10 Years of Political Art Days

Global Citizenship Education (GCED) is an educational concept that empowers people to become active, responsible, and engaged members of a global community. It encourages thinking beyond national borders and understanding the world as an interconnected whole.

Goals of Global Citizenship Education

The main goal of GCED is to raise awareness of global interconnections and to equip individuals with the skills and knowledge needed to better understand and actively address global challenges such as climate change, poverty, inequality, and human rights violations.

GCED particularly promotes:

• Global solidarity and empathy
  Students should be able to understand and relate to different life realities—regardless of origin, culture, or religion.
• Critical thinking
  GCED encourages questioning social structures and global power relations.
• Responsibility and agency
  Education should enable people to make decisions that are fair and sustainable—both locally and globally.
• Intercultural understanding and tolerance
  It fosters respect for other ways of life and for cultural diversity.

Why is Global Citizenship Education important?

In an increasingly interconnected world, local and global developments are closely linked. Decisions made in one part of the world can have significant impacts on other regions. GCED helps people recognize that they are part of a global society—with rights, but also with responsibilities toward the environment, humanity, and future generations.

A more detailed description can be found on the website of the German Commission for UNESCO .

The Political Art Days are a public education and art festival for global learning that has been using art education methods to communicate social, global and ecological contexts in Dresden for eight years. Its format opens up a creative space for artists and speakers from various fields of science, culture and education, within which they can address socially relevant issues comprehensively and together with festival visitors. Through a variety of interactive event formats, we want to make the challenges of our globalized world visible and their complex consequences – also on our own lives – comprehensible.

During the festival, these connections will be made comprehensible to our visitors and the structure of our everyday lives here in the Global North will be critically scrutinized. The Political Art Days are intended to encourage reflection on our individual and social responsibility and to encourage alternative approaches to actively participate in shaping a sustainable society in which sustainability, equal opportunities and solidarity, rather than unlimited economic growth and the systematic exploitation of natural resources and labor, determine the parameters of our human coexistence.