Global Youth Work – Earth Justice in the Youth Worker Education Curriculum

Global Youth Work (GYW) is core to the National Youth Council of Ireland’s (NYCI) Youth2030 long term strategic partnership funded by the Irish Aid. Influenced by Sallah (2014), GYW aims to empower young people to explore their own values, beliefs, and connections with the wider world. It engages young people in critical analysis of local and global influences on their own lives and communities and supports them to become active global citizens. Maynooth University and the NYCI collaborate on the design and delivery of the NUI Certificate in Global Youth Work, an accredited continuing practice and professional development programme designed to equip youth workers with the capacity to embed a global youth work approach in their practice. The programme is run part-time on a ‘block and blend’ basis over two semesters and has been offered for three cycles with the next due in 2026.

Certain commitments such as a global perspective, informal and non-formal learning approaches, social justice, decentring western assumptions and anti-oppressive oppressive practice are principles of GYW (Sallah 2014), many of which are already central to professional youth work education which is rooted in a Freirean pedagogy. The emerging literature invites us to reconsider the Anthropocentric orientation of youth work (Cooper et al 204, Gorman et al 2024) and in doing so, at the least, to develop an expanded conceptualisation of ‘the wider world’ to incorporate Earth Justice as a central principle.

This proposed contribution to the roundtable, considers how we might expand on the already featured ‘ecophilosophical’ work of Macy and Brown (2014) to embed an explicit ‘ecopedagogy’ (Gadotti 2010, Misiaszek 2023) in the curriculum. We explore the challenges and possibilities, grapple with the imperatives and in doing so, contribute to the discourse on the theoretical underpinnings of youth worker education and training.