Global by Design: Participatory Evaluation of a Global Citizenship After-School Program

OneWorld Now! (OWN) is an after-school program that focuses on global citizenship education by serving Seattle high school students with Arabic or Mandarin instruction, leadership coursework, and study abroad. A participatory program evaluation showed (a) OWN’s leadership curriculum to align with most standards for promising and evidence-based practices, (b) a year of OWN’s leadership coursework to associate with elevated levels of global citizenship on three measures, and (c) mixed results when comparing OWN’s recruitment methods to a high school-specific definition for global citizenship development. We discuss OWN’s status as a rare program to prioritize global citizenship and serve mostly economically disadvantaged students, plus opportunities for OWN to improve its design and theory.