Troubling The Canon Of Citizenship Education

The discourse of civic education privileges liberal democratic understandings of citizenship. Yet we know that such understandings do not accurately represent the complex, plural, and problematic nature of citizenship in contemporary society. To stimulate discussion about new possibilities for teaching citizenship, this volume brings together the work of Canadian and American curriculum scholars to «trouble» the existing canon of citizenship education. Addressing themes as diverse as gender, sexual orientation, globalization, agency, ontology, and interdisciplinarity, the essays that make up this collection seek to enlarge and expand upon the ways educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers might approach teaching citizenship.

Seven authors describe the controversial nature of patriotism andcitizenship education in their country, basing their account andrecommendations upon their philosophical understanding of educationand schooling. Offers differing national perspectives on patriotism acrossthe United States, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Japan andEngland Discusses varying accounts of how patriotism and citizenshipeducation should be handled as part of the school curriculum Provides crucial insights into how schools handle social andpolitical demands on controversial topics

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.

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.

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 volume bridges the gap between contemporary theoretical debates and educational policies and practices. It applies postcolonial theory as a framework of analysis that attempts to engage with and go beyond essentialism, ethno- and euro-centrisms through a critical examination of contemporary case studies and conceptual issues. From a transdisciplinary and post-colonial perspective, this book offers critiques of notions of development, progress, humanism, culture, representation, identity, and education. It also examines the implications of these critiques in terms of pedagogical approaches, social relations and possible future interventions.

The notion of global citizenship education (GCE) has emerged in the international education discourse in the context of the United Nations Education First Initiative that cites developing global citizens as one of its goals. In this book, the authors argue that GCE offers a new educational perspective for making sense of the existing dilemmas of multiculturalism and national citizenship deficits in diverse societies, taking into account equality, human rights and social justice. The authors explore how teaching and research may be implemented relating to the notion of global citizenship and discuss the intersections between the framework of GCE and multiculturalism. They address the three main topics which affect education in multicultural societies and in a globalized world, and which represent unsolved dilemmas: the issue of diversity in relation to creating citizens, the issue of equality and social justice in democratic societies, and the tension between the global and the local in a globalized world. Through a comparative study of the two prevailing approaches – intercultural education within the European Union and multicultural education in the United States – the authors seek what can be learned from each model. Global Citizenship Education and the Crises of Multiculturalism offers not only a unifying theoretical framework but also a set of policy recommendations aiming to link the two approaches.

This handbook brings together new work by some of the leading authorities on citizenship education, and is divided into five sections. The first section deals with key ideas about citizenship education including democracy, rights, globalization and equity. Section two contains a wide range of national case studies of citizenship education including African, Asian, Australian, European and North and South American examples. The third section focuses on perspectives about citizenship education with discussions about key areas such as sustainable development, anti-racism, gender. Section four provides insights into different characterisations of citizenship education with illustrations of democratic schools, peace and conflict education, global education, human rights education etc. The final section provides a series of chapters on the pedagogy of citizenship education with discussions about curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment.