Exploring the Complexities in Global Citizenship Education

Hard Spaces, Methodologies, and Ethics

Lauren Ila Misiaszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351719193
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

With a focus on the Global South, this book argues that awareness and discussion of the politics of equity and inclusion in global citizenship education (GCE) research are essential to the future of nuanced and effective research in this area.

The book explores the notion of heavily regulated hard spaces to examine areas of institutional blindness and reflects on ways to negotiate the issue of sensitivity in an institutional context, exploring how one's sensitivity relates to pedagogy and ethics. Through this in-depth metadiscussion of GCE research, the book provides a complex portrait of unique challenges in this domain and explores the nuanced experience of navigating temporal intersections of the global, the citizen, and education in geographically and thematically obstacled spaces.

This book will be of great interest to researchers, policymakers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of global education, comparative education, and educational policy.

1 An Introduction Label

Blending New Colors—Enriching the Canvases of Global Citizenship Education

Lauren Ila Misiaszek

A world of colors on the palette remaining … wandering … on canvases still emerging.

—(Attributed to Russian painter and art theorist, Wassily Kandinsky [date unknown])

I live in a place in the world—China—that heightens my global experience with obstacles—material, mental, and emotional. These firewalls are indeed the perfect starting point and focus of this book. Writing about Global Citizenship Education (GCE)¹ from China is itself an exercise in global citizenship, or a lack thereof. To write this chapter, I must go around censors. I turn on a Virtual Proxy Network (VPN) tool that allows me to use censored sites on the internet. But since the VPN is quite overloaded, Google picks up on the overload of internet traffic, demanding proof that I’m not a robot. I select “all of the boxes with traffic lights.” After playing a few rounds of gate-keeping games, I finally get in. Now I can use the far-superior online university libraries of institutions with more resources to globally valued information and—very slowly—download the references I need.

I have many privileges and advantages within my global economic, social, and cultural capital: money for electricity, internet, an up-to-date laptop, and the best VPN; a foreign credit card required to buy a VPN in the first place; access to other university libraries; an understanding about how to quickly navigate these websites when they are working; time and space to navigate them. Still, small, mundane but noticeable embodied feelings of doubt, frustration, fatigue, imposter syndrome, and indebtedness often bubble up, “The position of indebtedness is the position of gratitude (Hochschild, 2003): the other must be grateful for being saved or being brought into civil society” (Ahmed, 2004). I dig up this free sample of Ahmed’s book on Google Books, presented to us freeloaders without page numbers, seemingly as a plagiarism deterrent.

Firewalls and obstacles to the global flow of information and ideas provoked me to ask the central question of the book: How can one be a teacher, learner and researcher about global citizenship in “hard spaces” in the Global South?

While the term “hard spaces” will be developed by the authors of this book, I initially defined it as:

contexts that have been defined by multiple outside international actors and perhaps internally as well, as facing unique challenges to conducting GCE work; this may be because they are heavily surveilled and regulated spaces, because of political in/stability or another reason.

This is not to say that surveillance does not exist outside the Global South or that it exists in all spaces in the Global South, but the focus will be on this intersection of hard spaces and the Global South. Yet, to various degrees, all spaces in which we are trying to do GCE work can be considered hard; thus, another consideration for this book is a focus on the authors’ reflections on any sort of taken-for-granted methodological or ethical “hardness” of their work. I came to thinking about the idea of GCE work in “the shadows” through six years of teaching a core PhD course entitled Comparative Education Research Methodologies for international students in China. During this time, I have not seen a book that confronts, responds to, and/or resonates with the realities of my students’ and my research contexts, nor responds to how they can do work on GCE in those contexts. Hardly a week passes without a new vignette from one of us about ethical and methodological challenges in these settings.

In real time, GCE work in these settings is full of exasperating and mundane starts and stops, waiting periods, and back-tracking. As highlighted by a CNN article that came out as this book was going to press, Chinese censorship tactics are spreading and becoming a global model (Griffiths, 2019). In our “nervous present,” a term Chang (2014) uses in his Queering Citizenship exhibition curator’s notes, obstacled spaces won’t be going away and will instead certainly intensify in some ways—like these censorship tactics. Thus, learning to navigate these temporal intersections of the global, the citizen, and education in obstacled spaces—geographic, thematic—is worth examining.

Presenting a Palette

For those of us creating a “canvas,” to draw on the epigraph, of GCE work in hard spaces, I propose a “palette”—a loose framework—on which to mix different “colors of paint”—methodological and ethical priorities. The framework is considered “loose” because, as there are myriad ways to mix these colors, so are there myriad ways to navigate this work. The colors take the form of guiding concepts as well as critical questions, presented in quick and uneven brush strokes. Instead of hiding from the fact that I have more questions than answers, I have chosen to use bullet points to highlight questions throughout this chapter to encourage the reader to think along with me, inspired by “think piece” writing methodologies (Burke & Crozier, 2013). We can blend these colors together to enrich the canvases of global GCE discourses, such as that of UNESCO, which can feel like inaccessible art. The chapters in this book are an “exhibition” of these “emerging” canvases (Kandinsky, date unknown).

While these colors have emerged from my thinking about GCE, I don’t just do work in global citizenship. I see this as a reality for most people working in the field; it is also a strength in terms of the perspective interdisciplinary work gives us. Indeed, this discussion has larger social science applications beyond global citizenship. This is because it is hard to find a current topic that doesn’t touch on at least one of Torres’s characteristics of GCE (see first endnote). Thus, while a GCE project is one “medium” to be created from this palette, the palette can also be applied to other “mediums.”

Mixing in the Humanities

To confront the firewalls that I encounter in a medium as dauntingly saturated as GCE, I turn first to work in the humanities (and their intersections with the social sciences), considering that “fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination” (Winterson, 2011). The reality of doing GCE work in hard spaces often, in my view, ruptures our imaginings of what else might be possible as we try so hard to “paint within the lines” for our work to be considered legitimate.

I often refer to a New Yorker piece on writer, professor, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow Maggie Nelson, known for her ground-breaking autotheory, “autobiographical writing that exceeds the boundaries of the personal” (Nelson, 2015). The author of the piece, Hilton Als, notes about Nelson’s experience with her graduate professor, the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, that:

Koestenbaum’s work and guidance released Nelson from certain internalized academic expectations. She said, “I remember when I first met Wayne he told me, ‘Don’t get bogged down by the heavyweights.’ ” It sounds so simple, but it was very freeing advice. A sense of permission.

(Als, 2016)

In the same regard, I read Nelson alongside the work of Chilean poet and artist collective Tribu No’s “No Manifesto” (Vicuña, 1967, my emphasis), whose declaration has autotheoretical characteristics:

We undermine reality from within, which is why we are subversive and loving. Furthermore, we are so minor and unknown as to delight in our freedom… .

Have no fear. Our works will take years to manifest. We are not playing around. The interior of the seed is soft.

IT is known only by living IT. Whatever IT is.

IT is yet to be discovered.

These pieces leave me asking,

• What does IT look like for our work in the field?
• Can we explore GCE, engaging with, but without “get[ting] bogged down by the heavyweights”—whatever “heavyweights” might mean?

There is already a symphony of important intersectional critiques of GCE—see for example Abdi and Shultz (2008), Torres (2017), Abdi, Shultz, and Pillay (2015), de Oliveira Andreotti, Souza, and de Menezes (2012), Richardson and Blades (2006), de Oliveira Andreotti (2011), Misiaszek (2018a). Thus,

• What is left to be said? This is especially true since most of the authors of this book are emerging scholar-activist-practitioners—“so minor and unknown as to delight in our freedom.” Indeed, “our works will take years to manifest … the interior of the seed is soft.”
• What “critical conjunctures” can we capture in this moment, some of us not principally focused on GCE? This is a term often employed by this series editor, Carlos Alberto Torres, in his discussions with me about my own work ( Jones, 2012) to discuss the way multiple events come together at a specific moment in time.
• How might these conjunctures be autotheoretical ?

I argue that much of our work and research in GCE may benefit from an encounter with these humanities-based questions.

Blended Brush Strokes

As we seek new spaces to paint outside the lines that are often so constraining, my eye is drawn to other bright, blended colors:

• Aporia–This is a project concerned with “the in-between space of any knowing,” aporia (from Greek aporos [impassable]), and “stuck places” (Lather, 2002, p. 189).
• Guerrilla—It is a look at “guerrilla,” in the “impromptu,” “without authorization” sense, “immediate”—(“we are on the ground trying to do this, what do we do?”) “responsive” GCE for stuck, aporetic spaces.
• Small culture—Analysis rooted in the micro-level, in the “small culture” (Holliday, 1999, p. 237) nature of the spaces “rather than representing them as evidential of national ‘large culture’ (Holliday, 1999, p. 237) practices” (Hett & Hett, 2013, p. 498). These are opaque, ambiguous “liminal” contexts that “elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (Turner (1969) in Haywood and Mac an Ghaill [2012, p. 588]).

The Existing Canvas

Bearing these colors in mind, I consider the existing canvas of GCE, asking,

• What are the liminalities of the research on the UNESCO-emphasized GCE cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavior learning outcomes (UNESCO, 2015, 2014)?

To unpack this a bit, consider one of the two key socio-emotional learning outcomes, “learners experience a sense of belonging to a common humanity, sharing values and responsibilities, based on human rights” (UNESCO, 2015, p. 22):

• How should the researcher navigate this learning outcome in a place where this is not a taken-for-granted base/starting point?
• In a place where difference is not openly discussed, how should they navigate the socio-emotional learner attribute, to “develo[p] an understanding of difference and diversity (for example, culture, language, gender, sexuality, religion), of how beliefs and values influence people’s views about those who are different, and of the reasons for, and impact of, inequality and discrimination”?
• What should the researcher make of the fact that a search of the term political sensitivity, for example, yielded no results on the UNESCO Clearinghouse on GCE (https://gcedclearinghouse.org/)?
• Beyond international pressure, can there be new ways to more “authentically” come to GCE from within these spaces instead of just doing lip service to these targets? Instead of being a self-fulfilling prophecy of non-authentic engagement? How might this lip service “rupture” our imagination?
  • How can these “new ways” support more ethical GCE, if ethics are understood to be more than “just a voyeuristic tool to describe our pathologies” (Smith, 2016)?

I argue that the UNESCO site’s undoubtedly and purposefully aspirational learning outcomes leave much in doubt for researchers in many hard spaces—including, to ground it geographically—while working in many UNESCO partner countries. Consider Sarah Ahmed’s idea that emotions work to shape the “surfaces” of individual and collective bodies (2004, p. 1). In the context of the doubt caused by these aspirational learning outcomes, I would ask,

• What do hegemonic GCE discourses (including the performativity of these discourses) do to actors in these contexts, including to the authors in the book?

Considering issues of equity in GCE, it is worth considering “sensitive” issues of emotionality of scholars working from the Global South, such as resentment towards these “international” learning outcomes and those “objects of resentment” who benefit from their implementation.

Landscapes of Sensitivity

Sensitivity is a problematic concept, understood in practice to mean many different things—meanings that are often not understood by or visible to students, making teaching around ethics highly challenging, especially in hard spaces. A concrete institutional example of this is that I face the challenge of teaching students how to negotiate a system in which there are no ethics review processes in our context and often in their country of research. Moreover, ethics review processes are harder for students to under...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series Editor Foreword: Between Hard Spaces and Metaphors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Introduction Label: Blending New Colors—Enriching the Canvases of Global Citizenship Education
• 2 “Dancing in Chains”: Challenges for Practitioners in Citizenship Education and Citizenship Research in China
• 3 Notes on Global Reading: Critical Cultural Traversals, Transactions and Transformations
• 4 Politics of Emotions in Tanzania: Analyzing Global Citizenship Education Through Secular and Religious Lenses
• 5 Media, Youth, and Global Citizenship: The Challenges of Identity Construction in the Age of Global Media Capitalism
• 6 Expectations, Challenges and the Struggle to Fit In: Exploring the Experiences of Highly Educated Eritrean Migrants in the United Kingdom
• 7 Global Citizenship Education: A Method for Finding in Translation
• 8 The Past, Present and Future State of Citizenship Education in Zimbabwe
• 9 Negotiating the Global and National in Citizenship Education: Historical Legacies and Its Complicated Neighbor in South Korea
• 10 Critically Countering Appropriations of Global Citizenship Education in the Indian Context: Hard, Gated and Unmentionable
• Index