Research that tackles the pedagogical use of geolocated social media as an investigative tool for understanding cities in Geography and Urban Studies higher education programs has not been fully exploited. This study contributes by addressing the transferability of these sources as a research medium for enhancing student knowledge of urban phenomena. A collaborative problem-based learning activity was conducted in a third-year compulsory Urban Studies module of the Fundamentals in Architecture Degree at the University of Alicante. Two groups – Spanish (25 students) and English (34 students) language, participated in the activity. Foursquare and Twitter datasets were used as sources of information, and scaffolding in QGIS software, data analysis, and visualization tools were provided. Pre- and post- activity questionnaires as well as the work submitted by students gave an indication of the extent to which the activity was useful for achieving the set objective. Recurring approaches adopted by students and their “how-to” make sense of social media information enabled them to align spatiotemporal and social phenomena to the use and perception of city spaces. Students developed critical thinking and interpretative skills that are key transversal competencies for understanding the huge volume of data available in today’s digitalized world.

The objective of this study is to develop intercultural and critical citizenship competences by using a literary excerpt among a group of EFL university students in Spain. For this purpose, the focus group method was adopted, and a qualitative study was designed. The core aim was to implicitly work on aspects such as otherness, the rejection of racism and the use of revenge as a response to a perceived unethical action. The findings demonstrate that the approach dealt effectively with all these concepts. The literary excerpt triggered discussions against racism and religious intolerance. Revenge was rejected as a constructive solution to discrimination and the cohort expressed their connection to ‘others’ through a common humanity, which is linked to human rights principles. These values are closely aligned to the theoretical reference points known as Intercultural Citizenship Education (ICE), Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and cosmopolitan citizenship.

The question of developing educational policies that involve training people to be capable of critical reflection and skilled in approaching the discussion-debate binomial, with the overall goal of achieving learning which is of a transformative kind, is currently embraced by the transdisciplinary paradigm known as Global Citizenship Education. This qualitative study investigates the impact of protest or topical songs released in response to the Iraq War on a cohort of university students and explores whether these songs could be useful in Global Citizenship Education. The results of the study emphasize the value of these types of songs as triggers for transformative learning, because, independently of respective national educational policies or the possible influence of the mass and digital media, these songs were shown to tap into an underlying set of universal values, rights and attitudes among citizens that drive the need for Global Citizenship Education design and evaluation.

This study addresses the problem of facilitating critical thinking about the real-world complexities that underlie the Sustainable Development (SD) concept among university students of architecture. The Socratic Seminar was adopted because of its characteristic exploratory questions that are closely aligned to the question-types used by the lecturer in previous years during student-requested one-to-one tutorial sessions aimed at clarifying SD concepts. The findings of this study indicate that the interactive learning session fostered a collaborative community of critical thinkers as well as a mind-shift in students’ preconceived idea of SD, suggesting that transformative learning had occurred. Furthermore, the Socratic Seminar facilitated observation of whether students in a group setting could critically apply previously acquired theoretical knowledge to assessing SD in the context provided by the multimedia material viewed. The Socratic Seminar was shown to be a useful educational tool for specifically eliciting the complexities of SD among architecture and urban planning students, thereby building on the pedagogy applied in one-to-one student-driven initiatives.

The 2003 Iraq War was a landmark for real-time news dissemination, with news broadcast by journalists embedded with U.S. troops. The literature indicates that mainstream media reflected the viewpoints of those in power, giving little coverage to anti-war sentiment. This study focuses on press coverage relating to a specific aspect of dissent—protest songs against the 2003 Iraq War. After analyzing the content of articles sourced from mainstream newspapers from both sides of the Atlantic, namely, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Telegraph, the results indicate that from the beginning of this war, anti-war songs were perceived by journalists to be in decline for reasons that were reported to have been linked to the period’s sociopolitical and economic context. The conclusions of the study underscore the value of analyzing news type articles and opinion pieces from newspapers of record.