Context and curriculum in two global cities: A study of discourses of citizenship in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

This qualitative, comparative case study examined global civic education (GCE) in the Asian global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. Guided by theories that position curriculum at the intersection of discourse, context, and personal meaning-making, we sought to describe the ways in which intentions for GCE reflect broader societal discourses of citizenship and how curricula allow students to tackle tensions surrounding national and global citizenship. We found that Singapore and Hong Kong have adopted depoliticized forms of citizenship as a means of inoculation against global ills. These types of citizenship are more nationalistic than global in nature; moral rather than political; and focused mainly on utilitarian goals to produce adaptable workers able to support national economic projects in the global economy. Although critical, transnational, and other emergent civic perspectives are apparent in both cities, the data yielded little evidence of curricular opportunities for students to become exposed to alternative discourses and reconcile discursive contradictions. The findings inform current literature by illuminating the nexus of local and global discursive practices, implicating the ability of curricula to accommodate both novel and established civic identities, and forwarding suggestions to bridge disconnections between theoretical and local curricular definitions of global citizenship.

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.…”

Intercultural citizenship in the (foreign) language classroom

“…However, it can be argued (e.g. Alviar-Martin & Baildon, 2016; Houghton, 2012; Osler 2015b) that citizenship and human rights, together with the values that tend to be associated with them such as democracy, freedom, equality, respect for diversity, and openness of mind, may be defined and interpreted differently across cultural, linguistic and religious contexts. This means that the use of a human rights framework in education can also be questioned.…”

“…Another challenge is the existence of a strong national and often nationalistic basis of schooling systems (Alviar-Martin & Baildon, 2016; Myers, 2016), which encourage loyalty first and foremost to the nation, rather than to humankind. In certain circumstances, schools not only fail to promote justice and peace but actually encourage suspicion of the other, ethnic superiority, hostility and violence.…”

Remapping citizenship: Relationships between education levels and ethnonational identities in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Liberia

“…What is surprising, however, is that the majority of respondents who attended graduate school equally value their ethnic and national identification. Ethnographic research on citizenship in other contexts reports that elites may be able to transcend the nation-state, holding more cosmopolitan notions of citizenship (Alviar-Martin and Baildon, 2016; Ong, 1999). Completers of graduate education in these contexts may or may not be considered economic or political elites; however, given that the rates of graduate school attendance are less than 5% in each country, these respondents are educational elites and may have studied outside of their country.…”