Exploring the Complexities in Global Citizenship Education

Civic education agendas: from popular education and nationalism to global efforts

“…However, the latter development also challenges the legitimacy of agendas that are articulated at a distance from local contexts. Students and teachers understandably may feel that international policies are not relevant to their local context, which gives rise to the importance of adapting and negotiating these to be locally relevant (Wiksten, 2019). Practices of civic education provide opportunities to bridge local experiences and understandings with global issues and topics.…”

“…The latter is recognized by the UN in efforts to collect data on equity and by a call for more disaggregated data on education -that is, data that recognizes a greater number of social categories (UIS, 2018, p. 73). Such efforts notwithstanding, it is important to recognize that decentralized policy decisions drawing on context-specific and locally relevant feedback, such as feedback from teachers -and other qualitative sources of information -are an important and necessary complement for developing locally relevant civic education policies and practices (Wiksten, 2019(Wiksten, , 2020. This is particularly the case in contexts where quantitative data is difficult to obtain owing to unstable societal conditions -such as circumstances with political violence, natural disasters, conflicts and low levels of administrative resources.…”

“…As an outcome of the bifurcation, civic education teachers and students alike may feel that broadly articulated agendas such as UNESCO's Global Citizenship Education agenda (Tawil, 2013) remain abstract and distant from local relevance and are as such not easy to engage with or to see as legitimate. Bridging civics education in a decentralized manner, so that Global Citizenship Education is translated to locally meaningful practices, is thus necessary for bridging a gap in the understandings of individual, local, regional and global civic issues (Wiksten, 2019(Wiksten, , 2020. This is the case not only for the Global Citizenship Education agenda but is a dynamic that will apply also for forthcoming efforts to articulate international policies for education, including efforts following the most recent UN agenda for education, namely the Futures of Education agenda (UNESCO, 2021).…”

Global Literacies Research Diversity: A Manifesto for Change

“…Certainly, literacy educational research journals such as JLR and RRQ are beginning to publish more articles offering sociocultural perspectives focused upon global issues, including global ethics and epistemologies, cosmopolitanism, transliteracies, bordercrossing, translanguaging, pluraversity, and global meaning-making (e.g., García & Kleifgen, 2020;Gutiérrez, 2008;Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014;Kim, 2016;Lam et al, 2012;Ndimande, 2018;Perry, 2021;Rizvi, 2009;Stornaiuolo et al, 2017;Tierney, 2018bTierney, , 2020Wandera, 2020). Therefore, optimistically, I would suggest that changes are looming; as a critical global advocate, I would posit that we are not there yet.…”