped by dominance but possess the critical will and skill to renarrate the global past and thus reimagine its future.
Fighting Words
Founded in Dublin in 2009 by Roddy Doyle and inspired by Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia, Fighting Words uses a simple workshop model: participants collectively author an original story in a single session with facilitator guidance. While celebrated for boosting literacy and creative confidence, its deeper pedagogical potential for GCE is significant and underexplored. Fighting Words is not merely a literacy tool. It is structured democratic praxis that inherently cultivates core competencies of global citizenship.
Three theoretical lenses illuminate this potential:
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Narrative Identity – We understand ourselves through stories. Fighting Words democratises narrative construction, allowing learners to shape identities beyond immediate experience, cultivating what Appiah (2007) calls a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ (seeing oneself within a broader human story).
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Empathetic Imagination – Nussbaum (1997) argues democracy requires the narrative imagination: the ability to empathise with others. The collaborative, character-driven format lets participants ‘step into’ characters’ motivations, training the empathetic muscle essential for global solidarity.
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Critical Pedagogy – The model enacts Freirean principles (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994): flattening hierarchies, producing tangible outcomes via praxis and transforming learners from passive consumers of global issues into active producers of narrative meaning.
The common thread across all frameworks is the recognition that story is not a decorative add-on but a primary mode of critical engagement, identity formation and world-building. By consciously employing these diverse methodologies, GCE moves decisively beyond a pedagogy about the world to a pedagogy that engages learners in the ongoing, contested and hopeful process of renarrating it.
Envisioning the fourth stage: ‘what happens next?’ and the pedagogy of hope
A story traditionally has a beginning, middle and end. I propose that critical narrative pedagogy requires a fourth stage: ‘What happens next?’ This stage resists closure and thrusts the narrative into the realm of ongoing reality, consequence and learner agency.
This is the stage of hopeful praxis. It connects the imaginative work of the sliding glass door to tangible reality. It asks learners: ‘Given what we have witnessed in this story, what is our responsibility? What might just and sustainable futures look like, and what actions, however small, can we take toward them?’ This aligns with Arendt’s (1958) concept of natality, the human capacity to begin anew and Maxine Greene’s (1995) insistence that ‘imagining things being otherwise may be a first step toward acting on the belief that they can be changed’ (p. 22). Hope here is not naive optimism but critical hope (Freire, 2000), a disciplined, collective imagination that acknowledges the depth of crisis while stubbornly committing to alternative possibilities. By asking ‘what happens next?’ educators position learners as co-authors of an ongoing global story, fostering a sense of grounded agency and long-term responsibility.
Frameworks that use speculative fiction, scenario planning and utopian/dystopian storytelling (for example, work inspired by the UNESCO ‘Futures of Education’ initiative (UNESCO, 2021, 2024) and brown’s (2017) Emergent Strategy) leverage narrative for futures thinking. This approach explicitly trains learners to envision ‘what if?’ – a core capacity for hope and for designing alternatives to unsustainable systems. It essentially builds the ‘muscle’ of radical imagination. Creating a story set in 2050 that explores the consequences of climate policy, technological divides or border regimes requires learners to model complex, interdependent systems in a narrative form. This makes systems thinking tangible. By writing the ‘what happens next?’ piece for the planet or a community, learners engage in an act of co-authorship and ethical speculation about the long-term consequences of present-day choices and power structures.
David Hicks’s futures troika: a framework for critical narrative
A critical narrative pedagogy must equip learners not only to deconstruct existing stories but to consciously construct new ones. David Hicks’s (2002, 2014) futures thinking model offers a structured way to imagine and act toward tomorrow. He distinguishes three types of futures.
The Probable Future is where current trends, power dynamics and systems are heading if left unchecked. Think 2.5 °C+ warming, deepening inequality and mass extinction. This is the default ending of our present story, essential to analyse critically, but not somewhere we want to stop.
The Possible Future opens the imagination. It includes everything that could happen, from technological breakthroughs to social revolutions to ecological collapse. This is the realm of ‘what if?’ that is dystopian fiction, utopian dreams and scenario planning. It expands our moral and imaginative horizon beyond linear prediction.
The Preferred Future is values-driven. It asks: What kind of world do we hope for and choose to work toward? Articulating a preferred future is an act of political imagination and hope, a vision of justice, sustainability and flourishing. In narrative terms, it is restorying: drafting a new plotline for society.
Hicks’s troika of futures moves learners from critique (probable) through exploration (possible) to agency (preferred). It insists that global citizens must be fluent not only in the language of critique but also in the languages of possibility and hope.
Hicks’s troika moves learners through the fourth stage of any story (‘What happens next?’) with critical rigour and creative agency. It aligns perfectly with transformative learning’s arc: disorientation, exploration, reintegration (Mezirow, 2000). In practice, students might read a novel about water scarcity, analyse the probable future of conflict, write stories about possible solutions, then design a campaign for water justice based on their preferred vision of equitable resource management. Hicks operationalises a pedagogy of hope. Globally literate citizens must be fluent not only in critique but in possibility and preference. Constructing hopeful counter-narratives becomes a disciplined, essential component of GCE.
Conclusion: towards a narrative pedagogy of global citizenship
Storytelling is not merely an engaging classroom technique, but rather the fundamental cognitive and affective infrastructure through which we construct our realities, our relationships and our responsibilities. The intentional integration of story, transformative leaning and critical GCE creates a pedagogical triad capable of fostering deep personal and social change because each element addresses a distinct dimension of human development: affective; reflective; and political, while compensating for the others’ limitations.
Story serves as the gateway. Unlike abstract data, narrative engages empathy and imagination, producing what transformative learning theorists call a disorienting dilemma at an emotional, not merely intellectual, level. A well-told story of climate displacement or forced migration cracks open a learner’s taken-for-granted world before critical analysis begins.
Transformative learning provides the reflective engine. Without transformative learning, story risks becoming sentimental voyeurism, feeling moved without changing assumptions. Transformative learning structures the difficult work of identifying and challenging one’s own epistemic frames (such as meritocracy, nationalism, consumerism). It transforms ‘that story is sad’ into ‘my worldview is partial and complicit’.
Critical GCE supplies the ethical-political direction. Without it, transformative learning can become narcissistic introspection, personal growth without systemic action. Critical GCE insists on analysing power, coloniality and structural injustice, then asks: What is my response-ability? What collective action is required?
The triad’s profound potential lies in recursion. Story opens the heart; transformative learning rewires the mind; critical GCE mobilises the hands. The learner moves from rupture (story) through reflection (transformative learning) to repositioned agency (critical GCE). This is not additive learning but identity-level change: the learner restories themselves as an entangled, accountable and capable actor within global systems of injustice. Personal transformation becomes inseparable from the commitment to social change, each reinforcing the other in an ongoing, generative cycle.
The array of methodological frameworks discussed from Dolan’s (2014) Respect, Understanding and Action model and Andreotti and de Souza’s (2008) four dispositions, to the structured practice of N4, digital storytelling, story circles, critical race counter-storytelling and Fighting Words demonstrates that educators are not lacking tools. Rather, they require the critical intentionality to select and apply them in ways that prioritise epistemic humility, relational accountability, and a shift from charity to justice. Furthermore, Hicks’s Futures Troika offers a crucial scaffold for moving learners from critique to hope, guiding them to analyse the probable, imagine the possible and commit to building the preferred future. This brings us to the essential fourth stage of narrative, the imperative to ask, ‘What happens next?’ transforming story from a closed artefact into an open invitation to ethical agency and co-authorship of our collective future.
Ultimately, embedding storytelling within transformative GCE is a rigorous, relational, and deeply humanising pedagogy. It acknowledges that to change the world, we must first be able to imagine it otherwise. And it is through shared, critical, and hopeful stories that we can begin to learn our way toward a more just, peaceful, and sustainable common future.
Declarations and conflicts of interest
Research ethics statement
The author conducted the research reported in this article in accordance with BERA’s Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research.
Consent for publication statement
Not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of interest statement
The author declares no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.
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