The ethnic diversity of schools is increasing around the world. Given geo-political tensions raised by increased migration, heightened religious conflict and raised levels of poverty at a time of global economic recession, how pupils relate to global others is a pressing issue for teachers. At the same time, schools are under pressure to reform their curricula in line with international/EU/national policy agendas and to implement these policies under high-stakes accountability conditions (Sahlberg, 2011). The European Commission Key Competences for Lifelong Learning (EC, 2007) serves as one example.

The school curriculum operates as a powerful political message system. It may serve as a tool of oppression, for example, through the promotion of gender, racially or culturally-biased knowledge or as a tool of empowerment for marginalised social groups (Apple, 1996). Students may pay close attention to, rethink, challenge or simply reject school knowledge as they try to make meaning in the classroom (Todd, 2001). The study argues that the concepts and language underpinning curriculum policy and classroom texts relating to the global are informed by political and ethical discourses that influence student and teacher thinking about the world, themselves and others. In Social Studies curricula, this raises theoretical questions about global difference and empirical questions about teacher practices relating to controversial issues of global citizenship and relations with global others. This theoretical enquiry investigates discourses of curriculum knowledge and difference in school texts from three European countries as a precursor to the construction of a methodology to critically evaluate curriculum policies and classroom resources relating to critical global citizenship. The main research question is: What discourses of difference underpin curriculum knowledge about global others in national and school curriculum policy, textbooks and resources in Civics/ Citizenship, Geography and History curricula?

In ethnically diverse classrooms in Europe, transnational students with complex multiple, evolving and contextual identities (Banks 2008) experience curricula increasingly dominated by neoliberal discourses of nation-building and self-responsibilisation, haunted by the ghosts of colonialism (Roman, 2003; Mayo et al, 2009). This enquiry considers curriculum policies and texts about global others (people, places and relations), by thinking of nations as ‘imagined political communities’ (Anderson, p.6) not as locations of homogenous culture, and by investigating the ambivalence and instability of language within narratives of the nation (Bhabha, 1994). It analyses curriculum texts in relation to Mannion et al’s (2011) claim that political analysis is neglected in configurations of knowledge about global citizenship, and finally, the project tests McEwan’s argument about the invisibility of knowledge about colonial history (2009).

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