Conversations on Global Citizenship Education

Perspectives on Research, Teaching, and Learning in Higher Education

Emiliano Bosio, Emiliano Bosio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Vergleichende Erziehungswissenschaft

This volume offers a remarkable collection of theoretically and practically grounded conversations with internationally recognized scholars, who share their perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in relation to university research, teaching, and learning.

Conversations on Global Citizenship Education brings together the narratives of a diverse array of educators who share their unique experiences of navigating GCE in the modern university. Conversations focus on why and how educators' theoretical and empirical perspectives on GCE are essential for achieving an all-embracing GCE curriculum which underpins global peace. Drawing on the Freirean concept of "conscientization", GCE is presented as an educational imperative to combat growing inequality, seeping nationalism, and post-truth politics.

This timely volume will be of interest to educators who are seeking to develop their theoretical understanding of GCE into teaching practice, researchers and students who are new to GCE and who seek dynamic starting points for their research, and general audience who are interested in learning more about the history, philosophy, and practice of GCE.

Part I

Critical Views in Global Citizenship Education

Critical Pedagogy, Otherwise/Postcoloniality, Conviviality, and Planetary Citizenship

1 Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship Education

Henry A. Giroux and Emiliano Bosio

1.1 Introduction

We live in problematic times. This is especially true for critical pedagogues who are faced with the task of advancing global citizenship education (GCE) in a time of rising right-wing populist governments, growing racism, and police brutality tragically exemplified by the killing of George Floyd in the United States. For the last 40 years, neoliberalism has waged a significant attack on the structure and role of public education. Under such circumstances, social bonds are being loosened, public goods are under siege and matters of collective responsibility are under attack by the market-driven forces of marketization and selfish individualism (Bosio & Torres, 2019; Giroux, 2020). Given the ongoing attack on democracy, the social contact and the welfare state, critical pedagogy can play an important role in reclaiming the public good and producing civic education, literacy, and GCE (Bosio, 2017; Bosio, 2019; Torres & Bosio, 2020a/b).

With the subsequent dialogue, we contemplate how GCE can progress and connect matters of theory and critique to pedagogical practices informed by critical pedagogy by making the most of civic valor as an approach to political challenges, allowing hope and politics to occupy a space defined by morals, values, and public actions that tackle the motion of everyday experience and the woes of social ills with the might of individual and collective opposition. We believe that drawing upon this philosophy can relaunch critical pedagogy and GCE as one unified force. This is a ‘re/vitalized’ pedagogical approach oriented towards social justice which aims to resist the oppressive neoliberalism that is taking over higher education environments (Bosio, 2020; Giroux, 2020).

1.2 Dialogue with Henry A. Giroux

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is the nexus between citizenship and global citizenship?

HENRY A. GIROUX: Citizenship invokes a notion of the social in which individuals have duties and responsibilities to others. A globalized notion of citizenship extends the concept of the social contract beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, invoking a broader notion of democracy in which the global becomes the space for reaffirming and exercising civic courage, social responsibility, politics, and compassion for the plight of others. Clearly, citizens’ obligations to the environment cannot be seen as merely a national problem. At the same time, there is a globalized notion of citizenship not just as a political issue of rights and entitlements but also as an ethical challenge to narrow the gap between the promise and the reality of a global democracy. It is also important to recognize that the idea of citizenship cannot be separated from the spaces in which citizenship is developed and nurtured.

This suggests that any struggle over a globalized and meaningful notion of citizenship that encourages debate and social responsibility must include fostering and developing democratic public spheres, such as schools, media, and other institutions in which critical civic pedagogies can be developed. The space of the pedagogical cannot be enacted fully without the civic institutions that support its ideas and practices. The notion of global citizenship suggests that politics must catch up with power, which today has removed itself from local and state control. New political structures, global institutions, and social movements that can reach and control the flows of uncontrolled power, particularly economic power, must develop. Real citizenship in the global sense means enabling people to have a say in the shaping of international laws governing trade, the environment, labor, criminal justice, and social protections. Citizenship as the essence of politics has to catch up with new social formations that the current political and social institutions of the nation-state cannot influence, contain, or control.

BOSIO: What are the attributes of the global citizen in your opinion?

GIROUX: Citizens for a global democracy need to be aware of the interrelated nature of all aspects of physical, spiritual, and cultural life as part of a broader political and moral project. First, this means having a deep-rooted understanding of the relational nature of global dependencies, whether we are talking about the ecosphere or the circuits of capital. Second, citizens need to be multiliterate in ways that not only allow them access to new information and media-based technologies but also enable them to be border-crossers capable of engaging, learning from, understanding, and being tolerant of and responsible to matters of difference and otherness. This suggests reclaiming, as central to any viable notion of citizenship, the values of mutual worth, dignity, and ethical responsibility.

At stake here is the recognition that there is a certain civic virtue and ethical value in extending our exposure to difference and otherness. Citizens need to cultivate loyalties that extend beyond the nation-state, beyond a theoretical distinction in which the division between friend and enemy is mediated exclusively by national boundaries. Clearly, citizenship as a form of empowerment means acquiring the skills that enable one to critically examine the history and to resuscitate those dangerous memories in which knowledge expands the possibilities for self-knowledge and critical and social agency. Knowledge need not be only Indigenous to be empowering. Individuals must also have some distance from the knowledge of their birth, origins, and specificity of place. This suggests appropriating that knowledge that emerges through dispersal, travel, border-crossings, diaspora, and through global communications.

A cosmopolitan notion of citizenship must recognize the importance of a culture of questioning to any global concept of democracy. The global public sphere must be a place where authority can be questioned, power held accountable and dissent seen as having a positive value. There is a growing authoritarianism in many parts of the world, particularly the United States. In facing this threat to democracy around the globe, it is crucial for educators, parents, young people, workers, and others to fight the collapse of citizenship into forms of jingoistic nationalism. This means educators and others will have to reinvigorate democracy by assuming the pedagogical project of prioritizing debate, deliberation, dissent, dialogue, and public spaces as central to any viable notion of global citizenship. In addition, if citizenship is to be global, it must develop a sense of radical humanism that comprehends social and environmental justice beyond national boundaries. Human suffering does not stop at the borders of nation-states.

BOSIO: What is the role of educators in the context of globalization and how this can be framed in our discussion on critical pedagogy and GCE?

GIROUX: I have always argued that educators must be treated as a critical public resource, essential not only to the importance of an empowering educational experience for students but also to the formation of a democratic society. At the institutional level, this means giving educators an opportunity to exercise power over the conditions of their work, particularly when it comes to educating the critical “global citizen”. In this view, we cannot separate what educators do from the economic and political conditions that shape their work, that is, their academic labor. This means they should have both the time and the power to institute structural conditions that allow them to produce curricula, collaborate with parents, conduct research, and work with communities.

Moreover, it can be suggested that for a critical GCE to be effective, university buildings must be limited in size to permit educators and others to construct, maintain, and enhance a democratic community for themselves and their students. We are talking not only about the issue of class size but also about how space is institutionally constructed as part of a political project compatible with the formation of lived, democratic communities. In addition, particularly when it comes to implementing notions, such as “global citizenship”, educators should be given the freedom to shape the university curricula, engage in shared research with other educators and with others outside of the university, and play a central role in the governance of the school and their labor. Educational empowerment for educators cannot be separated from issues of power and governance. Educators should be valued as public intellectuals who connect critical ideas, traditions, disciplines, and values to the public realm of everyday life.

But at the same time, educators must assume the responsibility for connecting their work to larger social issues, particularly if they educate for critical global citizenship while raising questions about what it means to provide students with the values they need to write policy papers, be resilient against defeat, analyze social problems, and learn the tools of democracy and how to make a difference in one's life as a social agent.

BOSIO: What should be the purpose of a GCE when informed by critical pedagogy?

GIROUX: A GCE informed by critical pedagogy must take seriously the connections between theory and practice, reflection and action. All too often, theory in academia slides into a form of “theoreticism” in which it either becomes an end in itself, relegated to the heights of an arcane, excessive and utterly ethereal existence or degenerates into a form of careerism, offering the fastest track to academic rewards and promotions. But theory is hardly a luxury connected to the fantasy of intellectual power. On the contrary, the theory is a resource that enables us to both define and respond to problems as they emerge in particular contexts. Its transformative power resides in the possibility of enabling forms of agency, not in its ability to solve problems. Its politics is linked to the ability to imagine the world differently and then to act differently and this is its offering to any viable notion of citizenship education. At stake here is not the question of whether theory matters, which should be as obvious as asking whether critical thought matters but the issue of what the political and public responsibilities of theory might be, particularly in theorizing global politics for the twenty-first century. Theory is not just about contemplation or paving a way to academic stardom; it is foremost about intervention in the world, raising ideas to the worldly space of public life, social responsibility, and collective intervention. If learning is a fundamental part of social change, then the theory is a crucial resource for studying the full range of everyday practices that circulate throughout diverse social formations and for finding better forms of knowledge and modes of intervention in the face of the challenge of either a growing authoritarianism or a manufactured cynicism.

Moreover, I think a GCE informed by critical pedagogy begins with the assumption that knowledge and power should always be subject to debate, held accountable, and critically engaged. Central to the very definition of critical pedagogy is a common concern for reforming universities and developing modes of pedagogical practice in which educators and students become critical agents actively questioning and negotiating the relationships between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change. This is hardly a prescription for propaganda. I think critical pedagogy is often seen as dangerous because it is built around a project that goes to the very heart of what education is about and is framed around a series of important and often ignored questions, such as: Why do we, as educators, do what we do the way we do it? Whose interest does schooling serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? Critical pedagogy at its essence is about the struggle over power, agency, authority, desire, and what it means to prepare people for learning how to govern rather than be governed. It is not a method per se but a theoretically informed set of assumptions about the centrality of education to politics and envisioning a world in which justice and economic equality become a thread informing and connecting a larger global universe. Critical pedagogy must inform GCE in a way that is not simply concerned with offering students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom; in this sense, GCE, if informed by critical pedagogy, must also be concerned with providing educators and students with the knowledge and values to expand their capacities both to question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social practices that structure every aspect of society and to take responsibility for intervening in the world. In other words, critical pedagogy forges a GCE which, ideally, supports students’ agency through a language of skepticism and possibility.

BOSIO: Do you think there is a “crisis of values” in the modern university, particularly in the humanities? If so, how does this connect with concepts of GCE, critical pedagogy and the role of educators in your opinion?

GIROUX: The humanities traditionally has offered both a refuge and a possibility for thinking about these issues, though under historical conditions which bear little resemblance to the present. This is particularly evident as the conditions for the production of knowledge, national identity, and citizenship have changed in a rapidly globalizing, post-9/11 world order marked by t...