The Political Economy Of Global Citizenship Education

This edited collection offers analyses of ‘global citizenship education’ within and across different national contexts. This book illustrates the contingency of definitions, the complexities of juxtaposing demands and priorities in different educational contexts, and the difficulties and tensions of asking a question that is arguably one of the most pressing of our time: how should we live together in interdependent ecologies in a finite planet? In the discipline of education, where market imperatives and the dictatorship of 'effective replicable results' have laid siege to independent debates, this book aims to emphasize the importance of raising our intellectual game as educators to interrupt new and old problematic patterns of engagements, representations, uncomplicated solutions and conceptual straightjackets. Contributors to this volume address the tensions between homogenizing universalisms and parochial specifisms, ethnocentrisms and relativisms, deficit theorizations and romanticizations of difference, fantasies of supremacy and paralyses in guilt, the 'global' and the 'local'. The chapters take different approaches to map the origins, meanings, workings, ethics, politics and implications of initiatives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks related to the ideas of globalization, citizenship and education in different sites of knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and 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.

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.

The idea of citizenship and conceptions of what it means to be a good citizen have evolved over time. On the one hand, good citizenship entails the ability to live with others in diverse societies and to promote a common set of values of acceptance, human rights, and democracy. On the other hand, in order to compete in the global economy, nations require a more innovative, autonomous, and reflective workforce, meaning good citizens are also those who successfully participate in the economic development of themselves and their country. These competing conceptions of good citizenship can result in people’s participation in activities, such as profit-driven labor exploitation, that contradict human rights and democratic tenants. Thus, global citizenship education is fundamental to teaching, learning, and redressing sociopolitical, economic, and environmental exploitation around the world. Detailing the historical development of this field of study to achieve recognition, Global Citizenship Education: Challenges and Successes provides a critical discourse on global citizenship education (GCE). Authors in this collection discuss the underpinnings of global citizenship education via contemporary theories and methodologies, as well as specific case studies that illustrate the application of GCE initiatives. Editors Eva Aboagye and S. Nombuso Dlamini aim to motivate learners and educators in post-secondary institutions not only to understand the issues of social and economic inequality and political and civil unrest facing us, but also to take action that will lead to equitable change in both local and global spaces.

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.

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 collection offers analyses of ‘global citizenship education’ within and across different national contexts. This book illustrates the contingency of definitions, the complexities of juxtaposing demands and priorities in different educational contexts, and the difficulties and tensions of asking a question that is arguably one of the most pressing of our time: how should we live together in interdependent ecologies in a finite planet? In the discipline of education, where market imperatives and the dictatorship of 'effective replicable results' have laid siege to independent debates, this book aims to emphasize the importance of raising our intellectual game as educators to interrupt new and old problematic patterns of engagements, representations, uncomplicated solutions and conceptual straightjackets. Contributors to this volume address the tensions between homogenizing universalisms and parochial specifisms, ethnocentrisms and relativisms, deficit theorizations and romanticizations of difference, fantasies of supremacy and paralyses in guilt, the 'global' and the 'local'. The chapters take different approaches to map the origins, meanings, workings, ethics, politics and implications of initiatives, approaches, and conceptual frameworks related to the ideas of globalization, citizenship and education in different sites of knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

The essays in this edited collection argue that global citizenship education realistically must be set against the imperfections of our contemporary political realities. As a form of education it must actively engage in a critically informed way with a set of complex inherited historical issues that emerge out of a colonial past and the savage globalization which often perpetuates unequal power relations or cause new inequalities.