Conflations, possibilities, and foreclosures: Global citizenship education in a multicultural context

Abstract

This paper presents a critical framework applied to findings from a critical discourse analysis of curriculum and lesson plans in Alberta to examine the assumption that Canada is an ideal place for global citizenship education. The analysis draws on a framework that presents a critique of modernity to recognize a conflation within calls for new approaches to educating citizens for the twenty-first century. A main finding is that although the Alberta curriculum reflects important potential for promoting a critical approach, a conflation of different versions of liberalism often results in a false sense of multiple perspectives and a foreclosure of potential. The paper argues for a critical approach to global citizenship education that engages with the tensions inherent to issues of diversity rather than stepping over or reducing them to theoretically and conceptually vague ideas of universalism and consensus.

A meta-review of typologies of global citizenship education

“…The typologies draw on a mixture of theoretical and empirical work. The authors of the typologies refer somewhat interchangeably to cosmopolitan and global as key descriptors, and we included both (see Pashby 2013Pashby , 2015. They draw on a broad range of literature both related to wider theoretical engagements regarding globalisation and political theory (which largely correlates to the three discursive configurations: neoliberal, liberal, and critical) and to specific literature on GCE.…”

Internalization of Digital Citizenship for the Future of All Levels of Education

“…Yeni dünya dinamizmine adapte olabilmek için, küresel vatandaşın sahip olması gereken beceriler, değerler eğitim sistemindeki dönüşüme bağlı sorgulanmalıdır. Sayısal katılım sosyal yaşamın geliştirilmesinde önemli olduğu gibi, teknoloji de sosyal yaşamdaki kalitenin artırılmasında bir yoldur (Pashby, 2015). Buna ek olarak, teknoloji kürsel vatandaş olabilme sürecinin adaptasyonunda, öğrenmeyi destekleyerek sosyal değerlerin zenginleştirilmesini sağlar (Watling, 2012).…”

We, the non-global citizens: Reflections on the possibilities and challenges of democratic global citizenship education in higher education contexts

“…First, the national citizen. The work of Pashby (2015) critically illustrates how, in much of the liberal cosmopolitanist work on GCE, "citizenship identity is assumed to expand in a linear manner from local to regional to national to global" disallowing "contradictory sentiments between national and global" (p. 348). Indeed, the global and the national are often defined as opposites (Bowden, 2003;Myers, 2010).…”