Global Citizenship Education and Scholars for Syria: A Case Study (original) (raw)
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In this article, we examine how educating for global citizenship has increasingly become a shared goal of educators and educational institutions interested in expanding their own and their students’ understanding of what it means to claim or to have global citizenship in the twenty-first century. While this trend may be considered a uniform response to urgent global issues and contexts, through document analysis of various policies and programs of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in North America, it is evident that global citizenship is far from a uniform idea and, in fact, is a much contested term. There is a general consensus, however, that higher education institutions have a role to play in preparing citizens who are informed and able to participate in our complex globalized and globalizing world. Post-secondary institutions join other social institutions in working toward understanding their role in addressing social, economic, and political issues of our times. As global citizenship educators grapple with and respond to the global unevenness of internationalization, the legacies of colonialism, and ideologies that support a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many, educators look to global citizenship education efforts to open educational spaces for working for a more just and peaceful world.
Global citizenship education (GCE) and human rights education (HRE) offer substantive contributions to civic education. Interconnections between the fields exist in curricula from intergovernmental organizations (UNESCO), non-governmental organizations (Oxfam Great Britain) and national ministries (Learning and Teaching Scotland). This essay explores how civic education curricula, learning outcomes, and teacher preparation can be developed to enhance the roles played by GCE and HRE in U. S. civic education. Analysis of the relationships between GCE and HRE yields these conclusions: (1) global citizenship education programs share a philosophy of cosmopolitanism, commitments to universal human rights norms, respect for cultural diversity and sustainable development, and issues-based curriculum designs; (2) a high degree of compatibility exists between GCE program goals and the goals of the values-awareness-socialization HRE model, and (3) this strong compatibility does not extend to the accountability-professional development or the activism-transformation models of HRE. Implementing GCE faces major obstacles, notably emphases on national identity in nation-state civic education, the potential incompatibility between national interests and cosmopolitan commitments in the study of global issues, and the low commitment to GCE or HRE in teacher preparation.
Integrating global citizenship in undergraduate education
2021
Globalization has created new demands on educational leaders within higher education to prepare students for an increasingly interconnected and global world. The Association of American Colleges and Universities (2007) identified the important role of colleges and universities in fostering global learning, particularly during the undergraduate years. Corresponding to this designation, colleges and universities have significantly increased their global experiential learning programs and stated goals of developing global citizens. However, ambiguity exists regarding how key stakeholders understand global citizenship and associated definitions, learning goals, and specifics in terms of how global experiences affect students' global citizen identities. Using an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) methodology, I investigated how key stakeholders at a private, research university perceived global citizenship and how they saw students' experiences as transformative in creating students as global citizens. My research
Prospects UNESCO-IBE, 2023
Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has garnered increasing attention over the past two decades as a means of enabling learners to develop an understanding of diverse global, national, and local issues. The conceptualization of GCE has evolved through scholarly discourse, encompassing theoretical perspectives ranging from neoliberal to critical orientations (Giroux & Bosio, 2021; Torres & Bosio, 2020). A widely adopted definition of GCE, put forth by UNESCO (2015, p. 15), describes it as the cultivation of “knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes that learners need to be able to contribute to a more inclusive, just, and peaceful world”. In the past two decades, numerous countries have begun implementing GCE in both primary and secondary schools as well as universities, aiming to cultivate globally aware students. These initiatives take various forms and can be implemented through formal national policies, local initiatives, or the initiatives of individual academics (Bosio, 2021a, 2021b). However, there is a paucity of research on how educators worldwide perceive GCE and integrate it into their curricula and classroom practices. This special issue of Prospects brings together theoretical and empirical perspectives from leading scholars in both the Global North and the Global South to discuss how they understand the values and knowledge associated with GCE, and how their pedagogical practices adapt accordingly. In an effort to move beyond Western-centric and neoliberal GCE conceptions, the special issue engages with a wide range of pedagogical and curricular responses to current societal challenges, including post‒Covid-19 pandemic, and delves into the implications of different envisioned futures, including democratic and progressive ones.
International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 2010
This article presents findings from a study of a Canadian university that has named 'global citizenship' as a key educational goal. Drawing on theories of globalization, deliberative democracy, and deliberative processes including discursive closure, this study examines the multiple demands made of 'global citizenship' in higher education and the subsequent educational projects that are designed to meet this educational goal. The research questioned whether discursive closure was being engaged to limit 'global citizenship' to a modernity project where, as the literature suggested, (neo) liberalism and universalism ultimately served to make the world the un-gated playground of the elite where they might work, play, and consume without national or local political and cultural restrictions. In contrast, we wondered whether these policy openings might also be reflections of shifts in practices toward justice, equity, and inclusion with considerations of the historical and cultural histories and legacies of international relations of colonialism and imperialism. Using deliberative dialogue as a data collection method, the researchers were able to surface educators' multiple understandings of global citizenship as well as possible discursive closure and/or emerging social justice in the courses, projects, and policies of this institution.
Education for Global Citizenship at Universities
Journal of Studies in International Education, 2016
This article explores how three different learning spaces could be appropriate for developing a sense of global citizenship among university students. We draw on an interview study conducted at the Universitat Politècnica of Valencia (UPV) between 2010 and 2012. The spaces analyzed were two electives devoted to international cooperation, a mobility program that took place mainly in Latin American countries and a student-led university group. We examined the three spaces in terms of expansion of capabilities and agency related to global citizenship and cosmopolitanism using a conceptual framework that synthesizes Nussbaum’s and Sen’s capability approach with Delanty’s critical cosmopolitanism to explore the limits and potentialities of those three spaces. Although the exploratory character of our study cannot allow us to generalize our findings, what we can affirm is each of these areas has the potentiality to enhance global citizenship but with nuances, differences, and complementar...
Humanity and our planet face a growing number of interconnected challenges and opportunities exacerbated by globalization(s), which demand new paradigms of teaching and learning. Despite criticism, global citizenship education (GCE) has been proffered as an attempt to assist policy makers and practitioners to address complex global challenges through education. Guided by questions of what the roles and responsibilities of universities are in addressing global problems and how teacher education programs should incorporate pedagogies of GCE, the author offers preliminary findings from a qualitative self-study on teaching GCE to undergraduates in Los Angeles, thereby filling a void in empirical research of teaching university GCE in the United States. Before exploring critical approaches to GCE, the author examines challenges of authoritarian education, neoliberal globalization and nationalist populism that GCE confronts. Moreover, the author illuminates pedagogical themes of critical GCE emerging from the research and considers models of critical GCE, highlighting why they deserve more attention throughout US universities, specifically within teacher education programs and schools/departments of education.
Global Citizenship Offers Better Solutions, International Educator
The humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border has developed in near simultaneity with more than a decade of assertions from higher education leaders that we in colleges and universities either should—or indeed already do—create global citizens. And it reveals just how empty our global citizenship leadership has been. Or it illuminates the extent to which many who use the term global citizen may actually mean globally competitive capitalists who excel across cultures. There is another way. More robust global citizenship thinking would continue the historic role U.S. institutions of higher education have played in the promotion and expansion of rights. Our engagement with the value of global citizenship—if we are to be the slightest bit serious about it—must be marked by ferocious theoretical rigor and the attendant effort to make ideals real.