Whose Global Citizenship? Conceptions of Global Citizenship and Human Rights in Curricula From Ghana and Liberia

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

Abstract

As the world enters in the post-2015 era, a major shift is occurring in the goals and foci of both national and international educational organizations. In particular, global citizenship education has been prioritized, becoming a main focus of the United Nations’ Global Education First Initiative. Human rights are an intrinsic part of this focus, being the foundational rights of global citizens. Despite this concerted international effort for global citizenship education, scholars within the field of comparative citizenship education note that citizenship and rights have different meanings depending on national context (Hahn, 1998; Kubow, 2007). Furthermore, human rights have often been critiqued for having a Eurocentric, male, or individualistic focus (Charlesworth, 2005; Mutua, 2008).
Given the likelihood that global citizenship education will be a major focus for educational initiatives worldwide in the years to come, it is useful to understand how this concept is currently manifested in curricular documents, particularly in non-Western contexts. This paper analyzes international documents related to global citizenship education, produced by the United Nations and the (formerly British) Commonwealth, alongside recently produced citizenship education curricular documents in Ghana and Liberia, two Anglophone West African countries that differ greatly in ethnic composition, national histories, and current events. The following questions are investigated: How is global citizenship described in curricular documents from these national contexts? How are these conceptions similar to and different from each other? How are these conceptions related to international discourses on global citizenship?
In order to trace the ways that the concept of global citizenship education is presented in international guidelines and national curriculum, this project employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), specifically discourse-as-text analysis, focusing on the linguistic features of texts (Fairclough, 1992). As CDA requires a close attention to the social and political contexts of the texts under analysis, as well as an attention to the dynamics of power within those contexts (Vavrus & Seghers, 2010), the paper also describes the social and political contexts of the creation and use of the Ghanaian, Liberian, and international curricular documents. Finally, CDA necessitates analysis aimed at critique and disruption of power dynamics present in texts and in society (Rogers, 2004).
Although this study is still underway, preliminary findings point to important ways that curricular documents from Ghana and Liberia describe global citizenship education as more attentive to local concerns and communal success. In addition, global citizenship education in these texts rarely attends to gender. This is juxtaposed to a focus on human rights of the individual found in documents produced by the Commonwealth and United Nations. This analysis suggests ways that international organizations may wish to refine or adapt curricular frameworks for global citizenship education, allowing for local redefinition of the meaning of global citizenship.

Author

• Laura Jeanne Quaynor, University of South Carolina - Aiken