Citizenship Education In The Era Of Globalization

This collection of timely articles is the first to explore the dynamics between globalization and education from a specifically Canadian perspective. The articles engage with emergent debates and new discourses around global orientations to citizenship education currently defining scholarly work and teaching practices in Canada.

Contestations of Citizenship, Education, and Democracy in an Era of Global Change: Children and Youth in Diverse International Contexts considers the shifting social, political, economic, and educational structures shaping contemporary experiences, understandings, and practices of citizenship among children and youth in diverse international contexts. As such, this edited book examines the meaning of citizenship in an era defined by monumental global change. Chapters from across both the Global South and North consider emerging formations of citizenship and citizen identities among children and youth in formal and non-formal education contexts, as well as the social and civic imaginaries and practices to which children and youth engage, both in and outside of schools. Rich empirical contributions from an international team of contributors call attention to the social, political, economic, and educational structures shaping the ways young people view citizenship and highlight the social and political agency of children and youth amid increasing issues of polarization, climate change, conflict, migration, extremism, and authoritarianism. The book ultimately identifies emergent forms of citizenship developing in formal and non-formal educational contexts, including those that unsettle the nation-state and democracy. Edited by a team of academics with backgrounds in education, citizenship, and youth studies, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and faculty who work across the broader field of youth civic engagement and democracy, as well as international and comparative education and citizenship. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Rather than having formed a global community, today’s society is more fragmented than ever. In light of this, education faces some formidable new challenges. The authors of this collection of essays explore these challenges, and suggest some novel ways of dealing with them.

The ideas for this reader came out of a conference organized through the Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research (CGCER) at the University of Alberta in 2013. With the high expansion of global citizenship education scholarship in the past 15 or so years, and with most of this scholarship produced in the west and mostly focused on the citizenship lives of people in the so-called developing world, or selectively attempting to explain the contexts of marginalized populations in the west, the need for multidirectional and decolonizing knowledge and research perspectives should be clear. Indeed, the discursive as well as the practical constructions of current global citizenship education research cannot fulfill the general promise of learning and teaching programs as social development platforms unless the voices of all concerned are heard and validated. With these realities, this reader is topically comprehensive and timely, and should constitute an important intervention in our efforts to create and sustain more inclusive and liberating platforms of knowledge and learning. “This collection of cutting-edge theoretical contributions examines citizenship and neo-liberal globalization and their impacts on the nexus of the local and global learning, production of knowledge, and movements of people and their rights. Case studies in the collection also provide in-depth analysis of lived experiences that challenge the constructed borders, which derive from colonial and imperial re-structuring of the contemporary world and nation-states. The contributors articulate agency in terms of both resistance and proactive engagement toward the construction of an alternative world, which acknowledges equality, justice and common humanity of all in symbiosis with the social and natural environment. It is a valuable reader for students, scholars, practitioners, and activists interested in the empowering possibilities of decolonized global citizenship education.” – N’Dr

This edited book is the first full-length volume exclusively devoted to new research on the challenges and practices of teaching global issues. It addresses the ways that schools can and do address young people’s interest and activism in contemporary global issues facing the world. Many young people today are passionate about issues such as climate change, world poverty, and human rights but have few opportunities in schools to study such issues in depth. This book draws on new research to provide a deeper understanding and examples of how global issues are taught in schools. The book is organized in two sections: (1) contexts and policies in which global issues are taught and learned; and (2) case studies of teaching and learning global issues in schools. The central thesis is that global issues are an essential feature of democracy and social action in a world caught in the thrall of globalization. Schools can no longer afford to ignore teaching about issues impacting across the world if they intend to keep young people engaged in learning and want them to make their own communities—and the greater world—better places for all.

Globalization is changing what citizens need to know and be able to do by interrupting the assumption that the actions of citizens only take place within national borders. If our neighborhoods and nations are affecting and being affected by the world, then our political consciousness must be worldminded. The outcomes of globalization have led educators to rethink what students need to learn and be able to do as citizens in a globally connected world. This volume focuses on research that examines how K-12 teachers and students are currently addressing the challenge of becoming citizens in a globally interconnected world. Although there is an extensive body of literature on citizenship education within national contexts and a growing literature on global education, this volume offers research on the work educators are doing across multiple countries to bring the two fields together to develop global citizens.

The past decade has seen an explosion of interest in civics and citizenship education. There have been unprecedented developments in citizenship education taking place in schools, adult education centers, or in the less formally structured spaces of media images and commentary around the world. This book provides an overview of the development of civics and citizenship education policy across a range of nation states. The contributors, all widely respected scholars in the field of civics and citizenship education, provide a thorough understanding of the different ways in which citizenship has been taken up by educators, governments and the wider public. Citizenship is never a single given, unproblematic concept, but rather its meanings have to be worked through and developed in terms of the particularities of socio-political location and history. This volume promotes a wider and more grounded understanding of the ways in which citizenship education is enacted across different nation states in order to develop education for active and participatory citizenry in both local and global contexts.

There is growing pressure on teachers and faculty to understand and adopt best practices to work with diverse races, cultures, and languages in modern classrooms. Establishing sound pedagogy is also critical given that racial, cultural, and linguistic integration has the potential to increase academic success for all learners. To that end, there is also a need for educators to prepare graduates who will better meet the needs of culturally diverse learners and help their learners to become successful global citizens. The Handbook of Research on Diversity and Social Justice in Higher Education is a cutting-edge research book that examines cross-cultural perspectives, challenges, and opportunities pertaining to advancing diversity and social justice in higher education. Furthermore, the book explores multiple concepts of building a bridge from a monocultural pedagogical framework to cross-cultural knowledge through appropriate diversity education models as well as effective social justice practices. Highlighting a range of topics such as cultural taxation, intercultural engagement, and teacher preparation, this book is essential for teachers, faculty, academicians, researchers, administrators, policymakers, and students.