Centering Global Citizenship Education in the public sphere

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

A renewed call for ethically grounded responsible leadership in education calls the attention of both practitioners and scholars in Global Citizenship Education (GCE) to questions of social justice in education (Zeichner 2009; Westheimer 2015; Howard and Navarro 2016). Social justice in education is about promoting what we understand as fair practices in education. What is fair in a society is associated with the extent to which the interests of different groups in society are represented in education (Schement, 2001). A basic political mechanism for promoting representation is the use of deliberative practices. Deliberation, however, does not take place automatically in societies, nor in the context of education, but requires the availability of designated practices, resources and spaces. In a classic work of political theory, Habermas identified coffee houses in 18th and 19th century London as sites between civil society and state; places for critical public discussions (Habermas, 1979). These public spheres contributed to a situation where, instead of a ruler monitoring the compliance of the people, the people formed a practice of informed and critical discourses for monitoring the actions of state authority (McCarthy in Habermas, 1989, p. xi). The concept of public sphere is one of the concepts that has been used for understanding practices of collective social responsibility, a concept that is central to the 2021 CIES conference theme.

The purpose of this panel is to discuss examples from the global south and the global north that explore ways in which the Global Citizenship Education agenda of the UN (UNESCO 2015; Tawil 2013) can contribute to fostering new public spheres and revitalize existing public spheres. Also, to encourage re-thinking of what we mean by ’public sphere’ in the context of education (cf. Fraser, 1990). The four papers in this panel respectively report on education policy efforts in Brazil, a higher education program in Japan, online learning in a higher education program in the US, and a comparison of teacher attitudes in Finland and Japan that draws on data from a large-scale comparative multi-country survey. The latter is an empirical study whereas the three former report on efforts to advance democratic education in applied contexts. The examples represent a variety of geographical contexts, education levels, practices and policies. A goal of the contributions to this panel has been to think about a broad range of practices and enactments that may support the enabling of varieties of public sphere sites, collaboration and deliberation. A shared feature of all of the papers is that each of the authors engage with societal and political dimensions of education and do so by building on a post-structural approach that draws on postmodern values that underscore the importance of recognizing diversity in terms of social positionality (race, gender, age, first language, ethnicity) and in terms of societal power and resource relationships.

Paper one by our panel contributors from Brazil provides concrete examples of challenges and successes in advancing democratic governance practices in the administration of education. While important policy messages and policy strategies have been articulated in Brazil nationally and important steps in developing governance practices for realizing these messages in education have been taken locally; yet, much remains to do. One reason for this is the dilemma that education faces across the globe; namely, that teachers and educators work in a context that is in flux and is characterized by many uncertainties.

Nevertheless, teachers are expected to contribute to the mitigation of societal inequities and to have a positive impact on the life opportunities of all of the students they interact with as is demonstrated by TALIS data (OECD, 2019) that is contextualized and analyzed in in the second panel presentation on teacher attitudes in Finland and Japan. The data shows that teachers working in societies with comparatively higher inequality, experience a greater pressure to mediate societal inequities. This presentation accords empirical support to a key observation that is made in each of the panel presentations; namely, that there is a need for a context-relevant understanding of social justice in education.

The third paper reports on how a multilingual and multicultural higher education program in Japan works with Global Citizenship Education. The program has used a Content and Language Integrated Learning approach and instructs students in Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish language and societal issues. The authors use examples notably from the French component of the program to discuss political dimensions, social justice and how the program supports students in the development of intercultural lenses.

As a result of the joint efforts for this panel, we propose that the postmodern values framework, on which movements for social justice build, points at the development of perspective-taking skills (Erle & Topolinski, 2017) as one of the important outcomes of Global Citizenship Education. Literature and storytelling have historically provided an important support for an exploration of different perspectives and different life experiences. It is for this reason that the panel concludes with a discussion on practices that are at the same time very old, yet very relevant for our contemporary efforts in democratic education.

The fourth and last presentation in the panel analyses dialogic practices in higher education and online in a digital humanities program at a US University. The paper discusses a contemporary application of the historical concepts and practices of sociability, sympoetry and symphilosophy. The collaborative creation of new ideas through practices of collective creative efforts in our own and in previous eras provide helpful examples for how we may continue to revitalize existing public sphere sites and how we may develop new public sphere sites—online and elsewhere—for supporting dialogical forms of education.

Each of the presentations contribute to the kaleidoscope of perspectives that we will need to engage in order to meet the urgent need for new and strengthened public sphere sites in our societies. Democratic education plays a key role in such efforts and the comparative international examples presented in this panel are a resource from which we can learn to meet the challenges we face.

Sub Unit

• Citizenship and Democratic Education SIG

Chair

• Susan Wiksten, Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA

Individual Presentations

• Advancements and limitations in Brazil’s Democratic Management of Education framework - Maria A. Zero, University of Franca, São Paulo, Brazil

• Expectations to teachers’ role in advancing society and equity in Finland, Japan and the United States: Findings from TALIS 2018 - Crystal Green, University of California Los Angeles; Susan Wiksten, Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA

• Global Citizenship Education in Japanese higher education: A plurilingual and multicultural approach to social justice in a CLIL setting - Sylvain Detey, School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan; Xavier Mellet, School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan

• Global Citizenship Education in the UCLA Digital Humanities classroom: In the light of Early German Romantic philosophy - Renata Fuchs, University of California Los Angeles

Discussant

• Carlos Alberto Torres, CIES