Starting from students’ everyday lives, giving them a genuine say in how a project takes shape and comes to fruition, involving local partners… Working on Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in a participatory and co-creative way is easier said than done. With this podcast project, KTA CLW Bruges and a consortium of the NGOs Djapo and Studio Globo made it reality.
During the 2024–2025 school year, students from Beauty, Hair Care and Nursing sections, together with the school team at KTA CLW Bruges, Djapo, and Studio Globo, joined forces to design a GCE project that they themselves found meaningful and relevant. They identified a relevant theme through interviews and conceptualization workshops. The theme of “women’s rights” turned out to be close to their hearts, and they came up with the idea of creating their own podcast.
The students deepened their knowledge of the topic by, for example, taking part in a bystander intervention training organised by the City of Bruges, and by collecting testimonials from people with lived experience. They wrote the script themselves under the guidance of the professional podcasters at Quindo, and the recordings took place at Villa Bota, the Bruges community radio station. The result? A 100% top-of-mind, student-made school podcast!
“Women’s rights” is a brave choice: after all, it’s not an easy topic to gather testimonials about. Creating the podcast and addressing this topic is therefore an exercise in developing the sensitivity they will also need to demonstrate as hairdressers: they should receive the personal stories they will inevitably encounter in their future professional lives with great care. Their initiative is therefore an example of how project work can bridge global themes and practical coursework, while anticipating the reality of their future professionall lives.
GCE in (T)VET
This podcast is part of BeGlobal’s project “Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (T)VET”, which launched two pilot projects during the 2024–2025 school year. Two schools, one on each side of the language border, developed and implemented a GCE pilot project in co-creation with NGOs. A pilot project was also set up in Wallonia-Brussels: a collaboration between the Athénée Royal Rochefort-Jemelle and Entraide & Fraternité. Want to learn more about the pilot project in French-speaking Belgium? Click here!
GCE in (T)VET: the study
The study “Global Citizenship Education in Technical and Vocational Education and Training” was conducted in 2024 on behalf of BeGlobal by a research team from UCLL University College. The goal of the two pilot projects was to test the study’s recommendations against the reality of the school environment. They indeed confirmed the importance of an action-oriented approach, of connecting GCE to practical courses, and of starting from students’ lived experience.
Read the study ‘GCE in (T)VET’ here!
Want to learn more about the overarching program ‘GCE in TVET’? Click here!
