Reframing global education in teacher education from the perspectives of human capability and cosmopolitan ethics

• In Event: Globalization and teacher education II: Global imaginaries, norms and practices of teaching

Proposal

Since the late twentieth century, global education and its related movements – multicultural education, human rights education, peace education, education for sustainable development, and citizenship education – have gained increasing popularity across schools and colleges worldwide. What unites these different movements is the view that issues can only be effectively explored through a globally oriented perspective. International organizations, particularly OECD and UNESCO, have been influential catalysts in perpetuating normative visions about how best to prepare students for a global future. Not surprisingly, discourses on global education have also permeated the mission and curricula of teacher education programs.
In this paper, I begin with a survey of three models of global education in teacher education paying attention to their philosophical underpinnings as informed by Human Capital Theory, Human Capabilities Approach, and Cosmopolitan Ethical Approach. The first part of the paper examines the dominance of Human Capital Theory in global education policy. This is particularly observed in the infusion of economic logic and promotion of utilitarian ends in OECD’s global education policies and frameworks. This has influenced governments and policymakers to direct educational aims on developing productive skills and competencies in the name of preparing students to be future-ready.
The second part of the paper focus on alternative and complementary paradigms informed by the Human Capabilities Approach and Cosmopolitan Ethical Approach. I examine how they both center on a vision of human well-being and flourishing using examples from UNESCO’s humanistic approach to global education. Although the Human Capabilities Approach has been criticized for promoting an individualistic and universalistic vision of global education, I argue that this can be complemented with a Cosmopolitan Ethical Approach. In this way, global education can be reframed from its current emphasis on future-ready competencies to the promotion of ethical understanding, other-oriented sensitivities and obligation to others. When concretized in the form of a framework, this should be represented as one that is layered in which instrumental competencies and intrinsic values support human capabilities that ultimately aim to empower the self to support the flourishing of others in the world. In practice, this means that teacher education programs should foreground cosmopolitan dispositions, particularly a concern for justice, hospitality and empathy, and integrate the cultivation of cosmopolitan dispositions as teachers acquire subject and pedagogical knowledge. Framed in this way, global education in teacher education becomes ethically grounded rather than market-driven, centered on human flourishing rather than competition. More significantly, a cosmopolitan approach to teacher education provides strong philosophical and practical justifications that may powerfully overcome instrumental uses of education predominant in current neoliberal approaches to global education.

Author

• Suzanne S Choo, Nanyang Technological University-National Institute of Education