Citizenship Education

Drawing on contemporary global events, this book highlights how global citizenship education can be used to critically educate about the complexity and repressive nature of global events and our collective role in creating a just world.

Global Citizenship Education addresses the intersection of globalization, education and programmatic efforts to prepare young people to live in a more interdependent, complex and fragile world. The book explores topics such as sustainability education, cultural diversity, and human rights education, offering critical insights into how these facets of GCE are interpreted around the world. The book also strives to give voice to student populations within historically marginalized communities, rather than focusing solely on the role of GCE in elite schools. Gaudelli blends theory and practice to provide both an overview of GCE as well as examining current efforts to develop more globally-conscious classrooms. Blending empirical research and practical illustrations, this important volume encourages educators to take seriously their own call to prepare young people to engage global challenges with a sense of urgency and helps chart a new direction for global learning that is increasingly expansive, dialogic and inclusive.

Supporting children and young people to participate safely, effectively, critically and responsibly in a world filled with social media and digital technologies is a priority for educators the world over. Most young people in Europe today were born and have grown up in the digital era. Education authorities have the duty to ensure that these digital citizens are fully aware of the norms of appropriate behaviour when using constantly evolving technology and participating in digital life. Despite worldwide efforts to address such issues, there is a clear need for education authorities to take the lead on digital citizenship education and integrate it into school curricula. In 2016, the Education Department of the Council of Europe began work to develop new policy orientations and strategies to help educators face these new challenges and to empower young people by helping them to acquire the competences they need to participate actively and responsibly in digital society. This volume, the first in a Digital Citizenship Education series, reviews the existing academic and policy literature on digital citizenship education, highlighting definitions, actors and stakeholders, competence frameworks, practices, emerging trends and challenges. The inclusion of a wide selection of sources is intended to ensure sufficient coverage of what is an emergent topic that has yet to gain a strong foothold in either education or academic literature, but has received wider policy attention.

This open access book takes a critical and international perspective to the mainstreaming of the Global Citizenship Concept and analyses the key issues regarding global citizenship education across the world. In that respect, it addresses a pressing need to provide further conceptual input and to open global citizenship agendas to diversity and indigeneity. Social and political changes brought by globalisation, migration and technological advances of the 21st century have generated a rise in the popularity of the utopian and philosophical idea of global citizenship. In response to the challenges of today’s globalised and interconnected world, such as inequality, human rights violations and poverty, global citizenship education has been invoked as a means of preparing youth for an inclusive and sustainable world. In recent years, the development of global citizenship education and the building of students’ global citizenship competencies have become a focal point in global agendas for education, international educational assessments and international organisations. However, the concept of global citizenship education still remains highly contested and subject to multiple interpretations, and its operationalisation in national educational policies proves to be challenging. This volume aims to contribute to the debate, question the relevancy of global citizenship education’s policy objectives and to enhance understanding of local perspectives, ideologies, conceptions and issues related to citizenship education on a local, national and global level. To this end, the book provides a comprehensive and geographically based overview of the challenges citizenship education faces in a rapidly changing global world through the lens of diversity and inclusiveness.

This book explores alternative models of civics and citizenship education. Specifically, it uses Justice Citizens, a participatory research and film-making project, as a tool to examine young people’s ideas about active citizenship and participation in public spaces. It introduces a framework that seeks to explore the diverse and apparently contradictory nature of young people’s active citizenship. The framework draws on complexity theory combined with critical pedagogy and democratic education to formulate an approach to developing active citizenship among young people. This approach extends theories of both critical pedagogy and education for citizenship, and by doing so seeks to explain the variegated nature of young people’s engagement with civil society. This book contains a valuable repository of ideas and resources for application for teachers to use in schools and classrooms. Academics engaged in initial teacher education, at both primary and secondary levels, will find the framework of use when describing the importance and new approaches to civics and citizenship education within the current school and policy environments.

Education for Democratic Intercultural Citizenship (EDIC) is very relevant in contemporary societies. Seven European universities are working together in developing a curriculum to prepare their students for this important academic, societal and political task. The book present their theories and practices.

This volume offers a remarkable collection of theoretically and practically grounded conversations with internationally recognized scholars, who share their perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in relation to university research, teaching, and learning. Conversations on Global Citizenship Education brings together the narratives of a diverse array of educators who share their unique experiences of navigating GCE in the modern university. Conversations focus on why and how educators’ theoretical and empirical perspectives on GCE are essential for achieving an all-embracing GCE curriculum which underpins global peace. Drawing on the Freirean concept of "conscientization", GCE is presented as an educational imperative to combat growing inequality, seeping nationalism, and post-truth politics. This timely volume will be of interest to educators who are seeking to develop their theoretical understanding of GCE into teaching practice, researchers and students who are new to GCE and who seek dynamic starting points for their research, and general audience who are interested in learning more about the history, philosophy, and practice of GCE.

Cultural competence in education promotes civic engagement among students. Providing students with educational opportunities to understand various cultural and political perspectives allows for higher cultural competence and a greater understanding of civic engagement for those students. The Handbook of Research on Citizenship and Heritage Education is a critical scholarly book that provides relevant and current research on citizenship and heritage education aimed at promoting active participation and the transformation of society. Readers will come to understand the role of heritage as a symbolic identity source that facilitates the understanding of the present and the past, highlighting the value of teaching. Additionally, it offers a source for the design of didactic proposals that promote active participation and the critical conservation of heritage. Featuring a range of topics such as educational policy, curriculum design, and political science, this book is ideal for educators, academicians, administrators, political scientists, policymakers, researchers, and students.