Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Lynn Mario T. M. de Souza, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, Lynn Mario T. M. de Souza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415884969
• eBook ISBN: 9781136582387
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This volume bridges the gap between contemporary theoretical debates and educational policies and practices. It applies postcolonial theory as a framework of analysis that attempts to engage with and go beyond essentialism, ethno- and euro-centrisms through a critical examination of contemporary case studies and conceptual issues. From a transdisciplinary and post-colonial perspective, this book offers critiques of notions of development, progress, humanism, culture, representation, identity, and education. It also examines the implications of these critiques in terms of pedagogical approaches, social relations and possible future interventions.

Part I

Conceptual Analyses

Global Citizenship Education
and the Gifts and Limitations of
Postcolonial Theory

1 Questions for Global Citizenship
Education in the Context of the
‘New Imperialism’

For Whom, by Whom?

Karen Pashby

As is evident from international conferences and recent anthologies and journals,¹ the concept of global citizenship education (GCE) is emerging as a response to a sense of a need to encourage global interconnectedness and global responsibility through citizenship education. While there are divergent views, some common themes define GCE as an educational agenda. My understanding, based on a close reading of the related scholarly literature, is that GCE moves beyond an exclusively national perspective of world affairs and seeks to avoid a social-studies approach that tends to tokenize and exoticize foreign places and peoples. As an ideal, the concept of educating for global citizenship encourages students to adopt a critical understanding of globalization, to reflect on how they and their nations are implicated in local and global problems and to engage in intercultural perspectives (Pashby 2008, 2011). For the purpose of this chapter, I see these tenets as potentially contributing to a project of decolonization in that they work to promote social justice on a global level and work with a critical understanding of the history of global relations. It is significant to point out, however, that the bulk of the writings that theorize and propose GCE on which I draw are from England, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and this is important to contextualizing the way ‘the global’ and ‘citizenship education’ are imagined within this emerging field. Indeed, much critical work needs to be done to investigate how an agenda for GCE, while it could be identified as a postcolonial move, is still very much implicated in the colonial legacy of education. This chapter works through some key ideas central to a decolonizing project and examines what important critical questions they raise for GCE as an emergent theory and pedagogical approach in the current context of globalization.

I will outline some overarching rationales and premises of GCE. Then, in order to determine questions to be posed to an agenda for GCE from a framework of decolonization, I begin to frame a working understanding of imperialism and colonialism as they function in contemporary times. This leads to an overview of the legacy of colonialism in education and the articulation of new demands being placed on schooling given a critical understanding of the history of global relations. I draw heavily on the work of Tikly (2004), Smith (1999), Said (1994), Mohanty (1990) and Willinsky (1998) in identifying some of the challenges to a project of decolonizing and ‘relearning’ by examining political tensions inherent to such a pedagogy. The final section considers key questions arising from the discussion to which an agenda for GCE will have to respond.

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION: PREMISES AND RATIONALES

My own work theorizing and researching in the area of global citizenship education reflects and is shaped by my past and current experience as an educator. I have taught secondary History and English in northern Quebec and in suburban Brazil as well as in downtown multicultural Toronto. Currently I do occasional secondary-school teaching in Toronto and do instructional work in the inner-city cohort of the initial teacher education (BEd) program at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). The questions that I pose in this essay relate back to my own work theorizing and practicing global citizenship education (Pashby 2006, 2008, 2009, in press) and are in that sense self-reflective as well as directed at the wider community of scholars and educators working in this area. The scholarly literature on GCE is broad and encompasses a range (Barr 2005) from more liberalist and humanistic frameworks (e.g., Nussbaum 2002; Noddings 2004a) to more critical and social-transformation-oriented frameworks (e.g., Andreotti 2006; Shultz 2007; Richardson 2008; Pike 2008; Andreotti et al. 2010). In this section, I will map out some overarching concepts to loosely define what I mean by GCE in this chapter. This is by no means an exhaustive conceptualization and includes the political and educational spectrums within GCE-related theory. I intend this section to provide a reference point for GCE and to position my consideration of GCE in terms of the potential for contributing to a project of decolonizing education.

Scholars researching and theorizing a global approach to citizenship education recognize that urgent and troubling issues are global in scope: for example, poverty, global warming, AIDS, racism, wars (Nussbaum 2002a; Banks 2004a; Noddings 2004a; Richardson 2008; Ghosh 2008). Thus, there is a moral imperative for extending a notion of citizenship to those outside of our national borders (Noddings 2004a; Basile 2005). Through GCE approaches, students can gain a sense of agency and action that goes beyond charity and includes structural critiques of social issues (Ladson-Billings 2004; Davies 2006; Shultz 2007; Pike 2008). Pike (2008) theorizes that GCE “challenge[s] educators to acknowledge the ever-changing patterns of relationships among human communities, and between humans and their environments, and to help students explore the implications of such trends in terms of their rights and responsibilities, their allegiances and loyalties, and their opportunities for meaningful participation” (45–46). A main rationale for a global approach to citizenship education is the fact that educational materials are overwhelmingly Western-American-Global North-centric and emphasize neoliberal values of consumerism over critical democratic engagement while celebrating globalization from above (Talbert 2005; Pike 2008; Kachur 2008). At the same time, schooling is positioned as a central place for promoting social justice (Glass 2000; White 2005; Pike 2008, 2008a)² and for developing a global sense of community: “Schools are places where people learn inclusiveness, civil courage, and how to live in communities encompassing diverse relationships” (Abdi and Shultz 2008, 8–9). The concept of global citizenship recognizes that contemporary processes of globalization problematize homogenous notions of national citizenship. Increases in the mobility and movements of peoples who spend parts of their lives in different nation-states and who have multiple loyalties and commitments challenge previously taken-for-granted notions of the monolithic nation-state. Therefore, through global citizenship education, schooling can engage with contemporary complex experiences of citizenship and identity (Scott and Lawson 2002; Guilherme 2002; Osler and Starkey 2003; McIntosh 2004; Castles 2004; Banks 2004b, 2009; Davies 2006; Pike 2008). By overtly recognizing that there are multiple epistemological understandings of both the global context and local issues, GCE concepts and pedagogies can promote engagement with “the links between conflict and interpretations of culture” (Davies 2006) and an understanding of how different topics and disciplines of study are interrelated (Basile 2005). In this sense, GCE represents a possible space for creating new “legends” of the relationship between individual citizens and between certain groups of citizens and the world (Pike 2008a). Significantly, GCE aims to empower individuals to think differently and to reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their own cultures and contexts so that they can imagine different futures and take responsibility for their actions and decisions (Andreotti 2006).

WORKING TO DEFINE IMPERIALISM AND
COLONIALISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT

In order to examine how the theorization and practice of GCE might be implicated in a colonial project, it is necessary to set out a working definition of imperialism and colonialism. Said (1994) notes that at a basic understanding, imperialism refers to settlement on and control of a distant land possessed by and lived on by others. In this sense, he defines the relationship and distinction between imperialism and colonialism: “‘[I]mperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; ‘colonialism,’ which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory” (9). Similarly, Smith (1999) notes that historically speaking “[c]olonialism became imperialism’s outpost, the fort and the port of imperial outreach. . . . Colonialism was, in part, an image of imperialism, a particular realization of the imperial imagination” (23). Willinsky (1998) adds that ‘imperialism’ operates “as a loosely conceived historical phenomenon that covers a myriad of ventures directed at extending the dominion of Europe around the globe” (10). Therefore, in a historical understanding, imperialism is about dominating lands from afar, and colonization is ruling a foreign land on that land. Both concepts involve overt, direct measures as well as less obvious discursive modes of power that work at the level of ‘imagination’ to govern powerfully both on a level of physical and social institutions and on an epistemological level by enforcing a particular worldview.

Within the current global context, the term ‘new imperialism’ acknowledges the continued influence of more powerful nations on ‘distant land that is possessed by and lived on by others.’ Tikly (2004) argues that the contemporary global moment is marked by the emergence of a new form of Western imperialism. Although former ‘colonies’ are officially ‘independent,’ Tikly (2004) observes that within a discourse of development, so-called Second and Third World populations are incorporated into “a regime of global government” (173). In this sense, the ‘new imperialism’ speaks more to a subtle, ‘unofficial’ form of power and control than that of earlier imperialism, and ‘neocolonialism’ functions through a powerful discourse that gives former colonies official ‘sovereignty’ while they are in fact still dominated by Western nations. Thus Tikly (2004) identifies two strands of the new imperialism: (a) a new context of Western domination through a sense of transnational movement and the emergence of a global elite, and (b) a poststructural and culturalist turn in social studies through which new frameworks emerge to understand and analyze this ‘new imperialism.’ In raising some critical questions for an agenda for GCE, this chapter attempts to work through and with the tensions inherent to how the latter strand seeks to recognize and critique the first strand but is always at risk of further implicating the study of colonialism in the very Western domination a poststructural turn seeks to reject.

Any sort of pedagogy that seeks to promote social justice on a world scale, such as GCE, will have to be based on a strong understanding of and articulation of imperialism in order to locate its rationales and initiatives within the hegemonic global forces it seeks to critique and to transform. By evoking a notion of ‘citizenship education’ as a vehicle for social justice, as an educational agenda, GCE ties a notion of global community to state membership and thus to a history of imperial nations determining who does and does not belong. Citizenship is itself a contested concept,³ and GCE must do the difficult work of locating its own complicity within the colonial legacy of education.

THE COLONIAL LEGACY OF EDUCATION:
TOWARDS A RECOGNITION OF COMPLICITY

Those of us scholars and educators working on GCE-based pedagogy will have to be very conscious of the ways in which the concept of GCE is implicated in the colonial legacy of education. Since fostering intercultural perspectives is a central principle, it is important to consider just how GCE theory will talk about and through ‘difference.’ Willinsky (1998) speaks to the double bind of education in this regard. He explains how schooling extends the meaning of difference by developing the ability to identify what distinguishes ‘civilized’ from ‘primitive,’ ‘West’ from ‘East,’ and ‘first’ from ‘third’ worlds so that “[w]e are educated in what we take to be the true nature of difference” (1). Yet, he also notes that “if education can turn a studied distance between people into a fact of nature, education can also help us appreciate how that distance has been constructed to the disadvantage of so many people” (1–2). Said (1994) also speaks to what can be seen as a double gesture in the study of difference when he notes that awareness of the lines between cultures allows us to discriminate but also “enables us to see the extent to which cultures are humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote” (15).

The question of recognition amid difference is tied to the politics of diversity in schooling. Asad (2000) explains how in a European context a discourse of ‘inclusion’ creates conceptual and political tensions: “The idea of European identity, I say, is not merely a matter of how a more inclusive name can be made to claim loyalties that are attached to national or local ones. It concerns exclusions and the desire that those excluded recognize what is included in the name. It is a symptom of anxieties” (12). Defining a ‘global citizenship identity’ will also require an inclusion of multiple loyalties, and yet by being ‘global’ as opposed to ‘European’, the exclusion/inclusion dualism is not evident as presumably all inhabitants of the globe are included. Yet, citizenship is about loyalty and responsibility and infers a sense of common allegiances; therefore, the concept of global citizenship inherits the “anxieties” of citizenship. Indeed, the idea of citizenship is conceptualized within a matrix of inclusion, exclusion and loyalty. In the context of citizenship education, it is important to recognize how imperialistic discourses have constructed and continue to determine particular notions of identity within unequal power relations. Asad (2000) is concerned about how young people come to understand “the educational formation of worldly divisions that carry with them a profound sense of who belongs where. . . . Imperialism does not tell the whole of students’ stories, but it does figure in what they will learn of the world” (8). GCE is conceptually complicit in the imperial legacy of schooling and in the politics of recognition inherent to citizenship; yet, it also provides a conceptual space to renegotiate and make visible those tensions.

Willinsky (1998) provokes a consideration of how imperialism has divided and instructed notions of ‘belonging’ and “the part that schooling has long played in defining who belongs where” (244). Indeed, his work acts as a caution for those theorizing GCE and pushes for an acknowledgment of how current ideas of education have been influenced by and contained within an imperial framework. He points to the way that forces of imperialism historically worked to ‘possess’ the world through ‘displaying’ and ‘knowing’ colonized cultures and peoples who were ‘edified’ by a Western worldview. This process was then tied into a project of schooling that served both colonial states and colonized natives (19). Thus, he establishes the difficulty inherent to determining clear distinctions between the metaphorical and literal associations of imperialism and education (253). Willinsky (1998) raises some important questions for the motivations behind GCE when he writes, “The Western thirst for learning in that earlier era [of imperialism] was supported by, where it was not simply an extension of, the desire for colonial acquisition and political domination exercised by the European powers” (252–253). In what ways could GCE, in its (American, Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand) agenda for global awareness, be complicit with a ‘new imperialism’ that, without a careful interrogation of its good intentions, may actually reassert western domination?

A critical approach to schooling is an education for critical consciousness that works to overtly link a historical understanding of the configuration of social forms with the ways they work subjectively. Questions of the ‘who’ of global citizenship are paramount. Mohanty (1990) notes that “[the] issue of subjectivity represents a realization of the fact that who we are, how we act, what we think, and what stories we tell become more intelligible within an epistemological framework that begins by recognizing existing hegemonic histories” (185). Willinsky (1998) brings to light how a hidden curriculum has worked to colonize the processes of education. He observes that imperialism’s educational project lives on as an ‘unconscious aspect’ of education: “After all, the great colonial empires came to a reluctant end only during the years when I and the rest of the postwar generation were being schooled. It may take generations to realize all that lies buried in this body of knowledge as a way of knowing the world” (3). A significant aspect of this colonial imagination is a colonial nostalgic: “Beyond the economic and political legacy of the colonial era, the We...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Research in Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: (Towards) Global Citizenship Education ‘Otherwise’
• PART I Conceptual Analyses: Global Citizenship Education and the Gifts and Limitations of Postcolonial Theory
• 1 Questions for Global Citizenship Education in the Context of the ‘New Imperialism’: For Whom, by Whom?
• 2 Unsettling Cosmopolitanism: Global Citizenship and the Cultural Politics of Benevolence
• 3 Postcolonial Cosmopolitanisms: Towards a Global Citizenship Education Based on ‘Divisive Universalism’
• 4 Engaging the Global by Resituating the Local: (Dis)locating the Literate Global Subject and His View from Nowhere
• PART II Critiques of GCE Initiatives: Policies, Campaigns, Study Abroad and Volunteering Schemes
• 5 Entitled to the World: The Rhetoric of U.S. Global Citizenship Education and Study Abroad
• 6 How Does ‘Global Citizenship Education’ Construct Its Present? The Crisis of International Education
• 7 ‘I’m Here to Help’: Development Workers, the Politics of Benevolence and Critical Literacy
• 8 Making Poverty History in the Society of the Spectacle: Civil Society and Educated Politics
• 9 Recolonized Citizenships, Rhetorical Postcolonialities: Sub-Saharan Africa and the Prospects for Decolonized Ontologies and Subjectivities
• Youth Study Tour to Africa (poem)
• PART III Creating Postcolonial Spaces: Global Citizenship Education ‘Otherwise’
• 10 Beyond Paternalism: Global Education with Preservice Teachers as a Practice of Implication
• 11 Rerouting the Postcolonial University: Educating for Citizenship in Managed Times
• 12 Equivocal Knowing and Elusive Realities: Imagining Global Citizenship Otherwise
• Contributors
• Index