Cosmopolitan Nationalism and the Making of the Globally Competent Learner in Washington, DC

• In Event: A Critical Analysis of Global Competence and Other 21st Century Skills: Gaps, Fissures, and Erasures within OECD PISA

Proposal

Education has long been considered central to the national project, based on its contributions to human capital development, socialization of young people to institutions in support of the public or civic good, and social cohesion. These national purposes and dimensions have shifted in the global turn in schooling, spurred in the 1980s, which is marked by the rise in global doctrines in education, new international and transnational policy actors, international assessments, competency-based reforms, and movements to standardize and internationalize schooling systems. These policy interactions among and across national and global spaces in education are highly complex, and in some cases, it has been argued that systems of education are enacting a globally-oriented educational agenda in order to sustain and strengthen the national dimension, which Maxwell et al. (2019) refer to as cosmopolitan nationalism. Against this broader background, this paper focuses on global competence as a global movement and influential policy trend at global, transnational, national, and local levels (Engel, Rutkowski, & Thompson, 2019; Gardinier, 2021; Robertson, 2021). Drawing conceptually on the notion of cosmopolitan nationalism, this paper examines how notions of global competence are “taken up” and mobilized within a single local/state setting within the federal US context: the District of Columbia Public Schools, located in Washington, DC. I draw on policy documents and interviews with policy actors and stakeholders in the District of Columbia Public Schools as part of a larger qualitative study of global education in Washington, DC. Findings suggest how a global competence framework advanced by international, transnational, and national actors, namely the Asia Society and the OECD is leveraged and mobilized with respect to competing policy interests and priorities at the local level, including those related to academic achievement, college and career readiness, social and emotional learning, and equity and inclusion. These findings suggest a highly complex assemblage of global, national, and sub-national policy scales, which suggests a narrowing, prescriptive, and corporatized framework for global competence, while simultaneously providing space for local stakeholders to advocate for equitable access to globally-oriented educational initiatives.

Author

• Laura C. Engel, The George Washington University