Introduction: Educating for Human Rights and Social Justice

Do the conditions in Chinese secondary school education imply a need for global citizenship education? An exploration of six secondary schools in Jiangsu

“…Transferring a less developed concept such as GCE across contexts is substantiated by relevant educational functions, evidenced by both successful and ineffective cases, in the empirical settings. The process of operationalising GCE, compressing the highly abstract idea into implementation with targeted educational functions, is widely seen across different countries (Abdi 2008;Banks 2008;Ho 2009;McKinney 2008;Niens and Reilly 2012;Print 2015;Tarozzi and Torres 2016;Zhou 2011). The review of the literature revealed several educational functions of GCE, for example, extending civic education by offering a global perspective (Davies 2006;Print 2015; UNESCO Asia-Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding 2019), assisting immigration integration (Banks 2008;Tarozzi and Torres 2016;Zhou 2011), solving religious conflicts (McKinney 2008;Niens and Reilly 2012), and resolving historical issues (Abdi 2008;Ho 2009).…”

“…On one hand, in regions where the local culture is marginalised, a regionalised identity is needed to maintain the heterogeneity of many marginalised local cultures (Koh 2007;Law 2002;Thaman 2009). This is applicable to sub-Saharan Africa, where GCE is understood as an approach for empowering people in an anti-oppressive perspective to resolve the influence of the de-citizenising scheme during the colonial period (Abdi 2008). It has been shown that cases where the heterogeneity in regional identity is missing usually encounter difficulties in achieving the desired effects.…”