Globalization and technological advances of the 21^st century have caused a blurring of national lines, which formerly comprised the basis of a nearly indisputable model for civic identity (Beck, 2002). These societal changes have caused an unprecedented rise in the popularity of alternative, cosmopolitan identity models, namely global citizenship (Oxley & Morris, 2013). In order to prepare students to navigate and thrive in modern global society, many countries including the US (Rapoport, 2010), China (Law, 2010) Canada (Schweisfurth, 2006), South Korea (Moon & Woo Koo, 2011), and several European nations (O’Connor & Faas, 2012) have begun adding curricular contents aimed at developing a global orientation among students. These globally oriented contents are often grouped under a title of Global Citizenship Education (GCE).

The rise of GCE incorporation in schools and education system has happened simultaneously to the production of more and more scholarship surrounding the topic, both empirical and theoretical; and many empirical studies point to a potential gap between policy and practice. Additionally, although  several frameworks for categorizing GCE have been developed- there is a wide array of definitions and forms of GCE in use both in the scholarship and education systems, possibly causing the concept itself to become somewhat of an empty vessel.

What motivated our current endeavor was the apparent absence of systematic, conceptual reviews focusing specifically on GCE and observing its manifestations in exclusively empirical (not theoretical) works. For example, Parmenter’s (2011) review includes and concentrates on studies of GCE in higher education, and Oxley and Morris’s  (2013) does not concentrate solely on GCE but rather on conceptions of global citizenship in general. Moreover, it is necessary to consolidate and thematically analyze empirical literature to better enable identification of gaps between theory and practice in the future, especially in light of the rapid development worldwide of policy and scholarship surrounding the topic.

In this review, we first introduce a brief theoretical framework introducing the concept of global citizenship as a product of globalization and provide some insights into the current debates surrounding GCE as well as scholarly models to categorize related elements. After explaining our methodological procedure we present our analysis, which involved three distinct stages: first, we created an ad-hoc deductive categorization of the articles in our sample according to the region or country in which the studies were performed. During this stage we applied the most comprehensive taxonomy to date, developed by Oxley and Morris (2013), to demonstrate the most and least dominant types of GCE addressed in empirical studies in our cohort and map the current landscape of the field. In the second stage, we illustrated the commonalities and caveats located when the cohort was examined according to the articles’ main focus (teachers, students, and curriculum); the last stage of our analysis focused on the overall themes that emerged from the cohort as a whole. Finally, we discuss methodological and conceptual issues for scholars executing both theoretical and empirical research in the field of GCE to take note of, based on our findings.

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