Cosmopolitanism as a Privilege in Postwar Guatemala

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

Abstract

This paper draws from an ethnographic study based in four school-community contexts in Guatemala. Following a 36-year civil war (1960-1996), national educational policy reforms have emphasized democratic citizenship, multicultural values, and human rights as global norms (Ministry of Education, 1998, 2010). Yet many of these reforms are viewed as symbolic gestures in the context of “postwar” Guatemala, a society characterized by violence, impunity, and youth criminality (Adams, 2011).

Implementing these curricular reforms in one of Latin America’s most unequal and under-resourced education systems (UNDP, 2012), however, reveals conflicting approaches to youth citizenship and unresolved class tensions within and across school spaces. How do schools catering to different social identity groups shape young people’s sense of local, national, and global belonging? This presentation explores how perceptions of physical movement and social mobility in a high-risk and rigidly classed society interact with messages of global citizenship, conveying cosmopolitanism as a privilege uniquely accessed by elites.

Presenting ethnographic data from a school in Guatemala City catering to elite students, I will demonstrate how the school mission, centering on the development of cosmopolitanism and global mindedness, is routinely challenged by teachers and reinforced by students. Alongside messages that the school promotes transnational identities and cosmopolitanism, reflected in the presence of US teachers, bilingual instruction, and encouragement to pursue college abroad, teachers struggle to remind students that they have particular civic roles to play in Guatemala’s postwar future. Yet for the most part, these discussions, frequently one-sided, do little to challenge students’ orientation to their place in society, a privilege that comes with the ability to traverse national borders at will. Moreover, young people in this school setting largely conceive of their global interactions as a dimension of their civic duty to the nation, narrowly defined through the lens of development.

This case raises questions about the significance of global citizenship education in postwar and divided states struggling to reshape national identity and promote social inclusion. Additionally, it reveals challenges to discourses of cosmopolitanism when global inclusion is conveyed to particular groups in segregated school settings.

Author

• Michelle Jannette Bellino, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor