A Cross-National Comparison of International Strategies: National Competitiveness or Global Citizenship?

• In Event: Is There a Global Understanding of Global Citizenship Education? Comparative Perspectives on Policies and Practices

Abstract

In the last five years, there has been a growing interest at international and national levels in promoting global citizenship and global competence in education. International organizations, including UNESCO and the OECD have promoted these concepts and a growing number of countries have developed international strategies in education. These include Japan (2009), Ireland (2010), the U.S. (2012), Australia (2013), the U.K. (2013), and Canada (2014). While they vary in focus, these recent strategies promote internationalization of education as a key and desirable development initiative to build globally competent citizens. Our previous research provided an in-depth study of the U.S. Department of Education (2012) strategy, and examined the conveying and messaging of global education in the strategy (Engel & Siczek, under review). Building on this research, the current study is a cross-national comparison of internationalization strategies in Ireland, the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and Canada. Data are drawn from textual analyses of these strategies. We explored the frequency of key terms, using a coding process to examine how those terms are used and framed in the text. We also examined “keyness” on a linguistic level, which relates to the extent to which these words are particular to the text relative to a general reference corpus, in order to give a picture of the significant concepts in the text. Findings present multiple constructions of global education within the strategies, while at the same time reveal the presence of a rather narrow, nationalistic perspective on global education, one which seems more concerned with economic and educational competition over broader goals of global citizenship.

Authors

• Laura Christine Engel, The George Washington University

• Megan M Siczek, The George Washington University