The Global In Citizenship Education. Perspectives From Italian Lower Secondary School Teachers
Author(s):
Sara Franch (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

ERG SES D 13, Secondary Education

Paper Session

Time:
2017-08-21
13:30-15:00
Room:
W4.20
Chair:
Shosh Leshem

Contribution

Since the late 1960s, the global dimension in education seems to be slowly moving from the margins to the mainstream. According to Bourn (2015, p. 23), “the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the biggest ever expansion of support, interest and engagement with learning about global and development issues in the leading industrialised countries”. The term Global Citizenship Education (GCE) emerged in the 1990s at a time of increased interest in the concept of citizenship and in the need to reconceptualise it in relation to the global domain (Steiner, 1996). It emerged from within the development education movement in the UK as “a way of interpreting personal and social responsibility and engagement in global and development issues, with a nod to educational agendas around identity and political citizenship (Bourn, 2015: 22). GCE is now the term generally used in international fora and debates and is the predominant concept in the scholarly literature.

Pashby (2008; 2011) talks about a global imperative in education. The prevalence of a discourse of globalisation and of the need to respond educationally to global problems puts increasing pressures on schools to engage with and respond to the global, by facilitating the acquisition of “a sense of global-mindedness that encourages students to develop a consciousness of global connectivity and responsibility” (Pashby, 2008, p. 17). Students are seen as “global citizens in the making”. There is a strong vision that a ‘global’ citizen is one who is aware of global inter-connectedness, “who ‘responsibly’ interacts with and ‘understands’ others while being self-critical of his/her position and who keeps open a dialogical and complex understanding rather than a closed and static notion of identities” (Pashby, 2011, p. 428).

But GCE is complex, ambiguous, and challenging. First, it “emerges from a nexus of interrelated discursive fields, each of them contested as well as marked by particular histories, challenges, and possibilities” (Pashby, 2016, p. 69). Andreotti (2011, p. 307) underlines that the “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”. Second, the concept of GCE is “entwined with a number of overlapping ideas including development education, democratic education, education for cosmopolitan citizenship, peace education and human rights education” (Oxley & Morris, 2013, p. 302) as well as intercultural education and education for sustainable development. Third, in promoting GCE, it is important to recognise that it may have complex and contradictory consequences that educators may not always be able to envision and predict as globalization “defines a particular problem space” in which difficult and controversial contemporary issues arise (Pashby, 2008, p. 24). Lastly, as Pashby (2016) underlines, the field is not homogeneous as the international literature on GCE includes a broad range of perspectives with some drawing on liberal humanistic frameworks (Noddings, Nussbaum, UNESCO), while others adopting more critical ones (Andreotti, Birk, Pike, Rizvi, Shultz).

The purpose of the research, on which this paper is based, is to learn whether and how teachers conceptualise citizenship and particularly global citizenship and what curricular devises and pedagogies they use to address (global) citizenship in their classrooms. It combines two underrepresented interests. First, it responds to Marshall’s call for empirical research on GCE to uncover “dominant modes of pedagogic practice and knowledge orientation in mainstream schooling” (Marshall, 2011, p. 424). Second, as the bulk of the writings on GCE is from England, Australia, Canada and the US, it adds the case of Italy, where GCE is being practised but is marginal within pedagogical academic discourses

Method

The paper is based on a research on how GCE is practiced in lower secondary schools (approximate age of students is 11-13 years old), representing the last level of schooling in Italy common for all students. The geographical focus is Trentino-South Tyrol, a border mountainous region in northern Italy that, due to the presence of linguistic minorities, enjoys a special autonomy within the Italian political system. This means that its two Provinces have legislative and administrative powers in areas such as education, that are normally under the competence and responsibility of the state. The research uses Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to study the meanings that teachers assign to GCE, focusing on how teachers understand and interpret this concept and how they translate it into pedagogical practice. It addresses the following questions: Citizenship and the global imperative in the curriculum: Which citizenship discourses are dominant in the curriculum? How is the curriculum addressing the need to respond educationally to the global? Meanings of citizenship: Which meanings of citizenship do teachers hold and promote? Is citizenship the horizon within which their subject areas are located? Do teachers impose a certain citizenship reality? Do they leave citizenship completely unexplored? Or do they create spaces and opportunities for students to reflect and define their own sense of identity, belonging and responsibility? Meanings of global citizenship: How do teachers understand global citizenship? As an expansion of national citizenship? How do they engage with a concept so ambiguous and complex? How do they translate it into pedagogical practice? Data are collected in 6 schools in Trentino-South Tyrol. The schools, located in both the main urban centres and in small towns in the rural valleys, are currently being selected. Methods: in depth interviews with approximately 12 motivated teachers. The teachers, from different disciplinary areas, are currently being selected on the basis of particular criteria. A key assumption is that teachers’ exposure to GCE concepts and pedagogy are an integral step in sustaining teachers’ interest, motivation and capacity in engaging in citizenship education with a global orientation. Following this assumption, priority is given to selecting teachers that meet one or both of these criteria: (a) Teachers have had some exposure to GCE through pre-service or in-service education (courses, seminars, conferences, …); (b) Teachers’ interest and attempts in incorporating a GCE perspective in their practice is known beyond their school

Expected Outcomes

The research is ongoing. At the moment, schools have been selected and teachers will be interviewed in the period February – June 2017. Exploratory interviews have already been conducted. In line with the Grounded Theory approach, interviews will be first transcribed verbatim and then a coding system grounded in the data will be developed in steps (open coding, axial coding, selective coding) to identify the core-category, the macro-categories and the conceptual linkages between them. The coding system will then be used to analyse the data from which a theory on the meaning and sense of GCE for teachers is developed. It is expected that the presentation at the ECER Conference 2017 will include the coding system developed from the data and the preliminary findings of the analysis. In particular, it will propose a preliminary pedagogical framework to analyse the meanings and practices of global citizenship education of Italian lower secondary school teachers

References

Andreotti, V. (2006). Soft versus critical global citizenship education. Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 3, 40-51. Andreotti, V. (2010). Postcolonial and post-critical ‘global citizenship education’. In E. Geoffrey, F. Chahid & I. Sally (Eds.), Education and social change: Connecting local and global perspectives (pp. 238-250). London: Continuum. Andreotti, V. (2011). The political economy of global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3-4), 307-310.  Birk, T. (2016). Critical cosmopolitanism as a new paradigm for global learning. In I. Langran, & T. Birk (Eds.), Globalization and global citizenship. interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 38-55). London and New York: Routledge. Bourn, D. (2015). The Theory and Practice of Development Education. A Pedagogy for Global Social Justice. London, New York: Routledge. Marshall, H. (2011). Instrumentalism, ideals and imaginaries: Theorising the contested space of global citizenship education in schools. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3-4), 411-426.  Noddings, N. (2005). Educating Citizens for Global Awareness. New York: Teachers College Press Nussbaum, M. (2002). Education for citizenship in an era of global connection. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21(4), 289-303.  Oxley, L., & Morris, P. (2013). Global Citizenship: A Typology for Distinguishing its Multiple Conceptions. British Journal of Educational Studies, 61(3), 301-325.  Pashby, K. (2008). Demands on and of Citizenship and Schooling: "Belonging" and "Diversity" in the Global Imperative. In M. O'Sullivan, & K. Pashby (Eds.), Citizenship Education in the Era of Globalization. Canadian Perspectives (pp. 9-26). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pashby, K. (2011). Cultivating Global Citizens: Planting New Seeds or Pruning the Perennials? Looking for the Citizen-subject in Global Citizenship Education Theory. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 9(3-4), 427-442.  Pashby, K. (2016). The Global, Citizenship, and Education as Discursive Fields: Towards Disrupting the Reproduction of Colonial Systems of Power. In I. Langran, & T. Birk (Eds.), Globalization and Global Citizenship: Interdisciplinary Approaches (pp. 69-86). London & New York: Routledge Pike, G. (2008). Citizenship education in a global context. In M. O'Sullivan, & K. Pashby (Eds.), Citizenship education in the era of globalization. Canadian perspectives (pp. 41-51). Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Pike, G. (2008). Reconstructing the legend: Educating for global citizenship  In A. A. Abdi, & L. Shultz (Eds.), Educating for human rights and global citizenship  (pp. 223-237) Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rizvi, F. (2008). Epistemic virtues and cosmopolitan learning. The Australian Educational Researcher, 35(1), 17-35 Shultz, L. (2007). Educating for Global Citizenship: Conflicting Agendas and Understandings. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 53(3), 248-258 

Author Information

Sara Franch (presenting / submitting)
Free University of Bolzano/Bozen
Education
Bressanone

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