From Global Childhood to Global Citizenship: The Story of IC’s Lottie Dowling
Lottie Dowling explores the Forbidden City during her decade living and teaching in Beijing, where she says she realized, "the more you understand the complexities and the rich history of a place, the more you realize how little you know."
There is a shelf in Lottie Dowling's home in Australia where a collection of brightly clothed handmade dolls sits prominently, having traveled a very long way. They arrived decades ago, one package at a time, sent from China by a godfather who had found his way there as a carpet layer and stayed to become a successful global businessman Lottie was a girl growing up in suburban New Zealand when those packages arrived. She had no idea, then, that she was already being shaped into an educator of global citizens.
Today, Lottie is a facilitator with Inspire Citizens, leading work across the Australasian region. The role fits her perfectly. Her winding path to it spans continents, classrooms, a children's theater, an improv troupe in Beijing, and a radio co-hosting gig she held as a teenager. It is, in the best possible way, the story of someone who has always been engaging with an ever-widening world.
A Household That Looked Outward
Lottie grew up in the 1980s at a time when, as she puts it, there wasn't a lot of exposure to the world for children in New Zealand. Her household was different. Her stepfather had traveled overland from London to India, lived in a local village there for four years, and came home carrying those stories. Her godfather, one of the first Westerners to live in China in that era, sent regular packages from his work travels across China. Treasures include a scroll with a Chinese horse painting because Lottie was born in the year of the horse. He also posted poems he had written from remote parts of China on his travels and, of course, dolls from ethnic minority communities.
At the same time, her family attended a Universal Worship Service rooted in Sufism, where each week a candle was lit for each of the world's major religions and readings from multiple sacred texts were shared, woven around a single shared theme such as forgiveness or generosity.
"I was learning about all these different world religions," Lottie recalls. "I understood what their holy books were called. I understood that they all talked about and aimed to develop certain values."
She would only understand later how special her scope of knowledge was. "In hindsight," she says, "I realized how unique those foundational lessons about the universal aspects of our similar-ness and our different-ness really were."
Books, Fairies, and a Radio Microphone
Alongside all of this, Lottie read voraciously. She describes sitting in her primary school library just thinking about this wider world. Her parents also ran a children's theatre company, which meant her childhood was saturated with performance, young people, and storytelling. In her teenage years, she co-hosted a children's radio program on 95BFM, one of New Zealand's most well-known stations, co-founded by her father.
By the time she was old enough to consider a career, she had also worked as a professional fairy. "Most kids are working at McDonald's or the supermarket," she says with a laugh, "and I was doing children's birthday parties on Saturday mornings in my fairy costume, with magic tricks and my little bunny Moonbeam."
Teaching, when she arrived at it, felt like a natural convergence of everything she loved. Her father's practical advice helped too: get a qualification you can take anywhere. After completing her degree and two years of teaching at a community school in West Auckland, Lottie packed her bag.
Ten Years in China and a Life on the Road
She went first to India, then Zimbabwe, then London, and then she used London as a base for years of travel through Europe, Asia and Africa, including a period of volunteering at a school in India working with both the teachers and students. She eventually took up a teaching post at Dulwich College Beijing in its foundational year, drawn there by a visit to her godfather, whose life had planted the seed of China in her imagination since childhood.
She stayed for ten years. She also co-founded a community theater group called Beijing Improv, running free workshops that used improvisation to teach social skills. Performing and learning alongside local residents and internationals alike, Lottie gained insight into Beijing life that just working in an international school never could have yielded.
During long school holidays, rather than flying home, Lottie traveled to remote regions of China; Yunnan, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and across Southeast Asia. She thrived in places that most expats would not likely visit. She ended up in a local hospital in Yunnan once, seriously ill, with a local translator assigned to her because the staff were so concerned.
"They weren't relaxing holidays," she says simply. "But I was seeing and experiencing this world that most people never get to see, and understanding for the first time the experiences of others in a very real way."
Lottie with students during her volunteer teaching in India, an experience she traces directly to the spirit of service at the heart of her Sufi upbringing: "Always trying to give back."
Building Asia Capabilities and Finding the Tribe
Eventually, Lottie moved into a teacher training program managing pedagogical change across fourteen Chinese state schools. Then, back in Australia, she joined the Asia Education Foundation at Melbourne University, where she helped schools develop what were called Asia Capabilities: global citizenship education through an Asia-Australia lens. She took educators and school leaders to India and The Kingdom of Bhutan, a country she describes as carbon negative and well known for its’ Gross National Happiness Index which permeates every aspect of life.
She went on to work at a language-learning program; Meg Languages, connecting students in Australian schools with native-speaking teachers in China and Colombia to learn languages and for cultural exploration, via Zoom, long before the pandemic made that platform a household name.
In 2024, she joined Inspire Citizens. She had completed their Global Citizenship Certificate program a few years earlier and describes the experience as feeling like coming home. "I just thought, oh, these are all the things that I believe in and value and know are important,” she recalls. And she realized, “I'm not alone in this. There's a group of educators out there that also understand and believe in this work. I want to be part of this club."
The Work Ahead
Presenting at the 2024 DEi Conference in Queensland, Lottie brings her vision of global citizenship education to Australian educators — helping schools move from understanding the "why" to mastering the "how."
Alongside her facilitation work with Inspire Citizens, Lottie has also been developing a programme called Culture Agents, a story-driven experience for young people that uses a mission-based format to explore cultural diversity, belonging and inclusion. A comic is due out in the coming months.
When asked what she most wants to contribute to the educational sphere in the years ahead, Lottie talks about helping educators design learning that centers and empowers students, connects to real purpose, and leaves something behind in the world. She invokes Sir David Attenborough: "No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”
In the end, the impact of what Lottie is describing is not so distant from those packages arriving in suburban New Zealand: a child, a scroll, a doll, a poem from a hillside. She is dedicating her working life to helping open a window onto a wider world. And to the confident understanding that what one sees through it can shape everything that comes after.