Honoring the many faces of global citizens: A mixed-methods study of transnational youth’s negotiations with global citizenship education

• In Event: Education for Sustainable Development

Proposal

In K-12 schools and education research, global citizenship education (GCE) is often promoted to help youth confront our unpredictable future, which COVID-19 has put to the test. While there are various models (Andreotti, 2014; Noddings, 2005; Oxfam, 2015), GCE remains a fuzzy concept and field, and there is a small body of literature on how students take it up—an area my project expands. This study explores how transnational high school students understand and experience GCE and how it influences them to think or act, and how perspectives may differ based on intersecting identities.

One identity I investigate is privilege, operationalized as socioeconomic status (SES). Bauman (1998) differentiates between the world’s minority—“tourists” who move because travel is attractive, and the majority—“vagabonds” who move because they must. Here in response to sub-theme III, I also investigate the issue of equity and justice in education by highlighting how GCE is experienced by youth of varied backgrounds.

Conceptual Framework
I understand (school) curriculum as a dialogic and agentive process, whereby students negotiate the knowledge, skills, dispositions, or other ideas taught, in the context of structural forces that shape their subjectivities (Biesta, 2013; Pinar, 2012). Curriculum also influences students’ ideas around citizenship in legal and flexible cultural/social forms (Lee, 2016; Ong, 1999).

From the perspectives of postcolonial/decolonial theories, GCE may function as an oppressive curricular site (Young, 2001). On the other hand, by taking up tools such as hybridity, third space (Bhabha, 2004), and border thinking (Mignolo, 2000), I frame GCE as a space of possibility, where young people can play with the curriculum and speak back to hegemonic discourses.

Globalization is the broad context for GCE curriculum. I understand globalization as economic and technological forces that, from a postcolonial perspective, impose particular neoliberal structures that benefit those with resources at the detriment of others (Spring, 2008; Waks, 2003).

“Transnational students” refers to “youth whose emotional attachments, social lives, cultural practices, and notions of self are not bounded within one nation or state” (Shirazi, 2018, p. 112). GCE is associated with certain content and issues and emphasizes global, rather than nation-states’ concerns. GCE is often framed as a curricular goal and connotes a kind of learning that is exceptional relative to “standard” school curricula and endows the learner with certain cosmopolitan cultural/social capital.

Literature Review
Existing research shows that transnational students encounter a spectrum of positive (e.g., participatory pedagogy, teacher support) and negative (e.g., cultural dissonance, marginalization) experiences at school due to their complex positionalities (Allan, 2002, Skerrett, 2012). Further, most high school students take up GCE in the liberal humanist approach (developing themselves), followed by the entrepreneurial (success in the global market), very few in the anti-oppressive approach (justice and advocacy), and none in the incommensurable approach (open to other ontological/epistemological possibilities) (An, 2011; Yamashita, 2006; Shultz, Pashby, & Godwaldt, 2017). Identities, including gender and SES, play a role in how GCE is taken up by and influences youth (Cheng & Yang, 2019; O’Sullivan & Smaller, 2013).

Methodology
In a sequential mixed-methods design, a qualitative phase led to the construction of a quantitative survey. I analyzed statistics alongside rich, thick descriptions (Bryman, 2006), where the quantitative tool was based on the “culture,” “setting,” and “views” of the participants (Creswell & Clark, 2018, p. 84). I take up mixed-methods as a form of border-crossing (Anzaldúa, 1997) and aim to “advance an agenda of social critique, social justice, and opportunity through educational research” (Lutrell, 2009, p. 2). The qualitative phase included image-elicitation focus groups, semi-structured individual interviews, and optional final projects, where a visual component encouraged youth to direct the research and represent their ideas multimodally. The participants were high school youth in the U.S. who have lived in at least one other country.

Findings and Significance
The data show that transnational youth more readily take up GCE as skills and (conceptual) understandings rather than as concrete bodies of (factual) knowledge, and they perceive GCE to influence them to think, not necessarily act, differently (e.g., in response to social justice concerns). This raises questions around how educators should best determine GCE goals and content and practical constraints of “critical” versus “soft” models.

Secondly, the qualitative participants each took up GCE differently, suggesting that one of its strengths is its broad nature that allows individuals to adopt GCE as appropriate. I argue that effective GCE consists of learning that actively leverages students’ existing knowledge and skills, cultural backgrounds, and interests.

Next, GCE seems to compete with daily demands of assignments and grades, particularly when not well-integrated into the school day. The students are attached to place, including both in-person learning and socialization, which is in tension with a deterritorialized, lofty framing of GCE. The youths’ connection with physical space is especially intriguing given the context of COVID-19 and raises the question of how much GCE can prepare them for the unforeseen. One clear recommendation is for GCE programs to account for youths’ physical attachments.

Finally, qualitative data show that intersecting identities, especially SES and race, in the context of structural inequalities in U.S. education, make a difference in how transnational youth take up GCE. Survey results highlight gender, revealing that girls are more actively engaged with GCE. As we tailor GCE to better suit student needs, we can leverage identities as a useful tool, but we must resist essentializing students.

This study contributes to further research and theorizing about how GCE can better serve the needs of all youth–to create positive curricular change. We might further investigate the role of gender in GCE and how best to get to know students and mold GCE to suit their needs, integrating this kind of learning into the school day. Some practices to explore include youth action research and participatory course design, student background surveys, better involving families, and senior thesis projects. Broadly, this study attends to issues of equity in global educational resources—how school curricula can do better for our children, and how together, humans can do better for the planet.

Author

• Nancy Ku Bradt, Columbia University Teachers Colleg