Public mass education has been widely used as a mechanism for socialization and disciplining of populations, but it has also attained more tasks than these. As we may see from numerous studies, it is used as an instrument for creating social change and realizing the process of nation building (e.g. Anderson, 1991; Boli, 1989; Gellner, 1983; Kaplan, 2006). Yet over the last decades, as globalization process became more and more influential, education and globalization also became interconnected in complicated ways. Education became a discursive battlefield where globalization is discussed in terms of more and more intensive economic, political and cultural linkages and geographical dependencies across great geographical distances. It came to be understood as a concrete weapon, or instrument, with whose help citizens (and their nations) became better equipped to handle globalization processes. Hence education is supposed to prepare citizens for a ‘new global world’ at the same time as that global world is making new demands on citizens’ compliance with regard to the nation. Our ongoing project, Future citizens in pedagogical texts and education policies –Examples from Lebanon, Sweden and Turkey, provides three national examples for a closer analysis of both the historical development of education and nation-building and more contemporary debates on globalization, nation, national development and the education of the ‘right’ citizen. However this paper will present results mainly from the Turkish case and some examples from Sweden for a comparison. The project is financed by the Swedish Research Council’s Committee for Educational Sciences.

The overall aim of the project is to examine, by adopting a transnational perspective, how globalisation processes are expressed in educational policies and pedagogical texts. Questions asked are how the ‘right’ citizen is presented and depicted and what values are highlighted – at both national and global level. Whose history is made visible and what voices are heard? What groups or categories are identified? Among the specific issues that the project addresses to various bodies of material, this paper will mainly focus on how gender identities are narrated – this relates to two broader sets of issues in the project:

• How are the ’citizen’ and the citizen’s identity constructed in relation to place, nation, language, religion, ethnicity and gender in policy documents for schools and pedagogical texts?

• How is the relationship between national and global perspectives treated in relation to the ’citizen’ in guidance documents for schools and pedagogical texts?

Theoretically this project proceeds from and combine several fields of research: social science research on transnationalism, research on education and nation-building, education policy and forms of governance, research on textbooks and the globalization of education. Intersected insights provided by the studies on gender, nationalism, citizenship and, identity are used (e.g. Anderson, 1991; Chatterjee, 1993; Faist, 2000; Yuval-Davis, 1997). As Yuval-Davis suggests, constructions of nationhood involve specific notions of manhood and womanhood, and discourses on nation and gender intersect and are constructed by each other in various ways (1997). 

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