Global Citizenship Education for Justice or Competition? Public and Private Purposes

• In Event: 49.038 - Critical Global Citizenship: Education for Global Understanding and Local Justice

Abstract

This paper is a consideration of global citizenship education as a site of struggle between conceptions of globalization and education. We argue that global citizenship education can function as either education for justice (global citizenship as a public good) or education for global competition (global citizenship as a private good). We use a study (IRB-approved) of one educational community’s global citizenship course to provide additional insight.

A common response to the call for students to gain global understandings, experiences and competencies (especially at the secondary and postsecondary levels) is a commitment to global citizenship education (Andrzejewski & Alessio, 1998; Musil, 2006; Morais & Ogden, 2010), although there is little consensus on how to operationalize these commitments (Green, 2012). Existing literature clearly outlines distinct definitional patterns of understanding the concept of global citizenship: global citizenship as global activism or reform (Falk, 1994; Schattle, 2009); global citizenship as global cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2008; Schattle, 2009; Urry, 2000); global citizenship as global hybridity (Rhoads & Szelenyi, 2011); global citizenship as global management or capitalism (Falk, 1994; Schattle, 2009; Urry, 2000). This paper will argue that the public versus private distinction is a useful way of not only categorizing these manifold definitions but also of determining whether/how education for global citizenship can function as education for justice (as opposed to functioning as education for global competition).

We will be using global citizenship’s many definitions as part of our theoretical frame. Additionally, we will be considering the theoretical framework of understanding public versus private goods: Labaree’s (1997, 2000) perspective on the competing aims of education (democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility) and the extent to which those competing aims “portray education as a public or private good [and] the extent to which they understand education as preparation for political or market roles” (p. 41). Rhoades & Slaughter’s (2006) concept of “academic capitalism” and Marginson’s (2012) and Pusser’s (2006, 2008, 2011) understandings of the public sphere and public good specifically in relation to higher education is also crucial for our argument. Stone’s (2001) dichotomy of the market versus the polis will also inform our work.

Using these definitions and frames will allow us to analyze two years’ worth of data from a qualitative case study of a global citizenship course in one community, spanning multiple institutions. Specifically, we have coded participants’ understandings of themselves as global citizens and their changing apprehensions of concepts related to global citizenship in order to uncover the ways they interpret the purposes of global citizenship education. Ultimately we argue that global citizenship education for justice must be grounded in the notion of global citizenship education as a public good. Global citizenship education as a private good (e.g. as a way to increase global competitiveness) limits participants’ abilities to link global cognizance to local contexts. This paper will link delimited literature on the purposes of education and the rise of global citizenship education by unpacking the way that one educational community has operationalized its global and social justice impulses.

Authors

• Rose Cole, University of Virginia

• Chrissie Monaghan, University of Virginia