A Decolonial Analysis of Curriculum Intentions for Global Citizenship Education in two Asian Societies

• In Event: The politics of education: Insights into decolonizing curriculum, governance, and social media

Proposal

Global citizenship education (GCE) has emerged as a crucial approach to prepare young people for the complex challenges of the 21st century. Recent international civic education initiatives have called for preparing young citizens as members of their nations and the global community. Although conceptions of GCE vary, there is consensus regarding the need to educate youth for responsive action to address interconnected global problems. For example, UNESCO’s (2014) programs for GCE underline how civic education must promote values of empathy and intercultural understanding and skills of democratic deliberation across differences so that young citizens may work towards a future that is “more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable” (p. 9).

However, international scholarship is increasingly challenging dominant western, neoliberal, imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist traditions that have created hierarchies and social injustice within and across nations (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2020; Sabzalian, 2019). These legacies continue to marginalize the voices of people of Color, women, immigrants, and Indigenous communities (Gibson, 2020; Torres, 2017). In response, scholars have called for decolonial lenses to critique unequal structures of power and interrogate how Eurocentric worldviews shape knowledge creation and epistemologies of ‘the global’ that limit visions of transformation within narrow colonial-modern imaginaries (Pashby et al., 2020).

In this proposed formal paper presentation, we offer a decolonial framework derived from comparative studies examining GCE policy, curriculum, and classroom practice in several Asian contexts (e.g., Authors, 2022; Authors, 2021; Authors, in press). Employing grounded theory and reviews of empirically-based case studies, we developed insights for enacting GCE in more transformative and justice-oriented ways by identifying classroom practices that allowed for counter-narration and inclusion of marginalized perspectives, the use of Indigenous and decolonial education approaches, and efforts to promote greater hybridity to enable new possibilities for future classroom practice.

The framework and guiding questions for decolonial analysis, while still in development, appear in the appendix. Our paper tests the framework’s salience by considering curricular intentions through discourse and case analysis (Gee, 2005; Stake, 2005). In particular, we examine documents and contexts surrounding the Philippines K-12 New Basic Education Act and Singapore’s 2021 Character and Civic Education Framework. We aim to inform comparative scholarship in GCE by expanding current knowledge regarding the legacies of colonialism while building the basis for civic education that enables democratic visions of a more peaceful, sustainable, and just global community.

Our findings identify the complexities that arise from intersections and contradictions between decolonial conceptions of GCE, racial diversity, and national-neoliberal civic education curricular intentions. The two cases have similar histories of colonialism but provide differing contexts and approaches to diversity and GCE. In the Philippines, four centuries of Spanish and American rule marginalized the lifeways and perspectives of Indigenous groups while instilling a race-based “colonial mentality” that continues to center Western cultural perspectives (David & Okazaki, 2006). The former British colony of Singapore, meanwhile, has dealt with diversity through policies that seek to equalize opportunities for citizens of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and ‘Other’ racial categories. Like other Asian societies, the Philippines and Singapore have developed values-based civic curricula to strengthen young citizens’ affinity to the nation while building awareness of global interdependence, multiculturalism, and skill sets to compete in the global economy.

Appendix: Analytical framework for decolonial global citizenship education

Dimension: Identity / Definition: Individuals’ cultural heritage, experiences of migration, exposure to media, affective well-being, and aspirations. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum… Create spaces to know students’ histories, values, and multiple affiliations based on community, nation, and other membership categories?

Dimension: Issues / Definition: Local-global social problems that are important to students. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum… Recognize students’ visions of sustainable, just, and peaceful communities while developing skills to deliberate across differences and act to address problems?

Dimension: Interconnection / Students’ awareness of how localities are linked to global economic, social, political, environmental systems. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum… Sensitize students to the ways media, the environment, migration, and other forces of globalization link their localities to distant communities?

Dimension: Inequality / Definition: Societal hierarchies and disparities based on race, gender, income, language, etc. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum... Examine different forms of power, unequal power distributions; and how these are tethered to global systems shaped by colonization?

Dimension: Indigeneity / Definition: Indigenous voices and knowledge, histories, presence, rights, and resistance to structures and mindsets that pose harm to people and the planet. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum... Depict Indigenous ways of living? Include Indigenous values and knowledge to inform solutions to global problems?

Dimension: Interlocution / Definition: Critical reflexivity to recognize the dominance of colonial epistemologies and build the basis of openness and dialogue towards new ways of living. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum... Give voice to historically silenced perspectives; and open new spaces for solidarity, imagination, and creativity that recognize the interdependence of all life?

Dimension: Intention / Definition: The purposes of civic education in an increasingly unsustainable, interdependent, yet unequal global community. / Guiding questions: In what ways does the curriculum... Challenge narrow definitions of success, identity, and belonging to broaden schools’ visions of what it means to live a life of purpose and hope?

Authors

• Mark C Baildon, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Theresa Alviar-Martin, Kennesaw State University