A Systematic Review of U.S. K12 Education Standards for Global Citizenship Education: Content, Pedagogy, and Implications

• In Event: Beyond Borders: Exploring Civic Engagement through Comprehensive Data

Proposal

Universal access to Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a key target of the United Nations (U.N.) Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. Embedded within SDG 4: Insuring Inclusive and Quality Education for All and Promote Life Long Learning, GCE has the potential to not only transform education systems but also empower learners to build “more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable societies” (UNESCO, 2021). With this responsibility often tasked to educational institutions, reality in how GCE is actualized relies on three key aspects: one, that teaching standards support instruction in GCE, two, that teachers are equipped with the knowledge and pedagogical approaches to teach GCE, and three, that students are prepared to appropriate GCE in everyday routines and interactions. This study focuses on the first of these aspects, the teaching standards, with a systematic review of K12 teaching standards across all fifty U.S. states to explore the inclusion of GCE.

Theory/Context
Over the past two decades, defining GCE has proven to be both malleable and evasive. Drawing on disciplines such as citizenship education, peace education, conflict resolution, and multicultural education, GCE has come to serve as an “umbrella term” for learning about and acting upon issues that transcend borders (UN, 2023). While UNESCO (2021) defines the aims and outcomes of GCE to entail “creativity, innovation, and commitment to peace, human rights and sustainable development,” other literature outlines varied, and at times competing, definitions of GCE. Likewise, educational institutions may incorporate GCE through varied approaches and lenses.

Existing research has developed frameworks for educational institutions to conceptualize GCE (Katzarska-Miller & Reysen, 2018; Pashby et al., 2020), focused on building the capacity of teachers’ readiness to teach GCE (Kim & Kwon, 2023; Kopish, 2017), and mapped inconsistencies in approaches to teaching and researching GCE (Ahmed & Mohammed, 2022; Goren & Yemini, 2017). Additionally, GCE has been explored through different content foci and pedagogical approaches. Oxley and Morris (2013) define two overarching content approaches to GCE: the cosmopolitan approach, which includes political global citizenship, moral global citizenship, economic global citizenship, and cultural global citizenship, and the advocacy approach that entails social global citizenship, critical global citizenship, environmental global citizenship, and spiritual global citizenship. Moreover, Andreotti’s soft and critical global citizenship education (2006) serves to further define dichotomous pedagogical approaches to GCE.

Within the last decade, however, little systematic research has been done to explore whether K12 teaching standards across all U.S. states include GCE (Rapoport, 2009). Furthermore, there exists a dearth of research on the content foci and pedagogical approaches through which GCE is presented. Importantly, teaching standards serve as a form of policy to which teachers must then align curricula, strategies, and assessments. Thus, knowledge about how GCE is conveyed within teaching standards is valuable in understanding how GCE will be understood and taught by teachers and thereby appropriated by students.

Inquiry
We undertook a systematic review to examine whether K12 teaching standards of the fifty U.S. states include GCE and, if present, through which content foci and pedagogical approaches are GCE framed. We used each state’s social studies, civics, and history content teaching standards for this review and organized our review through the following research questions:
RQ 1: Which U.S. states incorporate tenets of GCE into their teaching standards?
RQ 2: Of the states that do, how do content foci and pedagogical approaches frame GCE?

We began by accessing each state’s teaching standards document through their department of education website. Next, we conducted a search within each document using various search terms that would align with GCE, such as global, globalization, global citizenship education, citizenship, world, countries, nations, and words that tangentially align with GCE, such as political, social, economic, etc. Once located, the standard was reviewed, and if it aligned with teaching GCE, it was recorded into a spreadsheet with additional information, such as the grade level(s) and specific content area.

Findings were coded using a quadrant rubric (Figure 1) that incorporates the content foci and pedagogical approaches of GCE as outlined in the literature: soft and critical global citizenship (Andreotti, 2006) represent the pedagogical approaches along the horizontal axis, and cosmopolitan and transformational (Oxley & Morris, 2013) represent the content foci along the vertical axis. Using this rubric, we first classified how each teaching standard aligned with specific content foci, followed by alignment with the pedagogical approaches.

Preliminary Findings
All U.S. K12 state standards include representation of GCE content, with the greatest emphasis on cosmopolitan. Across state standards, there was a heavier concentration of GCE content within older grade levels. The pedagogical approaches of GCE are much more nuanced and varied across states and grade levels. Other findings include a heavy presence of GCE content in geography, spatial, and history standards -especially those focused on war and conflict. While not currently present within the content axis, geography could be added to the cosmopolitan end and history on the transformational end.

A limitation of this study stems from the search terms since some standards may support GCE without including any of the terms we used. Additionally, the standards themselves do not consider teacher interpretation or provide insight into the curriculum used to teach the standard.

Contribution
These findings are beneficial in realizing whether GCE is present in U.S. K12 state standards and how content foci and pedagogical approaches frame GCE. However, simply the inclusion of GCE within state standards may not fully develop the capacities and opportunities for young people to engage with GCE. Beyond findings of this study, comparative research among states that include GCE in their standards and how GCE is then actualized among young people presents an opportunity for future research. Overall, state standards hold much power and influence in equipping educators with the knowledge and pedagogies necessary to teach GCE and empowering students with the concepts and skills needed to appropriate GCE to meet the U.N.’s 20230 Sustainable Development Goals.

Author

• Tara Lynn Bartlett, Technion Arizona State University