Spatial Citizenship Education

Spatial Citizenship Education is an innovative exploration of ways to engage and promote citizenship through a deeper understanding of spatial and geographic perspectives. The authors propose that recognizing the relationship between space and citizenry enables productive and positive engagement with important societal issues such as equity, justice, and environmental stewardship. By providing a historical overview of geography’s contribution to citizenship education, including progress made and challenges faced by educational reform movements, this collection shows how geography can contribute to a new type of citizen—one with an enhanced understanding of the world as seen through the key concepts of geography: space, place, scale, power, and human-environment relationships. Through a theoretical explanation of key citizenship ideas, and by providing practical, classroom-based teaching tools, this volume will be essential for geography education researchers and social studies educators alike.

With a focus on the Global South, this book argues that awareness and discussion of the politics of equity and inclusion in global citizenship education (GCE) research are essential to the future of nuanced and effective research in this area. The book explores the notion of heavily regulated hard spaces to examine areas of institutional blindness and reflects on ways to negotiate the issue of sensitivity in an institutional context, exploring how one’s sensitivity relates to pedagogy and ethics. Through this in-depth metadiscussion of GCE research, the book provides a complex portrait of unique challenges in this domain and explores the nuanced experience of navigating temporal intersections of the global, the citizen, and education in geographically and thematically obstacled spaces. This book will be of great interest to researchers, policymakers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of global education, comparative education, and educational policy.

This book is an initiative presented by the Commission on Geographical Education of the International Geographical Union. It focuses particularly on what has been learned from geospatial projects and research from the past decades of implementing geospatial technologies (GST) in formal and informal education. The objective of this publication is to inform an international audience of teachers, professionals, scholars, and policymakers about the state of the art and prospects of geospatial practices (GPs) as organized activities that use GST and lessons learned in relation to geographical education. GST make up an advanced body of knowledge developed by practitioners of geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing (RS), global positioning systems, (GPS), and digital cartography (DC). GST have long been applied in many different sectors; however, their first use in higher education began in the early 1980s and then diffused to secondary schools during the 1990s. Starting with GIS and RS, it evolved into a much broader context, as GST expanded to include GPS and DC with new communication technologies and Internet applications. GST have been used around the world as a combination of tools and special techniques to make research, teaching, and learning more effective.

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.

This book presents the core concepts of geographical education as a means of understanding global issues from a spatial perspective. It treats education, supported by high standards, approaches, methodologies, and resources, as essential in exploring the interactions of the world’s human and environmental systems at local, regional, and global scales embedded in the nature of the discipline of geography. It covers topics such as climate change, sustainable development goals, geopolitics in an uncertain world, global crisis, and population flows, which are of great interest to geography researchers and social sciences educators who want to explore the complexity of contemporary societies. Highly respected scholars in geography education answer questions on key topics and explain how global understanding is considered in K-12 education in significant countries around the globe. The book discusses factors such as the Internet, social media, virtual globes and other technological developments that provide insights into and visualization – in real time – of the intensity of relationships between different countries and regions of the earth. It also examines how this does not always lead to empathy with other political, cultural, social and religious values: terrorism threats and armed conflicts are also essential features of the global world. This book opens the dialogue for global understanding as a great opportunity for teachers, educators, scholars and policy makers to better equip students and future citizens to deal with global issues.

Social and Humanities Science Research, Theory

Ultimately concerned with how citizenship education for peace can be enriched through interdisciplinary learning, this edited volume reveals the role of peace education in global citizenship by illuminating instruction for comprehensive citizenship. A truly international collection, this volume offers timely insights from countries including Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Canada, Bangaldesh, Korea, Zimbabwe, and Timor Leste as it provides critical, in-depth analyses of peace-oriented instruction in formal and informal settings. The text illustrates how citizenship can be effectively developed on both a global and a local level, and discusses the practical learning opportunities that can enact change through schools, nongovernmental organizations, and community-wide civic actions with children, youth, adults, and families. This text will appeal to academics and researchers involved in the field of international and comparative education and will be of interest to educators and school leaders concerned with the role citizenship plays in the context of teaching and learning.

This book examines the issues of theorizing citizenship education research in non-Western societies that have embarked on democratic development after the fall of authoritarianism and colonialism. Despite a proliferation of studies on citizenship and citizenship education in non-Western contexts, there has been limited theorization of this research and little discussion of the applicability to such contexts of Western theoretical frameworks. This volume addresses these issues through empirical case studies of citizenship conceptions, practices, and education in South and West Africa, Latin America, Central Europe, and the Middle East. The contributors to the volume call into question the uncritical application of Western theoretical frameworks to non-Western societies and advocate for the development and wider application of new paradigms rooted in local processes and indigenous knowledge to better understand and theorize citizenship and citizenship education in such societies. This volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and practitioners working in the field of comparative and international citizenship education. It was originally published as a special issue of Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.