The Onto-Epistemic Foundations of Global Governance and Policies: A Decolonial and Settler Colonial Analysis of Global Citizenship Education in Hawai‘i

• In Event: Improving Teacher, Improving Teaching: Lessons from Practice

Proposal

This theoretical essay not only applies a settler colonial critique to the Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist foundations of global governance and global education policies, but also draws on decolonial scholars to suggest an ethical approach to constructing an alternative globality that respects and learns from onto-epistemic difference, rather than furthering the epistemicide of non-Western and Indigenous worldviews by forcing them to assimilate to Western modernity. This critique is rooted in an analysis of perspectives and policies related to global citizenship education in Hawai‘i, where the layers of coloniality are evident and continue to be contested. In advancing the aforementioned critique, this essay seeks to make an intervention in the literature on global governance, global education policy, and Global Citizenship Education (GCE), where settler colonial and decolonial lenses are scantly employed.
The present essay is based on a study conducted in 2020 that described teacher understandings and practices related to GCE in Hawai‘i. The GCE curriculum at public high schools in Hawai‘i is provided by an independent education NGO, Global Youth Organization (GYO, a pseudonym). Presently, 10 schools offer GCE as an elective course that counts towards one half credit in Social Studies. GYO provides an orientation each semester to introduce teachers to a curriculum that covers three units of current global issues. Teacher interviewees were asked about their perceptions of GCE, global-local tensions, and their teaching philosophies.
The present paper adds a theoretical dimension to the previous study, which was primarily descriptive. Our paper begins with a critical discussion of the dominant perspectives found in the literature related to GCE. This section addresses how none of the three dominant perspectives on GCE–neoliberal, liberal, and transformational–clarify what is meant by ‘global’ and ‘local.’ That is, the literature tends to ignore the onto-epistemic dimension: Authors fail to speak to the underlying worldview from which they are writing and within which ‘global’ and ‘local’ have meaning.
In response, the second section of this paper then turns to a discussion of the onto-epistemic and settler colonial foundations of global citizenship education. This section departs from the position that modern subjectivity did not arise in a vacuum but rather can be seen as the outcome of dynamics that played out over time within and beyond Europe. This section serves as the lens through which the interviewee perspectives from the previous study are re-interpreted. It spells out how contemporary writing on GCE is an extension of, and is necessarily constrained by, its Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist foundations. This section extends this line of argument by also signaling that the current system of global governance, which has been constructed by and fundamentally serves the interests of modern nation-states, cannot see beyond, or cannot meaningfully act in ways that threaten, the Western notions on which GCE is constructed (Rappleye & Komatsu, 2020). A necessary consequence is that the institutions of global governance justify and further the onto-epistemic basis of settler colonialism on a global scale.
After discussing the context of Hawaii in the third section and then describing the participants (from the previous study) and interpretive approach in the fourth section, the paper briefly synthesizes and relays the findings from the study conducted previously. The narrative in this section is built around teachers’ (a) perspectives on the meaning of GCE, (b) philosophies for teaching GCE, and (c) understanding of global-local tensions. These narratives are shared in order to then apply and reflect on the implications of the onto-epistemic lens constructed in an earlier section.
Once one is sensitized to the Christian-positivist-liberal-capitalist foundations of modern subjectivity, the coloniality of GCE is particularly evident. Not only were none of the GCE teachers Native Hawaiian, but none of the teachers questioned, critiqued, or seemed to be aware of the onto-epistemic paradigm from which GCE has emerged. For example, the comments of our interviewees reflected the mind-body split that is characteristic of Cartesian philosophy and that is at the heart of UNESCO’s theory of action for how to achieve a better world. Third, it stood out that the approach of GYO—the NGO supporting GCE teachers—itself departs from the global competencies framework of the OECD, rather than the framework endorsed by the Hawai‘i Department of Education which nominally endorses Hawaiian values.
However, as discussed further in our paper, there are clear limitations to Hawai‘i's framework, as well. Even though the framework—known as Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ)—is supposed to be consistent with “Hawaiian values, language, culture and history” (Hawaii State Department of Education, 2015), what one notes is that there is a disconnect between the language used in the framework and the concepts that guide a Hawaiian worldview. Furthermore, in the context of an Indigenous State founded on Indigenous principles, notions of “the global,” “citizenship,” and “education” would look very different. For example, as highlighted by Bagnall and Moore (2020) in one of the few studies that approaches GCE from an Indigenous perspective, “The Aboriginal meaning of ‘Country’ includes the landscape, waters, air, trees, rocks, plants, animals, foods, medicines, minerals, stories, …” (p. 72). Rather than thinking of citizenship as being a member of an abstract political entity, the focus, in part, would be on the cultivation of a different and less destructive relationship between people and the natural world.
The paper concludes by drawing on the work of decolonial scholars to suggest an approach to global citizenship education that could contribute to “constructing an ethical globality” by confronting “the concrete production of global culture, knowledge and subjectivity in the historical context of colonialism” (De Lissovoy, 2010, p. 282). Practically speaking, the suggestion of De Lissovoy (2010) is to center a “global ethical and decolonial politics and knowledge … outside Western traditions while nevertheless reaching out to communicate with and include them” (p. 283). The argument for such a point of departure (outside Western traditions) is that the “hallmark of imperialism and colonialism are their partitions and divisions of the world” and that such “conceptual and culture partitioning ought to be challenged … without covertly reinscribing the epistemological centrality of Eurocentric reason” (p. 283).

Authors

• Yumi Saito, University of Hawaii at Manoa

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii