The Sixth UM Global Citizenship Education Symposium

In the Fall of 2023 UNESCO Member States agreed on the revised text of the 1974 Recommendation concerning education for international understanding, co-operation and peace and education relating to human rights and fundamental freedoms. This document indicates how education should evolve in the face of contemporary threats and challenges: education should aim to be transformative, seeking to prepare, motivate and empower learners to take informed decisions and actions to promote peace, human rights, sustainable development and global citizenship.

What can you expect?

The theme of this year's symposium is digital citizenship, acknowledging that the Council of Europe has declared 2025 to be the Year of Digital Citizenship Education.

The event will begin on 13 January 2026, at 10:00h.

Location
The Symposium is held in Tapijn Brasserie, Tapijnkazerne 20, 6211 ME Maastricht and EDLAB, Tapijnkazerne 23, 6211 KD Maastricht.

Registration
You can pick up your badge at the registration desk at Tapijn Brasserie. You can also select tickets for the breakout sessions. These tickets remain available until the lunch break.

Morning programme (Tapijn Brasserie)
09.30 – 10.00: Registration
10.00 – 10.15: Welcome
10.15 – 11.15: The first keynote will be delivered by Gert Biesta, who is Emeritus Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland, and a member of the Education Council of the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad), the advisory body of the Dutch government and parliament. He is currently an expert advisor for the development of the Council of Europe’s ‘European Space for Citizenship Education.
11.15 – 11.40: Break 
11.40 – 12.40: First Break-Out Session
12.40 – 13.40: Lunch  

Afternoon programme
13.40 – 14.40: The second keynote presenter is Jason Goulah, pioneering and award-winning scholar in the fields of Soka studies in education and transformative and socioecological perspectives in culture and language education and director of the Institute of Daisaku Ikeda Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL.
14.40 – 15.40: Second break-out session

15.40 – 16.15: Closing panel discussion

16.15: Drinks
 

More information on keynotes and break-out sessions is presented below. You can find more information on GCEd at our website. 

Keynote Gert Biesta: Global citizenship education in the digital age? On democratic challenges and educational possibilities

Citizenship has become a tremendously ‘stretchy’ concept. The Council of Europe’s definition of digital citizenship, for example, is not only so wide that it includes any participation in any group, but also so neutral that it raises the question why the word ‘citizenship’ is needed at all. Many initiatives for citizenship education, be they national be they global, suffer from a similar problem: they include so much under the heading of ‘citizenship’ that the critical connection between citizenship and democracy is easily forgotten or marginalised. In my presentation I will explore a number of tendencies with regard to the notion of citizenship, particularly in the context of citizenship education. I will make a case for the importance of a democratic understanding of citizenship, intrinsically connected to the values of equality, liberty and solidarity. I will reflect on the ways in which the advancement of digital technologies poses a threat to democracy and democratic citizenship, particularly because of the presence of digital capitalism. Against this background I will outline educational possibilities, arguing that these come into view once we see that the democratic principle is also the educational principle. In doing this I will highlight the priority of teaching over learning, will raise some critical questions about competence-based approaches, and will propose a new, non-populist defence of democracy.

 

“Digital citizenship is the capacity to participate actively, continuously and responsibly in communities online and offline, through competent and positive engagement with digital technologies).” Council of Europe: Digital Citizenship Education - Education

 

Breakout sessions

“Digital sweatshops”: Does AI lead to neo-colonialism?

Sharon Anyango (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University)

A case study in Nairobi, Kenya shows that data labelers are paid less than 2 dollars per hour to check content that fits the AI, filtering through graphic and violent content. These tech companies also outsource such tasks to countries like India, Venezuela, and the Philippines. Often, these are countries that have a large low-wage population, well-educated but unemployed. The session will involve watching a 13-minute video titled ‘Training AI takes heavy toll on Kenyans working for $2 an hour | 60 Minutes’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS50KXjAX0&t=81s). Afterwards, in two groups, we will discuss whether or not AI creates a (neo)colonization 2.0, and what best practices we should consider in order to mitigate such inequalities.  

 

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Critically Exploring GenAI-Tools for Literature Discovery

Anna-Lena Hoh (University Library, Maastricht University)

Whilst there are many resources on the responsible use of generative AI (“GenAI”) tools in Education, there are few guidelines focusing on literature research. New GenAI tools promising to speed up academic research are emerging daily. Many of them (such as Perplexity, Elicit and Consensus) focus on searching for literature. Unfortunately, many of these tools lack transparency about the corpus they search in and their methods for selecting and prioritising sources.

Although the tools may offer advantages (for example: Gravina et al., 2024; Tomczyk et al., 2024), there are also serious concerns regarding the reliability of their outcomes (Tay, 2025), the increase of human biases (Lin, 2025), and overreliance of students on AI tools (Kaitharath et al., 2024, p. 144). This underscores the need to understand how these tools function and to establish criteria for evaluating the quality, transparency, and ethical implications of their outputs (ACRL, 2025).

In this hands-on workshop, together with participants, we will investigate evaluation criteria for results obtained when searching for literature with GenAI tools. After identifying useful evaluation criteria, we will experiment with a set of pre-selected GenAI tools to conduct our own GenAI literature searches and critically compare the outcomes with traditional methods. We will combine our different perspectives and knowledge of assessing literature searches to analyse the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of using AI for literature discovery in academic research.

This workshop will provide participants with strategies to critically evaluate the outputs of GenAI for literature discovery including identifying advantages and disadvantages, and developing reflection on the responsible and transparent use of AI for literature discovery.

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Problem Based Learning as a navigation tool through the noise of the AI era in Higher Education

Elissaveta Radulova (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University)

Artificial Intelligence is penetrating more and more sectors of the contemporary economy and public life. The rate of adoption and investment create an “aura of inevitability” and sidelines anyone who questions AI’s rapid development. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the landscape of higher education, too.

In this workshop we will use Gert Biesta's model of (higher) education in order to explore the defining features of the GenAI technology which present particular threats to the university environment. We will examine how AI tools (such as generative text models, intelligent tutoring systems, and adaptive learning platforms) impact scholarly integrity and academic honesty, deep (associative) learning, and the acquisition of academic skills such as writing, debating and argument-building/persuading.

Subsequently, we will chart out how Problem Based Learning (PBL) and its foundational principles of collaborative, contextual, constructivist and self-directed learning offer an antidote to the main risks that AI introduces.

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Five years of Global Citizenship education in Global Studies 

This is a panel discussion with initial developers, current coordinators, and students/alumni on the lessons learned after years of development, and 5 years of running a programme with a strong orientation on Global Citizenship Education. The goals of this session is to engage in a constructive discussion on the challenges and pitfalls in GCEd in a curriculum like Global Studies, among others related to:

• Promoting global/local collaborations – how to meaningfully engage a group of global studies students to local challenges.
• Setting up equal partnerships in field studies 
• Future perspectives on admissions and selection – how to truly diversify the international classroom (also in terms of economic background).
• Making global citizenship a tangible and assessable component in a three-year curriculum

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Discover your digital capabilities

Katja Shcherbakova (University Library, Maastricht University)

Digital competence is becoming as fundamental to teaching as subject expertise. AI, data, online learning environments, and digital collaboration tools are now part of every course and classroom. To prepare students for the world they will enter, we — as educators — need to feel confident and capable in this changing environment.

The Jisc Digital Capabilities Discovery Tool provides educators with a personalised insight into their digital strengths and development areas (e.g., information literacy, digital communication, media and AI literacy, digital teaching, and wellbeing), along with trusted resources for growth. It is already being used internationally to support reflective, future-ready teaching practices.

Participants receive a clear picture of their digital profile, personalised recommendations, and access to reliable learning resources.

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Meeting online threats: supporting critical engagement and well-being online

Nino Gugushvili (Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University)

This session examines how online threats like misinformation and algorithmic curation via personalised recommender systems influence not only what people know and believe, but also how they feel in digital spaces. Drawing on recent studies, it explores whether digital literacy approaches can support more critical engagement and wellbeing online. These approaches include helping users understand personalisation systems (for instance, turning off TikTok's personalised recommendation feed) and training them in lateral reading (verifying the credibility of information by comparing it with multiple other independent sources). The session also considers how these insights can enrich educational design (at UM), helping students grow into informed, reflective, and responsible digital citizens.

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Honing global citizenship competences during exchange abroad

Ainsley Loudoun (School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University)

This session introduces an educational development project currently being implemented in a bachelor programme at SBE: an online Canvas module designed to support students in developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to Global Citizenship during their exchange abroad. We will share an overview of the module’s structure and purpose, with special attention to elements that can be transferred to other courses and faculties, as well as some early student feedback. The session will also invite participants think along how elements of the module can be applied in their own educational contexts, as well as tweaks that can be made for future iterations of the programme.

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Digital rights and responsibilities

Sophia Longwe (Wikimedia)

Sophia will address the evolving digital rights and responsibilities of online content creators, particularly from the perspective of platform governance (Digital Services Act) and youth engagement in international digital policy. Drawing on her work within the Internet Governance ecosystem, she will focus on how creators (and organizations) navigate issues such as transparency, algorithmic accountability, and data governance and how these dynamics shape their agency, safety, and responsibilities online. 

 

 

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Closing panel

A group of students and alumni will reflect on what they take away from the day and what this could or should mean for learning, teaching and living at Maastricht University. The panel will be moderated by Thomas Frissen, programme director of the Digital Society bachelor.