Global Citizenship Education for Social Justice

• In Event: Global citizenship education for the global commons

Proposal

Initiated by the United Nations Secretary-General's Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) in 2012 , Global Citizenship Education (GCE) calls for all learners to be global citizens to forge a peaceful, tolerant and inclusive societies together. As an overarching framework, GCE is built on various theories and concepts. This paper, looks through the theoretical foundations of GCE, iterates that GCE should be socially transformative rather than reproductive, urges for GCE as a social justice oriented education that cultivates solidarity and commonality while valuing diversity at the same time. This paper argue that 1) Social Justice is the fundamental value of Global Citizenship Education (GCE), 2)Global Citizenship as an identity is not mutually exclusive of other identities, and 3)The unequal structure of power dynamics need to be addressed in Global Citizenship Education (GCE) and dismantled to result in social transformation rather than social reproduction.
While there are multiple theoretical foundations and concepts that preceded GCE such as multicultural education and intercultural education, there still lacks the critical element to lead to social transformation. Both multicultural education and intercultural education fundamentally aim for greater social justice through education. Both ideologies are confronted with the problem of hegemonic identity and culture that causes oppression over other marginalized identities. While multicultural education focuses on empowerment of the marginalized by providing culturally responsive education, intercultural education draws more attention to the common identity. The shortfall of these practices is that while they both strive to fight social inequalities, these practices can only result in social reproduction. While the main objectives of both multicultural education and intercultural education was to dismantle the unequal power dynamics in the social structure, the current practice only contributes to social reproduction rather than social transformation. For this reason, GCE needs to take a more critical approach while adopting from multicultural education and intercultural education, to not just result in celebration of diversity or negligence of multiple identities, but to allow for a social transformation that values diversity without hegemonic domination of one particular culture while consolidates shared identity for all.
This paper urges the need of GCE, but we recognize the limited impact it has to resolve all issues faced by all in the global world. Although we do not naively argue that education is the only solution to transform the world into a just society, we do take the position to advocate the application of global citizenship education for social transformation rather than social reproduction. In order for GCE to create greater impact, it needs to address the unequal social structure of power dynamics in global as well as individual levels. GCE should highlight commonality without undermining the differences. It needs to be critically confront the issues of assimilation, privileges, and harms of hegemonic culture and identities.

Author

• Debbie Shin, UCLA