Planetary citizenship education through worldwide solidarity in primary schools. Reflections on the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which addresses the issues of what we might call “planetary citizenship”, can help restore a fundamental dimension of geographical education that has been lost following Italy’s most recent ministerial programmes, namely that of the supra-national and planetary scale. It is important to “educate” the humankind to a worldwide peer and place-based collaboration and also to the value of solidarity right from the very first school year. This paper proposes a theoretical reflection aimed at enriching the “Territorial Education” model through the integration of global territorial dynamics. In order to understand the role played by planetary topics in primary school, we discuss the results of a survey submitted to a sample of primary school teachers in Lombardy (Italy). Lastly, we provide a didactic approach to apply the “Territorial Education” model to the UN 2030 Agenda goals.