Citizenship Teaching & Learning - Philosophical, Ethical and Pedagogical Visions of Global Citizenship Education: Critical Perspectives from International Educators, Jun 2023

Global citizenship education (GCE) as a global social justice practice centres on a pedagogy that is responsive to the needs of learners and provides for the reimagining of an educator’s role, and the learner/educator relationship. While the literature on GCE emerged from a western perspective and tended to ignore gender, through gendered GCE, the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, social class and gender reveals the complexity of the influence of these factors and a need for action. This article presents critical pedagogy (CP) as an approach for learner-centred education that activates a GCE process for learners to be co-designers of their learning experience. The defining principles of CP, along with the qualities of an educator within a critical pedagogical practice will feature the tandem relationship of educator and learner. The results are an emerging process of dynamic self-awareness, cultivating a questioning mind and empowering praxis. Disrupting the understanding of leadership, agency and power allows for the emergence of an empowering approach to one’s identity as a leader and social change agent. This provides a new perspective for positioning women’s leadership and power within GCE. This case study reveals that when students connect to a palpable sense of agency, they become learners that know too much to revert to passive receptacles of information. New opportunities await in the development of leadership, social change and GCE when learners bear witness to lived experiences through a critical lens.

This article examines how senior educators (n = 5) located in Japan perceive global citizenship education (GCE) as a reflexive dialogic pedagogy in the university undergraduate course ‘Dialogues on Global Citizenship Education’. Reflexive dialogue is a form of guided and interactive introspection by which educators encourage learners to speak about their needs and values as viewed interactively through the prism of the topics discussed with their peers. It encompasses educators supporting learners by encouraging them to critically examine the assumptions underlying their actions and the impact of those actions (praxis). It fosters students’ ability to examine systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against these systems (critical consciousness). From this perspective, the GCE course presented the educators with an opportunity to engage learners in reflexive dialogue in relation to the most important social issues of our time (e.g. climate change, COVID-19, refugee crisis, immigration, gender inequality, civil rights, racial discrimination). Data were collected by means of questionnaires and responsive interviews with the educators co-teaching the course, then analysed with the use of grounded theory and the constant comparative method. The educators expressed the opinion that the type of reflexive dialogic GCE developed in the course (1) fostered students’ conviction in common values, (2) developed students’ intellectual humility, (3) nurtured students’ appreciation of ‘Otherness’, (4) advanced students’ multiple perspectives and (5) encouraged students’ understanding of the complex dynamics related to immigration. Based on the findings, this article concludes by making a proposal for a reflexive dialogic GCE framework informed by the values and knowledge of Freirean critical pedagogy ingrained in praxis and students’ critical consciousness development to implement principles of GCE in Japanese and international universities.

Chartered accountant educators and accounting students at a historically disadvantaged institution (HDI) in South Africa explored concepts of responsible decision-making and leadership, social justice and the effect of decisions on local and global communities and the environment within the business context. The workshop was grounded on the global, focusing on sustainable human and planetary well-being and the local, centring on the notion of ubuntu. Specifically, this workshop was framed in line with the notion of glo-ubuntu as an extension of global citizenship education (GCE). The workshop’s purpose was to create a space for students to engage with the consequences of business leaders’ decisions critically. This was to be achieved by drawing on their embodied knowledge and nurturing, as future business leaders, social awareness of the need for decisions that are just – towards social cohesion, restorative justice and planetary well-being through sustainable businesses.

One of the authentic and relevant critiques of global citizenship education (GCE) is that its key concepts are dominantly underpinned by western ideals, values and norms. Seemingly, the current framing of GCE gives marginal recognition to cultural situatedness and perspectives from the non-western world, particularly Africa. Consequently, GCE is perceived to be an elitist movement whose overt objective is to entrench western-centric epistemological hegemony. Deploying decolonization of higher as a theoretical framework, we advance ubuntu as an expansion of GCE. Ubuntu features of human interdependence and dignity can reinforce the seemingly abstract notion of a common humanity as espoused in GCE. While we are aware of growing scholarly criticism against GCE, we seek to argue that GCE needs to be informed by a contextualized paradigm underscored by a notion of ubuntu.

In this article, I (a) register ambiguities of the ‘global’ and of ‘vision’ to indicate the complex relationship of global citizenship education (GCE) with the contemporary world. After setting this stage for GCE, I (b) argue that the current reduction of GCE normativity to social justice may ultimately work at cross-purposes with its vision of enlarged visibility of injustices around the globe. The hegemony of the social perspective on justice limits the visual horizon of the curious eye/I. Because uncomfortable questions are central to vision as dream and sight I introduce to GCE the theme of a politicized curiosity about various faces of (in)justice. I (c) conclude that, against the single-focused, social-justice perspective, GCE requires a more stereoscopic vision that better illuminates the many faces of justice in their synergies and tensions.

This article presents a remarkable conversation on critical global citizenship education (GCE) between Mark Olssen, emeritus professor of political theory and higher education policy in the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey, and Emiliano Bosio, guest-editor of Citizenship Teaching & Learning. In developing the concept for this dialogue, we thought it necessary to frame GCE within a critical perspective that examines the political, economic, ideological and cultural conditions of super-complex societies, particularly in relation to notions of neo-liberal globalization and global justice. Olssen’s copious work has complemented postmodern philosophy by drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and it has brought him high regard in Europe, the United Kingdom and worldwide; his insights, perspectives, concerns and outlooks bring to the centre of international educational debates on critical GCE relevant thoughts through which we can better understand the complex roots and history of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism particularly in relation to notions of democracy, equity, ethics and social responsibility.

Review of: Conversations on Global Citizenship Education: Perspectives on Research, Teaching, and Learning in Higher Education, Emiliano Bosio (Ed.) (2021)

New York: Routledge, 216 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-36774-056-6, p/bk, £36.99