Citizenship Education Around The World

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.

Though certainly not a new idea, citizenship education manifests in unique and often unpredictable ways in our contemporary neoliberal era. The question of what it means to be a productive and recognized citizen must now be understood simultaneously along both global and local lines. This edited volume offers an international perspective on citizenship education enacted in specific socio-political contexts. Each chapter includes a pointed conceptualization of citizenship education—a philosophical framework—that is then applied to specific national cases across Europe, Asia, Canada and more. Chapters emphasize how such frameworks are implemented within local contexts, encouraging particular pedagogical/curricular practices even as they constrain others. Chapters conclude with suggestions for productive change and how educators might usefully engage contemporary contexts through citizenship education.

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.

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.

This groundbreaking book describes theory, research, and practice that can be used in civic education courses and programs to help students from marginalized and minoritized groups in nations around the world attain a sense of structural integration and political efficacy within their nation-states, develop civic participation skills, and reflective cultural, national, and global identities.

Though certainly not a new idea, citizenship education manifests in unique and often unpredictable ways in our contemporary neoliberal era. The question of what it means to be a productive and recognized citizen must now be understood simultaneously along both global and local lines. This edited volume offers an international perspective on citizenship education enacted in specific socio-political contexts. Each chapter includes a pointed conceptualization of citizenship education—a philosophical framework—that is then applied to specific national cases across Europe, Asia, Canada and more. Chapters emphasize how such frameworks are implemented within local contexts, encouraging particular pedagogical/curricular practices even as they constrain others. Chapters conclude with suggestions for productive change and how educators might usefully engage contemporary contexts through citizenship education.

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.

This book brings together key perspectives from scholars in the Global South and Global North to illustrate diverse ways in which the UN’s Global Citizenship Education (GCED) agenda can promote social justice and be used as a vehicle for negotiating and learning about diverse and shared objectives in education and the global public sphere. Recognizing the historical function of education as a prominent public sphere site, this book addresses questions around how forms of global education can serve as public sphere sites in various contexts today and in the future. Specifically, it questions established notions of education and proposes new interpretations of the relationship between practices of education and the public sphere to meet the needs of our contemporary turbulent era and a post-2020 world. By offering conceptual analyses, examples of policy and educational practices which promote global learning, democratic citizenship, common good, and perspective-taking, the text offers new critical understandings of how GCED can contribute to the public responsibilities and roles of education. Chapters consider examples such as non-formal adult education at the Mexico–US border, teachers’ responsibilities in Japan and Finland, developments in education policy and practices in Brazil, civic religious teachings in Canada, online learning in the United States and China, and support to the participation of women in higher education in Pakistan. Given its unique approach, and the range of case studies it brings together, this book is a timely addition to the literature on education in the global public sphere. It will prove to be an invaluable resource for scholars working at the intersections of global education and transnational education policies, and for teachers involved in global education.