“Chinese Core, Global Trend”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese Civics Teachers’ Perceptions on Global Citizenship Education

• In Event: Challenges and Possibilities of Teaching Innovation and Curriculum Reform

Proposal

1.Global Citizenship Education
Against the backdrop of globalization and educational transformation, the past two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in global citizenship education (GCE) as a response to today’s global challenges, leading to a vast body of empirical and theoretical scholarship (Pashby et al., 2020). International organizations such as UNESCO and Oxfam promote their sustainable conceptual frameworks of GCE that aim to move beyond individualism and national perspectives toward international education (Oxfam, 2006; UNESCO, 2015). In addition, GCE has been considered contentious in a number of studies conducted in various countries and regions with a focus on how it is manifested in diverse contexts. Regional analyses undertaken in Global North (e.g., Swanson & Pashby, 2016; Wang & Hoffman, 2016), Global South (e.g., Howard et al., 2018; Skårås et al., 2019), Asian Pacific countries (e.g., Baildon & Alviar-Martin, 2020; Cho & Mosselson, 2018; Lin & Jackson, 2020) and across the globe (e.g., Cotton et al., 2019; Lee, 2020) have illustrated the dynamics and diverse forms and value orientations of GCE. Although GCE is indisputably a global phenomenon, its implementation varies significantly (Goren & Yemini, 2017a). Due to its multiple underlying value orientations, GCE continues to be a contentious field.
2.Global Citizenship Education in China
In China, although the concept of GCE has not been formally adopted, its relevant elements and characteristics such as global thinking, global visions, and international understanding have gained prominence in recent years (Law, 2013; Shi et al., 2019; Tse, 2011). As Zhu and Camicia (2014) have pointed out, discourses of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, neoliberalism and Confucianism interact and serve in China’s citizenship education curricular standards and policy documents. Accordingly, there is a need to further investigate how GCE, laden as it is with these value tensions, is transposed and digested within schools.
3.Theoretical Framework
In line with Bernstein’s (1990, 2000) theorising, the knowledge and values contained in the official field inevitably undergo recontextualization within the pedagogic field. In Bernstein’s (2000, p. 31) terms, a “pedagogic discourse” as a recontextualizing principle for the circulation and reordering of discourses embeds two dimensions: regulative discourse and instructional discourse. Regulative discourse as the dominant form, produces the order in the instructional discourse. Based on this hypothesis, we investigate the competitive forces and value regulation process underlying GCE.
4.Methodology
This article aims to demonstrate how dominant ideologies of GCE are recontextualized in Chinese educational settings by teachers’ representations of GCE. First, we present a review of contemporary literature on GCE, the research context, and the theoretical framework, highlighting that China’s citizenship curriculum in schooling is an under-researched area. Second, we describe Fairclough’s (2003, 2015) critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the methodology and elaborate on the data collection and analytical procedure. Third, based on an analysis of 17 teachers’ interviews, the findings illustrate how teachers represent and implement GCE. Fourth, we present a discussion of the nation-centric orientation towards GCE which is underpinned by state-national policy and Confucian culture, and of how localized constructivist learning theories are made complicit with the dominant nationalism in GCE. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for future research.
5.Research Findings, Discussion, and Implications
This study found that despite teachers’ attempts to describe GCE by constructivist teaching and learning notions, the central role of CCP-sanctioned official knowledge and teachers’ unwillingness to confront controversial topics indicate that these transformative educational theories have not fundamentally altered the traditional norms of China’s citizenship education and have unwittingly aided the operation of nationalism in GCE.
This study demonstrated, using China as a case, a potential practical obstacle that “new cosmopolitanism” theories may face in GCE. According to research on the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, the nation-centric version of GCE emerging from this study is comparable to new cosmopolitanism voices such as universal cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum, 1996), “rooted cosmopolitanism”, or “cosmopolitan patriotism” (Appiah, 1997, p.168), which advocate preserving cultural identity while recognizing universal global virtues. Based on the case of China, when these orientations are applied to GCE, the resulting educational approach may not only fail to encourage people to extend their sense of political community outward (Pashby, 2013) but, coupled with the strong framing of schooling, may also increase the transmission of homogenized information. Such a nation-centred GCE does, in fact, circumvent the Eurocentric and relativistic values that may result from educating learners in global ethics (Papastephanou, 2018; Wright, 2012), but it tends to marginalize voices of education and restrict the power of educational transformation. Moreover, at the discursive level, when GCE functions as nation-building, it inevitably restricts the possibility of other value expressions and tends to obliterate ethnic diversity within and beyond its state territory. China's case shows that promoting GCE in national curricula that aim to construct national identity is likely to be counterproductive and restrict the discursive space.
We identify two key issues for consideration in GCE in light of its strong framing feature in China. First, following Biesta’s (2022, p.8) call for a better way of speaking that “does not dissolve the complex normative and political questions concerning education into ‘smooth’ technical language of learning”, an essential starting point would be to reflect the pragmatic understanding of educational ideas, to challenge their expectations of education and the notions (e.g., student-centred, global perspective) that are accepted without further epistemological consideration. Second, it is utopian to disregard the prevailing educational norms and tradition but to highlight teachers’ autonomy unilaterally. Teachers’ agency cannot be fostered by teachers themselves, but rather by all the participants in various educational system domains (Priestley et al., 2015). Critical and reflective analysis of the educational practice of GCE is required to enlarge the space for GCE. Views on post-critical GCE (Andreotti, 2021; Bosio, 2021; Pashby et al., 2020; Stein, 2015) could facilitate educational researchers and practitioners’ ongoing self-reflection and dialogues regarding the epistemological constraints and action inertia they face.

Author

• XI WU, Nanjing Normal University