Introduction

In this chapter I argue that the prevalent political and educational narratives involving children and young people's philanthropic behaviours depict philanthropy as an embodiment of virtues and benevolence. While such approaches to philanthropy underscore individual habits and concern for others, they fall short in terms of enabling children to contemplate or deeply engage with the systemic challenges underpinning social issues. This constrains children's growth as philanthropic citizens. Consequently, in this chapter I advocate for an approach that embraces transformative, critically engaged, social justice-oriented philanthropy, which involves probing systemic issues and advocating for collective action.

Across the globe, children and young people frequently demonstrate various forms of philanthropic behaviour, both formal and informal, such as fundraising, contributing to food banks and participating in community clean-up efforts. Indeed, nonprofits long-term sustainability relies on the proactive engagement of younger participants (Gorczyca and Hartman, 2017). Apart from providing invaluable support to numerous deserving causes, the objective is to instil in children enduring ‘habits’ of giving and civic engagement that will persist throughout their lives. Unsurprisingly, families, schools and communities expend considerable effort to bolster the development of children's philanthropic behaviours as an integral part of their citizenship and civic participation (Body et al, 2020, 2022). We commonly refer to this as ‘philanthropic citizenship’, which is defined as ‘a dimension of civic engagement associated with intentions and actions that intend to produce public benefit, for example, volunteering, social action, charitable giving, advocacy, and activism’ (Body, 2024). While there is an extensive body of literature on philanthropy and civic engagement among adolescents and adults (Barrett and Pachi, 2019), it is widely acknowledged that there is a lack of substantive critical discourse and deliberation concerning the civic socialisation and philanthropic education of younger children (Body et al, 2020). Conversely, educational, social and psychological theory and research consistently emphasise middle childhood and the primary school years (covering those aged 4– 11) as pivotal in shaping the development and normalisation of civic, social and political behaviours (Feinstein and Bynner, 2004; van Deth et al, 2011; Peterson, 2016).

Introduction

I have had a long-term interest in child fundraisers. I am not talking about children who become the object of a fundraising campaign, often due to health or medical reasons, or sponsorship of children from afar. Both are worthy topics of our attention. Nonetheless, the focus I wish to settle on here, building on the previous chapter in which I critique the problem of elevating giving of money as the only tool in children's philanthropic toolbox, is children who seek to raise funds independently, though almost always facilitated by family, friends or organisations, such as schools or charities.

To date, this topic has been, almost bizarrely, overlooked by scholars, practitioners and policy makers. A widespread literature search on the topic reveals a significant gap in the literature and understanding. A limited amount of literature discusses how to encourage children to be givers in the fundraising world, but there is almost nothing on the child ‘doers’. Nonetheless, children play a vital role in leading fundraising campaigns for causes they are passionate about. This is widely celebrated by schools, families and the media.

For instance, in response to the Ukraine crisis, Save the Children highlighted the remarkable surge in contributions from children following the onset of the conflict (Hill, 2022), with each young fundraiser generating an average of £1,400, tripling the previous benchmark of £400. Mapping out these examples in an article in The Guardian newspaper, the creativity of child-led fundraising activities is clear (Hill, 2022). Evie and Rowan Lewis, aged 13 and 11, from Ilminster in Somerset raised £2,568 for Save the Children's Ukraine campaign by shaving their heads. Ella and Leo Ketley, aged nine and five, walked 43 miles, the same length of journey undertaken by many Ukrainian families seeking refuge in Poland, raising £1,859. Similarly, eight-year-old Zachary Clare did a 10-mile walk for the charity, raising a further £500. And seven-year-old Veda Plotkin and her three-year-old sibling sold hot chocolate and homemade cookies to passers-by from their doorstep in Haringey, North London, raising £256.

Collectively, these narratives converge to really show the power children can have when harnessed with purpose and directed towards action.

Introduction

Climate change poses an urgent and violent threat to current and future generations. Children will bear the biggest brunt, with immediate and lifelong impacts (United Nations, 2023). Nonetheless, it also highlights the power of children and young people who collectively come together around the world, united around a common cause. The term ‘climate crisis’ encompasses the devastating impacts of global warming, creating environmental havoc and emphasising the need for robust mitigation efforts. The global response is crucial. Climate change is escalating faster than anticipated, affecting every corner of the world, with rising temperatures causing environmental degradation, natural disasters, food and water insecurity, economic upheaval and more. Scientific consensus attributes climate change to human activities, particularly the combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation, leading to a rapid increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Global emissions, mainly from coal, oil and gas production, continue unabated, pushing temperatures over 1°C above preindustrial levels. Without intervention, the Paris Agreement's target of limiting warming to well below 2°C is increasingly unachievable, risking irreversible ecological harm. Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, ecosystem collapse and severe weather events threaten major cities and vulnerable coastal populations. Climate change also exacerbates global challenges, widening economic disparities, increasing resource competition and intensifying weather-related disasters. The impacts of climate change disproportionately affect low-income, Indigenous and marginalised communities, exacerbating existing inequalities. Nonetheless, the United Nations (2023) remains hopeful, advocating for sweeping societal transformations in agriculture, land use, transportation and energy production. Technology, particularly renewable energy and electric vehicles, offers solutions, while nature-based approaches like sustainable agriculture and land restoration provide relief. The UN calls for global collaboration across governments, businesses, civil society, youth and academia to forge a green future that mitigates suffering, upholds justice and restores harmony between people and the planet. Together, the UN asserts, we can turn the tide against the climate crisis, with children and young people often leading the charge.

Drawing on research and case study examples, I seek to present a critical exploration of how children engage in environmental issues outside of the education curriculum, from civil society organisations programmes to the school strikes. Particularly focusing on global youth climate action, the Greta Thunberg effect and the rise of young environmental activists, this chapter focuses on children as ‘future makers’, who initiate and lead political action and seek to set the agenda for their own future in light of the failures of adults to address the crisis meaningfully.

Introduction

Commencing my career as a children's participation worker, I engaged in numerous local social action projects with children and young people, striving to develop their skills while seeking to enable them to catalyse meaningful change within local communities on issues they cared about. This practical experience fuelled my commitment to children's voice and participation, a theme central to my academic research since entering academia in 2013. A pivotal moment occurred in 2018 when my colleague Eddy Hogg and I revisited a project I’d been involved in a decade earlier, exploring its lasting impact on participants (see Body and Hogg, 2019). The findings revealed that engagement in local social action projects had a ‘transformative’ effect, shaping participants’ present-day citizenship. Relationships with supportive adults, a key factor in facilitating their role as change makers, a sense of achievement and the ability to effect change were defining aspects of their experiences. Over 90 per cent of these participants, now adults, remain actively involved in voluntary action within their communities (Body and Hogg, 2019), a common feature in individuals’ civic journeys when engaging from a young age (McFarland and Thomas, 2006; Musick and Wilson, 2007; Flanagan, 2009), and two thirds of the participants were actively working with the younger generation in order to enable them to have a voice and empower them within their community.

Throughout this book, I’ve critically examined how children are socialised into our philanthropic ecosystem, emphasising its impact on achieving a fairer, more just and equitable society, particularly for children and young people. This concluding part delves into key components for fostering a more transformational approach to philanthropy, aligning it with justice and activist orientations (Johnson and Morris, 2010). Drawing upon insights from 40 leaders actively engaged in the philanthropic ecosystem, including educators, practitioners, leaders of charities and funders dedicated to supporting children as change makers, this chapter synthesises extensive interviews conducted for this book. Six interviewees represented leading philanthropic foundations and funders, 18 were leaders of organisations focused on children's citizenship and empowerment, while 16 were practitioners within the philanthropic ecosystem.

Introduction

According to Martin (1994), kindness is an act of benevolence along with compassion, generosity and love, and is a foundational concept of philanthropic behaviours. Therefore, it seems to be a good place to begin our conversation on children's philanthropic citizenship in action. Indeed, like many parents, carers and educators, I have constantly encouraged and told my children to ‘be kind’. But rarely have I sat back and thought what this really means: be kind to whom, why and to what ends?

Kindness itself is a concept that collectively still matters, which is universally valued (Hanel et al, 2020). As Martin (1994) argues, kindness seeks to further the wellbeing of other people. Indeed, the world is awash with people, organisations and even governments telling us to ‘be kind’. It has become a popular hashtag on social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and has multiple books published from gurus to academics, on the merits of kindness. We have World Kindness Day, a global 24-hour celebration dedicated to paying it forward and focusing on the good. We are encouraged to perform acts of kindness, such as giving blood, helping a neighbour or volunteering in the community. It even has the international festival ‘Kindfest’ dedicated in its honour each year. In these spaces we are constantly being reminded of research which consistently tells us that kindness is overall good for society's wellbeing (Curry et al, 2018), for fostering connections and communication across differences. Kindness matters.

Nonetheless, as I will explore in this chapter, there is a darker side to kindness, one which can silent the voices of the marginalised and disguise privilege behind a veneer of good acts rather than justice (Inayatullah and Blaney, 2012). It is in danger of becoming a concept which denies individual experiences and structural injustice, with the simple motto of ‘be kind’. It has been boxed up and marketed as a saleable virtue, merchandised across the planet as the neoliberal world has been quick to commodify, individualise and package up this concept. Indeed, the irony of fast fashion, which we know causes huge harm both environmentally and in vulnerable communities, producing t-shirts and merchandise embezzled with this motto, never escapes me.

In a world both fraught with challenges and rich in opportunities, which relies on the collective action of its citizens to positively progress, a group of powerful philanthropic actors who can help to achieve transformative change have been consistently overlooked: our children.

Philanthropy plays a fundamental role in civil society, with children and young people globally being one of the most common beneficiaries of philanthropic gifts. Yet children's voices are all too often absent from philanthropic conversations and decision making. We frequently ignore their role as current social actors and, importantly, as active members of the philanthropic ecosystem. Throughout the pages of this book, I argue why it is not only important that we start to take children's philanthropic engagement more seriously, but also that is vital if we are to achieve a more just, equitable society which works for all.

Philanthropy – ‘the love of humankind’, ‘good will to others’, ‘voluntary action for social good’ – why would anyone take issue with such a notion? Nonetheless, it is a concept which attracts a great deal of scrutiny, debate and indeed criticism, often associated with ideas of power, influence and privilege. I don't dismiss these criticisms; indeed, I think these debates within philanthropy are important, necessary and healthy. However, I worry that within this scrutiny and common focus on big philanthropy, we have lost sight of what to me is a more central, uniting and unifying debate: what does it mean to be philanthropic and why does this matter? In this book I present our philanthropic behaviours as acts of citizenship, showing the importance of our everyday participation in philanthropic decision making and linking this to social justice, acts of participation and democracy. I argue that our philanthropic actions should not be solely tied to the personal sphere, as is so often the case, but instead should be understood through a lens of participation and indeed collective action, alongside our moral obligation and responsibility to others as fellow citizens. In essence, our philanthropic self should be a central consideration of our citizenship. So, I have come to spend much of my time considering the act of philanthropy through this lens of citizenship, and something I have termed ‘philanthropic citizenship’.

In order to set the scene for this volume, I begin the chapter with a narrative of my experience on the day when I got promoted to a professor at a Japanese university by combining my professional experience to the ideologies of native-speakerism and trans-speakerism. I also include the overall background of the study through providing the aims of the research, explicating the significance of the current inquiry, and outlining the core ideas of this book: native-speakerism and trans-speakerism. In other words, this chapter delineates how these two influential ideologies in language education come together in this book and makes a case for why the present inquiry is a fertile endeavor to make. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the structure and content of the volume.

The current chapter delves into the experiences of NNES university professors in Japan, scrutinizing noteworthy events and incidents that they came across while working in their particular settings. The chapter opens, much like Chapters 4 and 5, by offering narratives from four university professor participants. As with the previous narratives, these ones also represent the initial phase of data analysis as well as a portion of the research results. These narratives were then subjected to constructing grounded theory approaches, which led to the discovery of several notable and oft-repeated codes. These were subsequently organized to construct a conceptual framework. This chapter justifies and explains the multifaceted, yet interconnected, principal categories and their incumbent subcategories of university professor participants’ experiences involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism: they are linguistic, cultural, and professional native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including contextual knowledge) in relation to trans-speakerism. Pertinent excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data are used to establish and expound upon the categorizations. Finally, the chapter concludes with the conceptual framework of the university professors’ experiences and several recommendations for practice involving native-speakerism and trans-speakerism.

This chapter describes the origin, development, and subsequent conceptualization of native-speakerism, as well as profiling relevant research on it. Importantly, it also offers my own understanding and interpretation about the notion. To do this, the chapter presents a selection of previous discussions and empirical research into native-speakerism and documents some of the most deleterious effects that native-speakerism has had on the lives and identities of both NESTs and NNESTs worldwide – specifically the effects on NNES teachers and researchers in Japan, who are the focal points of this book. I commence this chapter with a theoretical overview of the ways in which native-speakerism came to be recognized and defined. I then introduce my own analysis of what native-speakerism entails at this moment in time within the ELT field. Afterward, I provide an overview of germane conceptual and empirical studies on native-speakerism while offering my own critiques of them as I do so. With the key points and positionings of the discussion established, I conclude this chapter by positing my case for the originality and significance of this endeavor and by presenting the focal research questions which the research within this volume attempts to answer.

I commence this chapter by introducing the narratives of four graduate school student participants who partook in this endeavor. The participants’ narratives are a representation of the interview data that were relayed to me. They function as the initial phase of data analysis as well as serve as part of the findings because they are presented largely intact as concise stories which are both the basis for analysis and the vehicles for portraying the interview data pithily. The analysis involved subjecting these narratives to constructing grounded theory methods in which I sorted, synthesized, integrated, and formulated a number of prominent and recurrent codes in order to determine several categories and eventually a conceptual framework (theory). I introduce in this chapter primary categories concerning linguistic, cultural, and academic native-speakerism, in addition to Global Englishes, intercultural competence, and professionalism (including work ethics) related to trans-speakerism. I explore and illustrate these by referring to germane excerpts and anecdotes from the interview data to support and expound on the categorizations. This chapter ends with a conceptual framework (theory) and recommendations for practice.

I open this chapter with a discussion about an alternative concept to native speakerism – trans-speakerism. This is a modern ideological viewpoint that is devoted to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion for all language speakers, teachers, and researchers in the field. I begin by comparing the notion of trans-speakerism with the idea of native-speakerism, then proceed to present its definition, highlight its significance, and introduce the terminology it spurns for describing persons who are subsumed within its precepts: global speaker of English (GSE), global teacher of English (GTEs), and Global Englishes researcher (GER). I continue this chapter with an outline of the research upon which this book is based, which includes: (a) a description of the ways in which I selected the participants and ensured ethical compliance, (b) information about the participants, and (c) an account of how the data collection procedures were followed as well as how the data were treated, analyzed, and interpreted.