Youths today exist in complex situated realities and face a time of great precarity (Puar, 2012). Given the large amount of literature and distinct instrumental and pedagogical agendas operating under the umbrella of GCE, we wonder how students’ lived, complex realities are engaged and/or over-stepped in the process of educating for global citizenship. Research suggests students already think of themselves as global citizens (e.g, Myers, 2006; Richardson, 2008). Taylor (2011) reminds that “global citizenship education of ‘bringing the world into our classrooms’ forgets that our classrooms are always already in this world” and inherits geo-political power relations written through social categories and identities (p. 177 see also Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010). Todd (2010) also points to “the real, on-the-ground issues currently being articulated around questions of citizenship, belonging, and intercultural exchange” (p. 244). In this paper, we reflect on our experiences facilitating a youth forum on global citizenship. The National Town Hall on Global Citizenship Project will occur in two parts during the winter of 2015. First, over a series of weeks, groups of students from across Canada engage with complex issues and create a framework and set of critical questions at their schools, using the internet to connect with other groups. They will receive feedback from expert panelist (including academics and activists) throughout this process. The larger event is scheduled for March 11 when several hundred students from across Canada will bring together many perspectives based on the work they have done in preparation. The student leaders will then begin a process of writing a policy brief that will be presented to UNESCO and to education leaders in Canada. Our role as facilitators involves helping to select the prompts (which draw on several media: newspapers, blogs, videos, etc.), the framing questions for student work, and the members of the ‘expert’ panelist who give the students feedback. We are motivated to facilitate a pedagogical approach that Expósito (2014) refers to as a “reflexive point”, whereby students “investigate their location within a complex network of power relations, and to analyse how such a positioning shapes their subjectivity and circumscribes their possibilities of action and thinking” (Expósito, 2014, p. 242). Our contribution to the panel will be some reflexive insights, identifying aspects of the project that could be modeled in other contexts and critically reflecting on the spaces of possibility and foreclosure in our experience with the project.

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