The Oregon Journal of the Social Studies The Oregon Council for the Social Studies is an affiliate of the National Council for the Social Studies Volume 9, Number 1 Page | 19 Sustainable Living, Global Citizenship, and Teaching about Community Jay M. Shuttleworth This article investigated how an elementary teacher utilized Global Citizenship Education in an instructional unit about communities and sustainable living. Specifically, this study examined how the teacher implemented instruction emphasizing interconnectivity and knowledge of how the Earth’s systems compare and interact. Findings suggested that opportunities to practice empathy in concrete and abstract scenarios highlighted the importance of developmentally-appropriate learning for elementary students. The need to teach children about the world may be more important now than at any point in history. They need to be better prepared to understand the interconnected and interdependent nature of their globalized world and take action to solve its related environmental issues. Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is an appropriate and necessary lens in which to guide this kind of preparation for its empathic and transformative thinking objectives. Children’s worldview is relatively small, but researchers note that they are ready to think about complex issues (Halvorsen, 2017), including topics like the globalized nature of the world and humans’ need to live more sustainably within it (Louv, 2008; Sobel, 1996, 2005). Educating children with a GCE perspective prepares them to interrogate more complex environmental issues when they get older—like the need to rethink one’s inward-gazing view of the world (Gaudelli & Schmidt, 2018). Social studies and GCE researchers have prioritized studies of classroom instruction (including at the elementary level) for its potential insights on how to transform anthropocentric and western-centric narratives on global issues (Grossman, 2017; Pashby, 2018). A gap exists between what social studies students know of ecological issues and what they are willing to do about them (Shuttleworth, 2015; Shuttleworth & Marri, 2014), and this is particularly acute for elementary students (Pope & Patterson, 2012). Perhaps owing these challenges, social studies educators affirm the compelling and necessary undertaking to civically engage youth with global environmental issues (Hayes & Magraw, 2020). Such an undertaking informs this study’s research objective, which investigates how one elementary social studies teacher used a GCE framework to teach about sustainable living and community. Theoretical Framework Global Citizenship Education (GCE) guides this study because it informs students’s opportunities to rethink notions of community and their responsibilities for it. Scholars have written much about GCE over the last thirty years, and the social studies field has a robust cadre of contemporary contributors (Davies et al., 2018; Gaudelli, 2016; Grossman, 2017; Myers, 2020; Rapoport, 2020; Zong et al., 2008). Yet the subject owes much of its theoretical origins to indigenous knowledge about the interconnectedness and interdependence of the Earth’s systems. GCE’s theorizing rests on what scholars call “Indigenous Environmental Knowledge” (IEK) (Longboat et al., 2008) or “Traditional Ecological Knowledge” (TEK) (Porter, 2014). Concepts in IEK/TEK draw generally on the “cultural ecology” used by indigenous peoples in conserving ecosystems (Vescey, 1980, p. 4). IEK/TEK underlines that native peoples nurtured these places for hundreds or thousands of years, while European settlers caused those same places to fail in a few