Cultivating global citizens: planting new seeds or pruning the perennials? Looking for the citizen-subject in global citizenship education theory

This paper engages with a selection of scholarly writing in English that was published in the last decade and written from particular liberal democratic contexts (predominantly the UK, the USA, and Canada). The literature diagnoses the need for a more complex theory of citizenship education and theorises schooling for citizenship in a global orientation. The analysis calls for more explicit attention to the assumptions about the citizen subject student, the ‘who’ of global citizenship education (GCE). Overall, the findings suggest the assumed subject of GCE pedagogy is the autonomous and European citizen of the liberal nation-state who is seen as normative in a mainstream identification as citizen and who must work to encourage a liberal democratic notion of justice on a global scale by ‘expanding’ or ‘extending’ or ‘adding’ their sense of responsibility and obligation to others linearly through the local to national to global community. Thus, this theoretical work contributes a more complex notion of the citizen-subject to accommodate more diversity and to begin to recognise unequal power relations. Ultimately, however, the conceptualisation of global citizen education assumes a particular normative national citizen, and this assumption must be probed and made more explicit

Conflations, possibilities, and foreclosures: Global citizenship education in a multicultural context

© 2015 the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. This paper presents a critical framework applied to findings from a critical discourse analysis of curriculum and lesson plans in Alberta to examine the assumption that Canada is an ideal place for global citizenship education. The analysis draws on a framework that presents a critique of modernity to recognize a conflation within calls for new approaches to educating citizens for the twenty-first century. A main finding is that although the Alberta curriculum reflects important potential for promoting a critical approach, a conflation of different versions of liberalism often results in a false sense of multiple perspectives and a foreclosure of potential. The paper argues for a critical approach to global citizenship education that engages with the tensions inherent to issues of diversity rather than stepping over or reducing them to theoretically and conceptually vague ideas of universalism and consensus

Implications for equity and diversity of increasing international student numbers in European universities: Policies and practice in four national contexts

This paper examines the main rationales for and possible implications of the policy of increasing international student numbers in higher education (HE). Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we map key themes emerging from two sets of data—university strategy documents and interviews with staff—collected at eight universities in four national contexts in Europe as a part of a larger project focused on ethical internationalism in HE. In our analysis of the data, we apply social cartographic mapping to consider overlapping, competing and absent discourses related to the push to increase international student numbers by using a heuristic developed in the larger project. We found the imperative to increase international student numbers to be largely driven by economic rationales across different national contexts, reflective of a corporatization trend. Where more civic rationales are presented, these discourses are ultimately framed and mediated by neoliberalism. The findings contribute insight into the complicated discursive terrain of internationalising HE. The mapping makes visible what can be taken for granted or is left unexamined. It serves as a jumping-off point for reflection on the policy, practice and research of internationalisation in HE, promoting the formulation of key questions around the assumed benefits and ethics of internationalisation

Youth voices on global citizenship: Deliberating across Canada in an online invited space

This article examines the processes of youth engagement in an ‘invited space’ for Canadian secondary school students. The organizers created a participatory citizenship education space in which Canadian students discussed their views and visions and developed their policy position on global citizenship and global citizenship education. The content and process of The National Youth White Paper on Global Citizenship (2015) demonstrated that youth have important policy knowledge and understand they live in a globalized world that includes unacceptable inequalities and oppressions. They also understand that, through acts of citizenship, these conditions can be changed. The article discusses how students were engaged in developing public opinion and working in the public sphere while developing the policy paper on the topic of global citizenship

Ethical internationalisation in higher education: interfaces with international development and sustainability

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Abstract: This analysis is situated within a larger project focusing on ethics and internationalisation in higher education. Internationalisation is occurring at a fast pace and encompasses overlapping and contradictory aims largely framed by market imperatives. At the same time, institutions of higher education increasingly promote sustainability. We use a framework informed by decolonial theories to map different orientations of internationalism at the interface of sustainability and international development in the context of neoliberalism. To examine these interfaces we offer a social cartography that locates intersections of neoliberal, liberal, and critical discourses within an internally contested but enduring modern/colonial imaginary. We demonstrate the generative potential of the social cartography by drawing on examples from strategy documents relating to internationalisation from universities in Canada, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK

Global Citizenship Education: A Critical Introduction to Key Concepts and Debates

Global Citizenship Education explores key ideas and issues within this field, placing them firmly within local, national and global dimensions. Including examples and case studies from across the world, the authors draw on ideas, experiences and histories within and beyond 'the West' to contribute to multifaceted perspectives on global citizenship education

At what time does a quantum experiment have a result?

This paper provides a general method for defining a generalized quantum observable (or POVM) that supplies properly normalized conditional probabilities for the time of occurrence (i.e., of detection). This method treats the time of occurrence as a probabilistic variable whose value is to be determined by experiment and predicted by the Born rule. This avoids the problematic assumption that a question about the time at which an event occurs must be answered through instantaneous measurements of a projector by an observer, common to both Rovelli (1998) and Oppenheim et al. (2000). I also address the interpretation of experiments purporting to demonstrate the quantum Zeno effect, used by Oppenheim et al. (2000) to justify an inherent uncertainty for measurements of times.Comment: To appear in proceedings of 2015 ETH Zurich Workshop on Time in Physic

Towards a Critical Global Citizenship?: A Comparative Analysis of GC Education Discourses in Scotland and Alberta

Global citizenship has increasingly become common parlance in education curricula internationally. Yet, it can be argued that in many instances, especially in official curriculum documents, Global Citizenship Education (GCE) tends to ignore critical engagement with ethics and complexity that inform global inequities worldwide, and often fails to achieve the self-reflective political consciousness called forth by a critical GCE. In this paper, we compare conceptualizations of GCE in the Alberta Social Studies curriculum, Canada, and in the Scottish national curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence. We consider the extent to which these documents and attending discourses open up critical discursive spaces for complex, ethical understandings and calls to action related to global injustices and political responsibilities, or foreclose important opportunities

Pedagogies Of Agonistic Democracy And Global Citizenship Education

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities of agonistic educational practices as a way to educate a critical global citizenry. This paper is based on empirical work conducted in the UK involving primary, undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and researchers. We invited these groups to an interactive workshop to discuss global citizenship. In devising the workshop, we drew on the work of Ruitenberg (2009) and her application of Mouffe (1999) in attempting to promote an agonistic approach to democratic education. Activities aimed at foregrounding conflict and destabilising consensus. In this paper, we critically reflect on the workshops and consider pedagogical contributions to a critical approach to global citizenship

Agonistic Controversial’ Issues As A Pedagogy For Global Citizenship Education

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities of using ‘agonistic’ engagement with controversial issues as a pedagogy for global citizenship education. Educating for Global Citizenship (EfGC) has been on the educational agenda since the turn of the 21st century. Internationally, global citizenship education is specifically targeted in the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO, 2015). Some countries have been relatively resistant to this global orientated approach to citizenship education. In USA, for instance, the dominant nationalist approach has not yet been replaced for a model that consider the changing nature of citizenship in the context of globalization (Myers, 2006). But other territories (e.g. Colombia, Hong Kong) have explicitly included EfGC in the national curriculum (see Davies et al., 2017. In England, where this research took place, EfGC is not explicitly mentioned in the national curriculum, but it has driven policy and practice (Marshall, 2009, 2011). Two key agendas are emphasized: a) preparing students with knowledge and skills to be competitive in the global market, and b) fostering students’ values, particularly empathy and an orientation towards social justice. However, these two approaches are likely to undermine the roots underlying ‘global’ inequalities (Marshall, 2011). To overcome this challenge, a significant amount of scholarship has promoted a “critical” approach to EfGC which explicitly aims to expose and challenge power relations (e.g., Andreotti, 2006; Lapayese, 2003; al. et au., 2016). Within this later framework, this project aims to engage (rather than ignore) with discussions of power and conflict. Our question is, is ‘agonistic’ controversial issues a potential pedagogical approach for critical EfGC? The paper draws upon empirical data collected during and after a workshop conducted in an English university. The workshop involved undergraduate and postgraduate education students, primary students, researchers and practitioners interested in global citizenship (44 participants). In the workshop, participants were presented with controversial questions related to global citizenship. Participants were required to debate (but not to reach consensus) on these controversies. Data was collected during the workshop activity via field notes and afterwards via diaries and comments written by the participants. The objective was to examine the possibilities of this approach for democratic citizenship in education. In this paper, we first examine the theoretical and pedagogical grounds of our ‘agonistic’ approach to controversial issues. We then present the pedagogical and research method, followed by some preliminary findings and a discussion in scholarly significance