There is heightened consciousness around Global Citizenship Education in the international educational arena. It is included as a key principle of the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI, n.d.). UNESCO (2014) has included global citizenship in the reaffirming fundamental principles and as a key imperative in its position paper on Education post-2015. It is a strong discourse framing international understandings of education at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels as well as in in informal education. In support of these developments there has been a growing amount of scholarly writing in educational journals, book compilations, conference papers, and symposiums devoted to GCE. Andreotti (2011) notices that “[t]he different meanings attributed to ‘global citizenship education’ depend on contextually situated assumptions about globalisation, citizenship and education that prompt questions about boundaries, flows, power relations, belonging, rights, responsibilities, otherness, interdependence, as well as social reproduction and/or contestation” (p. 307; see also Marshall, 2009, 2011). This symposium brings together scholars from across European and North American contexts working to theoretically map and practically engage with the critical possibilities in GCE.

There is a growing body of research calling for a critical approach to GCE that recognizes the concept itself is embedded in the very system of power relations that it seeks to change. Critical GCE work (Andreotti, 2006) aims to empower individuals to go beyond paternalistic and benevolent ideas of helping others ‘over there’. Critical GCE foregrounds recognition of complicity within geopolitical power relations and opportunities to interrogate and transform status quo power relations (Shultz, 2007). Students are led to think differently and to reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their own cultures and contexts so that they can imagine different futures and take ethical responsibility for their actions and decisions (Eidoo et al., 2011).  

This symposium is organized around the question: what are the theoretical and pedagogical possibilities for critical global citizenship? It includes a set of papers that engage with theoretical and practical issues and the possibilities and risks of a mainstreaming of the concept of GCE. Rene Suša provides a theoretical engagement with a key tension within global citizenship: using a universal category for citizens while recognizing particulars, and especially in respect to excluded/suppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Žižek, he promotes spaces for a critical reflection on the role of GCE within the context of (post)modern globalized societies. Karen Pashby and Lynette Shultz build from a critical approach to GCE to reflect on their experiences facilitating secondary students across Canadian contexts towards writing a statement on global citizenship. Connecting to some of the questions raised by Suša, they speak to the possibilities and foreclosures involved in attempting to open up critical spaces for youth to express their multiple and dynamic understandings of global citizenship, particularly in the precarious times in which they live and which frames how they imagine being citizens. Momodou Sallah contributes a practical example of connecting youth who experience marginalization and providing an opportunity for critical global citizenship education outside of formal educational structures. He relays insights into using global youth work as methodological approach to explore local-global issues. Dalene Swanson references an online international transdisciplinary course on global citizenship to raise possibilities of working across epistemic and political borders in engendering what she refers to as a ‘glocalising pedagogy’ and praxis (Swanson, 2011), much like a praxis of phronesis. It is in the liminality of working between local situated contexts and interconnected global conditions of inequality, injustice and oppression that deeper ethical stances and positionalities as well as ontologies of agency can be highlighted and raised to the level of action-oriented possibilities.

Andreotti, V. (2011). The political economy of global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3-4), 307–310. Andreotti, V. & Souza, M. (Eds.) (2011). Postcolonial perspectives on global citizenship education (pp. 1–6). New York, NY: Routledge Eidoo, S., Ingram, L., MacDonald, A., Nabavi, M., Pashby, K., & Stille, S. (2011). Through the kaleidoscope: Intersections between theoretical perspectives and classroom implications in critical global citizenship education. Canadian Journal of Education, 34(4), 59–84. Marshall, H. (2009). Educating the European citizen in the global age: Engaging with the postnational and identifying a research agenda. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 41(2), 247–267. GEFI (Global Education First Initiative). (n.d.). Foster Global Citizenship. Website. http://www.globaleducationfirst.org/220.htm Shultz, L. (2007). Educating for global citizenship: Conflicting agendas and understandings. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 53(3), 248–258. Swanson, D.M. (2011). Parallaxes and paradoxes of Global Citizenship: Critical reflections and possibilities of praxis in/through an international online course. In L. Schulz, A. Abdi and G. Richardson (Eds.), Global Citizenship Education in Post Secondary Institutions: Theories, Practices, Policies, (pp. 120-139). New York: Peter Lang Publishers. UNESCO (2014). Position paper on education post-2015. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002273/227336E.pdf.