Is There a Global Understanding of Global Citizenship Education? Comparative Perspectives on Policies and Practices

Session Type: WERA Symposium

Abstract

While there is now widespread consensus that global citizenship education (GCE) is important (at least on paper), it is less clear that there is a common understanding of what this entails. In this panel, therefore, we plan to examine how GCE is being conceptualised, practised and challenged in different geographical contexts and at different levels (international, national and local). Through four empirical papers we will provide a multi-level and comparative perspective that is still often missing from citizenship education studies. Together, these four papers will also shed light on the ways in which GCE policies are converging and diverging, and the tensions and contradictions that emerge in different contexts.

Sub Unit

• World Education Research Association

Chair

• Avril Keating, University College London

Papers

• Conditional cosmopolitanism? The Limits of Youth Cosmopolitan Identities - Avril Keating, University College London

• A Cross-National Comparison of International Strategies: National Competitiveness or Global Citizenship? - Laura Christine Engel, The George Washington University; Megan M Siczek, The George Washington University

• Whose Global Citizenship? Conceptions of Global Citizenship and Human Rights in Curricula From Ghana and Liberia - Laura Jeanne Quaynor, University of South Carolina - Aiken

• Cosmopolitanism as a Privilege in Postwar Guatemala - Michelle Jannette Bellino, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Discussant

• Hugh Starkey, UCL Institute of Education - London