Charting a democratic course for global citizenship education: Research directions and current challenges

Abstract

This article outlines research directions for global citizenship education, by emphasizing the centrality of democratic goals for schools in the 21st century. Despite a significant shift in educational policies and practices towards addressing education that respond to the conditions of globalization, there is not a clear vision regarding its role in schools. Furthermore, curriculum reforms such as global citizenship education inevitably face the issue of whether to adapt to neoliberal tenets of privatization, high stakes testing and standards-based accountability, or to resist and challenge these policies with alternative, democratic visions of schooling. This article argues that for global citizenship education to reach maturity, there is a need for a programmatic research agenda that addresses the complex dynamics that globalization has introduced to schooling, particularly the challenges to teaching and learning for helping youth to make sense of the world and their role in it. An analysis of recent advances in research and practice in civic education is used as a starting point to advance directions for global citizenship education. Two key directions are suggested: to gain a more secure foothold in schools and the need to focus on a shared conceptual focus that helps researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders to access the same body of practices and knowledge.

Affordances, complexities, and challenges of intercultural citizenship for foreign language teachers

“…Teaching within an intercultural citizenship framework requires time, effort, and commitment to a broader conceptualization of language teaching beyond the linguistic (Byram & Wagner, ; Larsen‐Freeman, ). Furthermore, as the recent special issue on intercultural citizenship in the language classroom in Language Teaching Research (Porto et al, ) showed, teachers may be uncomfortable with this role and may not know how to put the theory into practice, in particular in public educational systems where there is often a strong focus on the national and the nation (Alviar‐Martin & Baildon, ; Myers, ) and where national policies or family and cultural values may be incompatible with the principles of democratic citizenship. Since the notion of critical cultural awareness means becoming aware of one's own values, and of their national basis, the point of departure for developing intercultural citizenship is the understanding of otherness by first decentering and then exercising critical reflexivity.…”

“…In language education, this element of community engagement is known as global citizenship (Jackson, ), intercultural service learning (Rauschert & Byram, ), or community‐based service‐learning (Palpacuer Lee et al, ). In the field of education more globally, beyond foreign language teaching, this connection with the community is referred to as community‐engaged learning and teaching (Brown, Shephard, Warren, Hesson, & Fleming, ; Mbah, ), global education (Abdullahi, ), and global citizenship education (Davies et al, ; Myers, ), among other alternatives.…”

Reaching the world outside: cultural representation and perceptions of global citizenship in Japanese elementary school English textbooks

“…The learners' individual backgrounds and experiences rendered it difficult to describe their L2 identities in broad strokes, and they did not universally aspire to become 'global citizens'. Because global citizenship education is not 'one-size-fits-all' and demands an expansive, democratic approach when implemented in schools (Myers, 2016, p. 10), perhaps the label is unnatural in some modesty-driven East Asian contexts. In future studies, it may be more prudent to emphasise localised engagement with the core values of global citizenship than to impose any foreign, strict terminology.…”

Students’ perceptions of global citizenship at a local and an international school in Israel

“…In particular, while once schools were entrusted mainly with the responsibility of promoting patriotic values in students (who comprise part of what Anderson [1991] coined as the national 'imagined community'), a greater number of schools and governments today are adopting a cosmopolitan narrative that includes global citizenship and related terms (Dill, 2013;Reilly & Niens, 2014). Moreover, as claimed by Myers (2016), in similar to the way that globalization in education had been driven by free market, competition and neoliberal logic, global citizenship education many times "wrapped up in a market oriented skill set that prepares students for achievement in high stakes testing and global competitiveness" (p. 3) and thus actively promoted by the states.…”