Global Citizenship Education

Everyday Transcendence

William Gaudelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138925946
• eBook ISBN: 9781317406334
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Global Citizenship Education addresses the intersection of globalization, education and programmatic efforts to prepare young people to live in a more interdependent, complex and fragile world. The book explores topics such as sustainability education, cultural diversity, and human rights education, offering critical insights into how these facets of GCE are interpreted around the world. The book also strives to give voice to student populations within historically marginalized communities, rather than focusing solely on the role of GCE in elite schools. Gaudelli blends theory and practice to provide both an overview of GCE as well as examining current efforts to develop more globally-conscious classrooms. Blending empirical research and practical illustrations, this important volume encourages educators to take seriously their own call to prepare young people to engage global challenges with a sense of urgency and helps chart a new direction for global learning that is increasingly expansive, dialogic and inclusive.

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GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP

We must foster global citizenship. Education is about more than literacy and numeracy. It is also about citizenry. Education must fully assume its essential role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful and tolerant societies.

(UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, September 26, 2012)

Global citizenship presents a certain amount of ambiguity given its aspirational qualities. No one is a global citizen in a legal sense and so the phrase can invoke uncertainty, disbelief and even disorientation. What is a global citizen, or global citizenship, exactly? Some consider the term offensive, as it suggests arrogance about the privilege that is often connoted by one who declares such membership. Others believe that it is urgent to act on this aspiration in developing educational programs and civil society to promote world-mindedness. Still others contend that global citizenship is indeed urgent, which requires a more measured response and greater patience. In the words of Bayo Akomolafe in his recent keynote to the DEEEP (Developing Europe’s Engagement with the Eradication of Global Poverty) world citizenship conference, referencing the words of his West African elders, “The time is urgent. Let us slow down” (November 19, 2014).

I want to briefly sketch some ideas about global citizenship, addressing some of the larger issues in the discourse taking shape today. I explore a variety of points that have been raised about global citizenship, from advocates and critics alike, as a way of setting the broad context for understanding what it means to educate for global citizenship. I surely will not address every issue, but I hope to give the reader a working understanding of the discursive terrain. The backgrounder offers a broad context for interpreting and understanding the local acts of education related to global citizenship that follow.

Ambiguity, or What is Global Citizenship After All?

I was engaged in guest teaching with colleagues in Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2004. After a 10-day stay in a small village near the campus with my family, we decided to rent a car and drive to Germany for the weekend. We had recently visited the overwhelming serenity of acre upon acre of soldiers’ graves, killed in the liberation of this region in 1944. As we left for Germany, I recall driving across the international border, which still had an immigration house, though completely vacant, left over from an earlier time. We talked about how incredible it was that this border, a center point of world conflict just 60 years prior, was hardly noticeable now. Did this brief moment point towards a larger trend, a citizenship or belonging beyond a strictly national one that was once so foundational to the 20th century and now rapidly disintegrating?

People have wrestled with what global citizenship means for quite some time, increasingly in the past two decades. These debates, though, have largely centered on the global aspects of the phrase and less on citizenship. I want to begin, however, with citizenship since this term is at least as problematic as the term global. Leaping ahead from the time of Diogenes, what it means to be a citizen in early modern Europe raises doubts about the solidity of citizenship as a concept. Europe’s transition from the feudal era prior to 1500 to the revolutionary period of 1770–1810 had much to do with reconfigurations of what it meant to belong somewhere and therefore to have rights and responsibilities in and to a particular place. In the old regime of Europe, one’s standing in a community was related to one’s descent or identifiable lineage such that the “law came with the person” (Fahrmeier, 2007, pp. 10–11). This principle helped preserve rank and social hierarchy thus maintaining an aristocracy throughout much of Europe during this period. Early modern states, such as France and Sweden, were relatively weak as compared to estates and provinces that collected taxes and provided some social services, not the least of which was protection. And, the primary purpose of revenue generation was not social services but rather to wage warfare. This was among the most violent three-century era in the history of Europe, from 1500 to 1800, due in part to the consolidation of power by sovereigns and the raising of armies to build, maintain and extend spheres of economic and political control.

The revolutionary period in France and the then-fledgling US generated a deeper sense of citizenship vis-à-vis the state while ironically excluding large segments of society from the category of citizen. In the former, a citizen was one who was a political actor, a conscripted soldier, or a passport holder, but in relation to the latter, these privileges were not available to women, ethnic minorities and the poor (Fahrmeier, 2007, p. 29). The divisions within citizenship became more pronounced throughout the 19th century for a number of reasons. The shift from agricultural to industrial economies in the West slowed demand for farm labor—comprising enslaved persons or indentured servants in North America, South America and the Caribbean—and generated demand for factory labor, especially in industrial centers. These changes caused the migration of previously conscripted labor to the industrial North in the latter half of the 19th century along with increased flows of immigrants leaving Ireland, Poland and Italy for industrial, urban centers elsewhere in pursuit of economic opportunity. National debates about immigration and citizenship were troubled by a rising discourse of scientific racism, a movement fueled in part by the publication of Charles Darwin’s (1909/1859) The Origin of Species. This era contributed to a widely held belief that genetic stock of “preferred races” contributed to national prowess. Though race-ability discourse ebbed considerably following the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust, eugenics remains a residue of significance in the West, particularly as espoused by right-wing identity groups angered by and anxious about demographic changes.

Citizenship in the post-World War II era thus shifted increasingly away from ethnic/racial identity and gravitated towards nation-states and the making of new, aggregate identities. The period 1950–2000 was perhaps the zenith of national power as previously colonized countries were granted independence, the Cold War created a dualistic environment (e.g. US or Soviet) for national alignment and nations increasingly and generally diminished legal constraints on granting citizenship. And with the expansion of national power, and subsequent growth of international relations, there was an expansion of projects aimed at protecting the social welfare of an increased number of citizens while expanding the duties and entitlements of citizenship to a widening circle of people. Problems of disenfranchisement persisted, however, throughout this era as they continue into the present. In the US, for example, 12 states may deny convicted felons the right to vote in elections, even after their prison sentences have been completed (Pro-Con.org, 2013). Or, the presence of undocumented residents in the US, now estimated above 11 million, continues to challenge what it means to be a citizen (Undocumented Immigrants in the US, 2013).

Turning to consider global in this compound phrase, it too inheres some of the uncertainty of citizenship. Global can be found periodically in the latter half of the 19th century, as a way of naming the growth of industrial capital and the expansion of international trade. It was and still is often used as a synonym of universal or worldwide conditions. An element of conjecture accompanies global as a way of articulating a representation of the world, a way of asserting that a condition exists similarly in multiple locales, rather than a unique circumstance all its own. Marshall McLuhan popularized the phrase global village in the 1960s as a way of expressing the relatively small size of the planet, the interconnectedness among people, while ironically connoting a degree of intimacy by invoking a tight-knit community (McLuhan, 1964, p. 34).

Global characterizes a diversity of phenomenon, from trade and commerce to environment and sustainability, from peace and human rights to cultural diversity and religious affiliations. Global could be used to describe any range of phenomena, including a marketing campaign, outbreak of a contagious disease, crop failure, financial portfolio, aesthetic sensitivity and architectural style. In all of these illustrations the common element is the conception of scale, that global has application elsewhere and around the world. But must it be applicable everywhere to be global or only somewhere else? Say, for example, there is a loss of habitat that is happening in a limited number of places around the world. Does that somewhat particularistic version of global connote the same as the always/everywhere term before? I would like to think that even the “few-case” scenario does since the value of global, in part, is the ability to understand through comparison to similar circumstances, which does not require that one look at many or every situation.

Taken together, global and citizenship, what can be made of this conglomerate phrase? Might it be that global citizenship is part of the logical progression for humanity, from living in small bands in our origins to living in increasingly larger and intersecting groups over time? If we consider the short trajectory of citizenship highlighted here, a few patterns emerge. Citizenship is a term, though Western in origin and arguably exclusive in application, increasingly used throughout the world to describe the relation of self-to-sovereign as well as the relationship one has to other citizens. Citizenship’s history illustrates a broad arc of moving from exclusion to expansion as its circle has tended to grow wider over time, though with significant challenges of exclusion remaining. Last, as suggested by the Netherlands–German border crossing, a tendency towards larger and larger political units is both characteristic of globalization and epitomized by the European Union’s push towards economic, political, legal and to some degree, social integration; but it is challenged as well, for example, by flows of migration from war-ravaged areas of North Africa and Central Asia.

The global citizenship as logical progression thesis may seem to make some sense but there are counterpoints that also need to be considered. As citizenship in nations has increased, there has been a weakening of people’s sense of affiliation to nations along a similar trajectory. Consider the rise of pan-Islamic identity demonstrated in the Arab Spring of 2011 or the subsequent rise of ISIS in 2015. One way to read these events is to argue that certain Muslims feel more affinity with fellow Muslims beyond their national boundaries than with those non-Muslims with whom they happen to share a national citizenship, say in Egypt or Syria. Centrifugal forces related to multiculturalism of the past three decades in the West, for example, take shape diversely and yet share a similar antagonism towards hegemonic national containers. Furthermore, global citizenship may be viewed as a way of ironically reinscribing the privilege of earlier applications of citizenship. As Fahrmeier (2007) offers,

An extreme projection of some present-day trends suggests a return to some pre-citizenship practices. At the very least, there are indications of the emergence of an international class (or estate?) of “high potentials” distinguished by wealth, common educational experiences, cultural codes and employment practices, who communicate in an international language (English) and who may have more in common with each other than with their fellow citizens.

(Fahrmeier, 2007, p. 232)

The increase of gated communities, quasi-public/private housing arrangements, may foreshadow a new mode of social organization that oddly resembles older versions.

Global citizenship might be read in a totalizing manner, meaning a person with rights and privileges as a citizen everywhere, or might be read as a person developing their identity as rooted in a particular community but with a sense of connection, responsibility and concern for people elsewhere. Again, it may not be global in the comprehensive sense of everywhere and anytime but rather in the particular situation that one is found. Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath in the northeastern US, for example, has drawn a closer link to engineers in the Netherlands who have tried to hold back the sea for nearly a century and are increasingly learning to mitigate rather than prevent inevitable flooding in such lowland areas of Earth (Kimmelman, 2013). The exchange of expertise and insights generated from such living conditions being shared between at least two locales around a public problem suggests a practice of collaboration, and perhaps an act of global citizenship.

Scale, or How Big Can a Civic Be?

The Greek city-state serves as a historical and etymological grounding point for citizenship, through the combination of polis and civitas (Dagger, 1997, p. 155). Aristotle and Plato both speculated about the issue of scale. Plato offered an exact figure, some 5,040 families, that would constitute a healthy polis; Aristotle, on the other hand, offered criteria of (1) self-sufficiency, and (2) knowledge of each other’s characters (Dagger, 1997, p. 156). The ancients could not envision communication technologies such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook that allow people to reach out to wider circles of others to share ideas and insights and, in so doing, permit knowledge of themselves to be known. Do these technologies make the scale of a civic unit limitless? It depends. We know that communication technologies do not necessarily lead to engaged public discourse; indeed, it may create the opposite as incidents of flaming, or public insults, are much more likely to happen in a-synchronous conversations than in face-to-face ones. While technologies offer platforms for dialog about substantive issues, it is difficult at this stage to imagine them having the replacement value of live, embodied speech. And yet without that, it is difficult to imagine a civic on such a scale as the planet—or even for that matter on the scale of a large urban center.

Distance itself does not seem to be the trouble, as citizens living in the US, for example, have a relatively strong sense of shared political identity despite the size of their civic. Approximately 6,000 miles, a quarter of the circumference of the Earth, separates the westernmost island of Hawaii from the easternmost coast of Maine, and yet it is politically singular. As Peter Singer (2002) notes, “geographical proximity is not in itself of any moral significance, but it may give us more opportunities to enter into relationships of friendship and mutually beneficial reciprocity” (p. 166). Or, to invert his argument, distance allows us to avoid witnessing the situations of others. Wing-Wah Law suggests that it is the lack of territorial symbolism, or that, “There are no commonly shared symbols to arouse people’s sense of belonging to the global society that are comparable to those associated with national identity, such as a flag, anthem, or emblem” (Law, 2004, p. 273), that creates a stance of disinterested bystander among those seemingly unaffected by a problem far away. While the lack of emotive symbols complicates the emergence of global citizenship, the trouble lies beneath these construed objects, pointing to the narratives they convey. Flags, anthems and emblems signify shared sacrifice and values. The lack of a mythos, or a story of shared origin and common experience however fictionalized such a story may be, undergirds these symbols. The “abstract universalism” of global citizenship has created a yawning gap of meaning, an insufficiency of connection such that most people prefer the tangible stories of ethnicity, religion or region to the somewhat utopic and futuristic pull of global citizenship (Castles & Davidson, 2000, p. 6).

Mobility bears on this conversation as well. Part of what has sparked discourse about global citizenship has been the increasing number of people who travel and work beyond national borders. The ease of intercontinental travel has increased dramatically since 1950 along with the proportionally decreasing costs of these excursions, making them available to those other than elites. Yet as people are more mobile, and often do not live for extended periods of time in the same community, they may be disinclined to feel a part of that community. The tension exists between a conception of civics that is rooted in embodiment, inhabiting particular places and feeling a sense of attachment to those places, and their development in tension with a disembodied, technologically connected and seemingly placeless type of global belonging. When combined in this manner it is difficult to imagine how something can be both global and civic since they have highly different meanings.

Facebook has become a sort of virtual community of enormous scale with nearly 1 billion users globally and 3.7 billion dollars in revenue, arguably a global civic space. People are able to communicate with a diverse community of associates, or friends, in ways that are simple, direct and easily accessible across the planet. And yet the sense of connection that people share when they like a photograph, watch a video or read a posted link is less intimate than talking over coffee, attending a public meeting or participating in a demonstration. As Stephen Marche (2012) cryptically offers, “We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.” Advocates of global citizenship therefore have to confront how scale may contravene efforts to build a community of the world, one that still breathes with life and fullness. Spaces such as Facebook, which are designed to keep people in touch but literally at a distance, are not sufficiently robust for what global citizenship might become. Rather, such media may also suggest its opposite, a dystopic digital wasteland filled with ephemeral images that are no more about connection than about simple appearances. The question of scale is not simply about “how big is too big” but more about what types of connectivity, listening and sharing do we imagine constitute a meaningful civic engagement?

Politics, or What are the Power Structures of Global Citizenship?

Globalization is typically understood as a powerful economic force, one brought on by the liberalization of financial markets in the latter half of the 20th century. In what William Tabb (2012) has called the era of global neoliberalism, major economic shifts identifiable in the past three decades include rapid increases in foreign direct investment, speculative transactions in international markets by a growing investment class, currency fluidity and the sale of derivatives, or a financial instrument based on the exchange of an asset (Tabb, 2012). The recent wave of debt crises in southern Europe and how each day’s news roiled and soothed financial markets around the world demonstrates how deeply interwoven the world economy has become. The economic dimensions of globalization represent an important piece of infrastructure as to how the world is connected, though they alone do not capture the breadth of what is taking place. Globalization is rightly associated with economics, specifically international finance, capital shifts and technology flows. But this “electronic herd,” or the rapid and intense flow of capital into and out of particular countries due to political circumstances there, moves quickly and voraciously around the planet with relatively little regard for what is left in its wake (Friedman, 2000).

While the economic aspects of globalization are largely the drivers of the changes we have witnessed and will continue to witness, the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Global Citizenship
• 2 Global Citizenship Education
• 3 Human Rights and Citizenship Education
• 4 Self, Society, and Others
• 5 Sustainability
• 6 Teacher Education
• 7 Insights for Practice and a Habit of Everyday Transcendence
• Appendix: Methodology
• References
• Index