SDG 4 and Education in the Global South and Global North: Curriculum, Policy, and Practice

1. Introduction

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) establishes a shared commitment to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. Its significance extends beyond participation in formal schooling. The goal raises fundamental questions about what education enables people to become, whose knowledge shapes learning, and which institutional arrangements sustain meaningful educational opportunity. These questions connect educational access with cultural recognition, professional responsibility, and the capacity to participate in creating sustainable futures. As the 2030 horizon approaches, the challenge is to translate an internationally endorsed aspiration into educational experiences that learners and communities recognize as equitable, relevant, and sustaining.

This Special Issue of Education Sciences, “SDG 4 and Education in the Global South and Global North: Curriculum, Policy, and Practice,” examines that challenge through five contributions spanning early childhood education, teacher professionalization, Indigenous-centered social–emotional learning, multilingual literacy, and Latino students’ educational experiences. Together, the articles suggest that progress requires closer attention to the relationships which connect policy commitments, professional capacities, and everyday learning. We argue that educational quality must encompass the conditions through which learners experience recognition, exercise agency, and participate without surrendering their languages, identities, or community affiliations. These conditions require institutional support and cannot be secured through individual goodwill alone.

The terms Global South and Global North provide a starting point for examining unequal distributions of resources and authority. They should not imply internally uniform regions or a developmental sequence in which one supplies solutions and the other receives them. Educational exclusion operates within affluent settings, while theoretical and pedagogical innovation emerges from communities historically positioned at the margins of international scholarship. Indigenous sovereignty also cannot be reduced to the economic classification of the nation within which Indigenous peoples live. This collection therefore invites readers to consider North–South relations through interconnected histories, institutional power, and reciprocal learning, while attending carefully to differences among communities.

The research area matters because education can reproduce the inequalities it promises to overcome. Breidlid (2013) questions the dominance of Western epistemologies and the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge in education and development. Meanwhile, Tikly (2019) similarly situates educational transformation within postcolonial conditions, directing attention to the relationships among sustainability, inequality, and development. These perspectives challenge assumptions that educational expansion is inherently emancipatory. They invite scrutiny of curriculum content, language hierarchies, institutional decision-making, and the purposes attached to learning. SDG 4 becomes more demanding when quality includes the authority to influence education rather than simply the opportunity to enter existing institutions.

2. Developments and Gaps in the Field

Recent scholarship increasingly examines how global educational commitments are interpreted through national governance and local practice. In their paper, Perrodin et al. (2026), analyzing Thailand’s reform trajectory, identify continuing discrepancies between policy alignment and equitable implementation. Their analysis links reform ambitions to resource distribution, interagency coordination, and conditions in underserved areas. It provides an important contextual counterpart to this collection: international commitments require workable delivery arrangements. Policy texts can establish priorities, but their educational significance depends on the institutions, budgets, and relationships through which those priorities become actionable. The gap between formal commitment and lived provision remains a central research problem.

A second development concerns the growing visibility of education for sustainable development (ESD) within curriculum research. Mavuso and Olawumi (2026) identify expanding scholarly attention alongside uneven institutional and geographical participation in indexed research. Their bibliometric perspective highlights a knowledge-production problem: international visibility does not necessarily reflect the full range of educational experimentation or community expertise. Database coverage and publication systems shape what becomes legible as evidence. Consequently, a growing literature can coexist with limited recognition of locally grounded knowledge. Examining whose work circulates, whose languages support publication, and who defines research priorities is therefore part of the SDG 4 agenda itself.

The relationship between education and wider development outcomes also demands qualification. Ciriello’s (2026) structured narrative review connects education with economic, social, health, and institutional outcomes while emphasizing variation in evidentiary strength and contextual conditions. Its conclusions support investment in quality and inclusion alongside institutions capable of converting learning into opportunity. For this editorial, the implication is that educational participation cannot serve as a sufficient proxy for social transformation. Researchers must examine how educational experiences interact with employment, public institutions, social hierarchies, and community resources. Claims about education’s benefits become more useful when they specify the conditions under which those benefits emerge.

Assessment represents another unresolved area. Giangrande et al. (2019) address SDG Target 4.7 through a competency framework that includes intrapersonal transformation, reflective validation, and learning beyond formal institutions. Their work extends discussion beyond the transmission of sustainability content toward how learners develop capacities for change. Yet the measurement challenge persists; dimensions such as relational accountability, cultural continuity, and collective responsibility may be distorted when translated into standardized indicators. The field needs approaches that support public accountability while preserving the meanings communities attach to educational success. Measurement should help institutions respond to inequity without requiring every valued outcome to take an identical form.

Across these developments, several gaps intersect. Policy studies do not always trace reforms into classrooms; pedagogical studies may leave institutional financing and governance underexamined. Research on belonging can overlook cultural differences in relationships, while discussions of cultural inclusion may insufficiently examine whose authority governs knowledge use. Technological innovation can proceed ahead of evidence about developmental suitability and equitable access. This Special Issue addresses selected dimensions of these gaps by inspiring discussion on different educational scales. It offers a focused collection rather than comprehensive coverage of all SDG 4 targets, regions, or populations, and its contributions should be interpreted within those boundaries.

The Issue also exposes a gap in how sustainability is sometimes framed. Ecological concerns and social justice cannot be assumed to converge simply because both appear in a curriculum. Land-based learning raises questions about relationships, responsibility, and authority, while technology-mediated learning raises questions about the purposes and consequences of innovation. A productive research agenda would examine how learners encounter these tensions in specific activities. Studies could investigate whether sustainability education enables critical engagement with unequal resource use, cultural marginalization, and competing accounts of development, while allowing communities to articulate futures that are not determined by external institutional priorities.

3. Overview of the Special Issue Contributions

3.1. Indigenous Knowledge and Social Emotional Learning

In their work, Nganga and Kambutu (2026) examine Indigenous-centered social–emotional learning (SEL) through a qualitative collaborative ethnographic design integrated with a structured literature synthesis. Their study draws on two years of community-engaged research involving 20 Native teachers, Elders, cultural leaders, and community practitioners. Collaborative dialogs and sustained relational engagement provide the basis for examining SEL through Indigenous and Local Knowledge. This design matters because the study approaches knowledge through relationships and community experience rather than treating cultural context as an additional variable within an otherwise unchanged framework. Its contribution concerns both the substance of SEL and the processes through which educational knowledge is developed.

Five interrelated themes connect culturally grounded SEL, structural barriers, culture as prevention and healing, schoolwide conditions for belonging, and alignment with SDG 4. Participants emphasize storytelling, ceremony, Elder mentorship, talking circles, land-based learning, and cultural identity. Their accounts situate well-being within collective responsibility and relationships with community and land. The article consequently questions approaches that detach emotional learning from histories of assimilation and the institutional marginalization of Indigenous knowledge. It identifies tensions between culturally sustaining educational practices and systems organized around standardization, external accountability, and assumptions about appropriate behavior that may not reflect Indigenous understandings.

The authors connect these findings with teacher professional development and a conceptual model of Indigenous-centered SEL. Professional learning emerges as a relational undertaking that requires community partnerships and schoolwide support. The study contributes to SDG Targets 4.5 and 4.7 by connecting equity and cultural diversity with the conditions of teaching. Its findings provide contextual and interpretive insight rather than evidence that a standardized intervention causes improved outcomes. For the collection, the central contribution is a sovereignty-affirming account of quality: institutions must examine who defines well-being, who authorizes cultural knowledge, and how professional learning becomes accountable to the communities it intends to serve.

3.2. Relational Pedagogy and Latino Students’ Experiences

DeNobile (2026) reinterprets an existing qualitative bounded case study through SDG 4. The original study involved seven Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Mexican college students from the Bronx; the article collects no new empirical data. Participants’ accounts illuminate meaningful teacher–student relationships across their educational journeys. This distinction is essential because the article offers a new interpretive framing of established findings rather than a new evaluation of SDG implementation. Its contribution is to show how a global framework can sharpen attention to educational experiences that conventional measures of access and attainment may leave insufficiently explained.

The narratives describe influential educators as mentors, advocates, trusted adults, and sources of encouragement and accountability. Cultural recognition and sustained investment in students’ development shaped how participants understood educational support. DeNobile develops familioso as an interpretive lens for family-like relational qualities, while cautioning against assuming that this orientation characterizes all Latino learners. The article thus treats relationships as culturally mediated rather than universally experienced in the same way. It also recognizes that meaningful connections can develop across cultural differences when educators demonstrate understanding, maintain expectations, and engage seriously with students’ lived experiences and aspirations.

This contribution extends the Issue’s understanding of inclusion within the Global North. Access to an institution does not exhaust the question of whether students experience membership, recognition, and educational possibility. The article also connects relational pedagogy to organizational arrangements, including mentoring opportunities and sustained interaction. These implications move responsibility beyond a teacher’s personal disposition toward institutional conditions that support relationship-building. Given the small, retrospective, context-specific study, the findings do not establish causal effects on persistence or represent Latino students generally. They nevertheless identify dimensions of educational quality that deserve further investigation alongside academic and administrative indicators.

3.3. Ubuntu Translanguaging and Multilingual Literacy

Borti (2026) advances Ubuntu translanguaging as a decolonizing framework for multilingual literacy education, grounded in Ghanaian educational contexts. The article brings a relational account of personhood and knowledge into conversation with translanguaging theory. It examines how learners’ integrated linguistic resources can become legitimate means of participation and knowledge-building within institutions shaped by colonial language hierarchies. Its contribution is conceptual rather than an empirical test of a new classroom intervention. This distinction enables readers to appreciate the framework’s explanatory and practical possibilities while recognizing that proposed applications require further collaborative investigation.

The framework challenges deficit interpretations of multilingual practice and recognizes teachers’ community-rooted expertise. Borti explicitly considers the movement of Ubuntu, associated with Southern African philosophical traditions, into dialog with Ghanaian contexts. The argument depends on connections among related relational traditions, not on treating Africa as culturally homogeneous. This attention to conceptual translation is valuable for international education more broadly. Educational ideas acquire meaning through particular histories, languages, and communities; their movement requires interpretation and justification. Decolonizing pedagogy therefore involves examining both inherited hierarchies and the assumptions through which alternative concepts circulate across contexts.

For SDG 4, the framework links language equity with curriculum design, assessment, teacher preparation, and research partnerships. Recognizing multilingual resources requires institutional conditions that allow teachers to use them without penalizing learners through contradictory language expectations. The article also positions teachers as co-inquirers and knowledge creators in reciprocal South–North collaborations. This expands the question of inclusion from classroom interaction to research governance. Its proposals encourage attention to decision-making, authorship, and continuity after external projects end. The next step is to investigate how communities adapt these commitments and what changes follow under different policy, linguistic, and material conditions.

3.4. Teacher Professionalization and Policy Implementation in Cambodia

King (2026) examines Cambodia’s implementation of SDG Target 4.c through qualitative documentary analysis. Four principal national policy and monitoring documents anchor the study, supported by relevant literature and reports. The analysis organizes evidence around policy intent and alignment, system capacity, and implementation quality. This structure makes a useful distinction between establishing a professionalization agenda and creating the conditions required to sustain it. The study addresses teacher qualification pathways and professional learning within a wider institutional system, bringing governance and implementation into a collection that also examines relational and culturally grounded dimensions of teaching.

The analysis identifies substantial policy commitments alongside constraints involving teacher supply, teacher educator capacity, financing, institutional coordination, and continuing professional development. Raising qualifications and aligning national plans with international standards cannot independently resolve these challenges. The article also examines how development partners influence reform priorities and resources, inviting consideration of the relationships through which international educational agendas enter national systems. Its account locates teachers within interdependent arrangements of recruitment, preparation, professional support, and workforce sustainability. This perspective helps explain why apparently coherent reform can encounter uneven enactment across institutions and regions.

King’s contribution addresses a gap between policy ambition and implementation readiness. It supports an understanding of quality that includes the capacities of teacher education institutions and the opportunities educators have to learn throughout their careers. Documentary analysis, however, cannot fully establish how teachers and teacher educators experience reform or what changes occur in classroom practice. The article therefore creates a foundation for research that follows policy into institutional and professional life. Read alongside the other contributions, it demonstrates why expectations for inclusive and responsive teaching must be accompanied by adequate preparation, professional support, and sustained public investment.

3.5. Artificial Intelligence and Play Pedagogy in China

In their contribution, Lyu and McNair (2026) examine the relationship between Froebelian pedagogy and artificial intelligence in Chinese early childhood education. Their mixed-methods study combines a questionnaire phase involving 50 valid responses, with interviews involving eight practitioners selected for variation in experiences and perspectives. The focus is practitioners’ interpretations and reported practices, not an experimental assessment of children’s learning. This contribution brings technological change into the collection while locating innovation within educational purposes. It asks how digital tools can interact with commitments to child agency, holistic development, sensory engagement, and relationships with nature.

The authors describe a dual-track integration approach in which digital and physical learning experiences coexist. Practitioners perceive opportunities for extending play and supporting individualized learning while identifying tensions involving screen time, nature displacement, training, and uneven infrastructure. These findings challenge the assumption that the educational value of AI follows automatically from availability or technical sophistication. The relevant question becomes how tools are selected and mediated through professional judgment. The article also illustrates how an educational tradition can be reinterpreted within a particular national context, with practitioners actively negotiating the relationship between inherited principles and contemporary policy priorities.

This study contributes to SDG 4 by connecting innovation with developmental appropriateness and the unequal conditions of implementation. Its implications concern professional learning and resource allocation as well as classroom design. Practitioner optimism should not be read as evidence that AI improves children’s outcomes, and the study does not establish the transferability of the proposed approach across early childhood settings. It does identify a productive research agenda: examining whether digital experiences support meaningful play, how they affect material and outdoor exploration, and which forms of teacher support make technological adoption educationally defensible and accessible across differently resourced communities.

4. Connections Across Curriculum Policy and Practice

The five articles collectively broaden educational quality beyond enrollment, qualifications, and technological provision. Nganga and Kambutu locate quality within sovereignty, cultural continuity, and relational well-being. DeNobile foregrounds recognition and belonging; Borti examines linguistic legitimacy and knowledge authority. King identifies the institutional capacities supporting professionalization, while Lyu and McNair place pedagogical purposes at the center of technological decisions. These contributions do not yield a single model or a combined estimate of effectiveness. Their value lies in making visible complementary dimensions of the same challenge: global commitments acquire educational meaning through situated relationships supported by workable institutions.

One connection concerns the interaction of redistribution and recognition. Resources are necessary for teacher preparation, professional learning, and equitable infrastructure. Yet additional resources may leave exclusion intact when curriculum or assessment continues to devalue learners’ languages and knowledge. Conversely, culturally affirming practices become difficult to sustain when educators lack time, support, or stable employment. Reading the contributions together suggests that equity requires examining these conditions jointly. Policy should ask both how opportunities and resources are distributed and whether institutional expectations permit learners and communities to participate on terms that recognize their knowledge, identities, and educational aspirations.

A second connection concerns teacher agency. Across the collection, teachers interpret policy, sustain relationships, negotiate language expectations, and make judgments about technology and cultural knowledge. Their agency is consequential but institutionally bounded. Professional development that promotes responsiveness while leaving assessment rules, workloads, or infrastructure unchanged may create expectations that educators cannot reasonably fulfill. The collection therefore encourages a view of professional learning linked to organizational change. It also expands who contributes to that learning; Elders, community practitioners, multilingual educators, and learners hold expertise that can reshape how professional knowledge is defined and shared.

The educational stages represented in the Issue also reveal why lifelong learning should be considered across institutional boundaries. Early childhood experiences establish opportunities for exploration and agency; schooling relationships influence how learners understand their educational possibilities; teacher education and continuing development shape the quality of subsequent provision. These connections are an editorial inference across distinct studies, not a developmental pathway tested by the collection. They nevertheless suggest useful questions about continuity: which supports persist as learners move between settings, which disappear, and how can institutions share responsibility without assuming that educational needs remain unchanged across the life course?

A third connection concerns the relationship between global comparison and local accountability. The collection demonstrates the usefulness of a common goal without establishing that educational quality should look identical everywhere. Comparisons can investigate how institutions support participation, how authority is distributed, and how professional judgment operates under different constraints. They should also preserve distinctions among Indigenous sovereignty, multilingual language politics, culturally mediated mentorship, and national workforce reform. These are connected concerns with different histories and obligations. Productive South–North dialog depends on learning across such differences while resisting the conversion of contextual findings into universal prescriptions.

5. Future Research Directions and Conclusions

Future research should follow the pathways connecting policy commitments, institutional action, pedagogical decisions, and learners’ experiences over time. Longitudinal studies could examine whether professionalization reforms expand meaningful professional learning, whether multilingual pedagogies remain viable under assessment pressures, and whether relationship-building initiatives survive changes in leadership or funding. Comparative case studies could investigate why similar commitments produce different experiences across institutions. Such research should document adaptation and implementation difficulties alongside intended outcomes. This would help distinguish weaknesses in an educational idea from the consequences of inadequate resources, contradictory policies, or limited opportunities for sustained community participation.

A related priority is to develop assessment approaches with the people whose educational experiences they describe. Student accounts, community-defined outcomes, classroom observation, and institutional data can provide complementary evidence when their purposes are made explicit. Indigenous research requires attention to sovereignty, authorization, and obligations governing knowledge use; these responsibilities cannot be reduced to generic consultation. Research on belonging should examine variation within communities and avoid presenting a culturally grounded interpretive lens as a fixed group characteristic. Evidence becomes stronger when it identifies whose experiences are represented, what remains uncertain, and how interpretations have been negotiated with relevant participants.

The conceptual and technological contributions particularly invite collaborative testing. Ubuntu translanguaging can be investigated through teacher-led inquiry that documents language choices, participation, assessment practices, and institutional constraints. Research on AI and early childhood play should include observation of children’s experiences, developmental suitability, data governance, accessibility, and the relationship between digital engagement and physical exploration. Studies should examine who benefits and who encounters new barriers. These questions require designs proportionate to the claims being made, with attention to unintended consequences. Neither conceptual promise nor reported enthusiasm should substitute for evidence about educational experiences and outcomes.

Policy evaluation should also consider the costs and distribution of proposed improvements. Mentoring programs require protected time; sustained community collaboration requires compensation and continuity; multilingual teaching requires suitable materials and assessment support. Research that identifies promising practices without examining these requirements leaves institutions with an incomplete basis for action. Studies could compare how different funding arrangements affect participation, professional workload, and the durability of educational change. Such inquiry would strengthen the connection between the collection’s pedagogical insights and the practical decisions facing schools, teacher education institutions, ministries, and community partners operating with unequal resources and different responsibilities.

The collection’s limits also identify opportunities for expansion. Disability inclusion, education in conflict settings, vocational pathways, and adult learning warrant fuller attention in future work. Researchers should investigate how these areas intersect with language, location, gender, and socioeconomic position rather than adding categories without examining their relationships. Cross-national inquiry would be especially valuable when it compares mechanisms and institutional conditions instead of ranking systems against a single ideal. Equally, studies within countries can reveal inequalities obscured by national averages. Extending the conversation in these directions would help connect SDG 4’s universal commitments with the varied conditions under which people seek education, exercise rights, and sustain learning throughout changing circumstances and across generations in their own communities and beyond their settings.

Research partnerships themselves also require investigation. Future collaborations should examine who determines questions, controls resources, interprets findings, and receives recognition. Reciprocal South–North and South–South partnerships can support shared inquiry when they provide meaningful authority to local researchers, educators, and communities. Their quality should be judged partly by what remains after publication: accessible findings, stronger research capacity, sustained professional relationships, and educational practices that communities value. Multilingual dissemination and locally useful outputs deserve consideration alongside international visibility. The organization of research is one of the settings in which SDG 4’s commitments to inclusion and equity must be enacted.

This Special Issue demonstrates that curriculum, policy, and practice must be understood through their relationships. Its five contributions identify different points at which educational commitments can become more responsive to learners and communities, while making clear the limits of the evidence available. We thank the contributing authors and reviewers for advancing this conversation. The collection invites researchers, educators, and policymakers to treat SDG 4 as an ongoing responsibility to examine the conditions of education. Progress depends on institutions that sustain professional judgment, respect cultural and linguistic knowledge, and make equitable participation possible across diverse educational settings.