LIBRO Conversations On Global Citizenship Education Perspectives On Research, Teaching, and Learning in

Conversations on Global
Citizenship Education
This volume offers a remarkable collection of theoretically and practi-

cally grounded conversations with internationally recognized scholars
who share their perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in
relation to university research, teaching, and learning.
Conversations on Global Citizenship Education brings together
the narratives of a diverse array of educators who share their unique
experiences of navigating GCE in the modern university. Conversations
focus on why and how educators’ theoretical and empirical perspectives
on GCE are essential for achieving an all-embracing GCE curriculum
which underpins global peace. Drawing on the Freirean concept of “con-
scientization”, GCE is presented as an educational imperative to combat
growing inequality, seeping nationalism, and post-truth politics.
This timely volume will be of interest to educators who are seeking to
develop their theoretical understanding of GCE into teaching practice,
researchers and students who are new to GCE and who seek dynamic
starting points for their research, and general audience who are inter-
ested in learning more about the history, philosophy, and practice of
GCE.
Emiliano Bosio is a Senior Lecturer at Tokyo Woman’s Christian Univer-

sity, Japan.
Critical Global Citizenship Education
Edited by Carlos Alberto Torres, University of California
Los Angeles, USA.
1 Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Critical Global

Carlos Alberto Torres
2 Educating the Global Environmental Citizen

Understanding Ecopedagogy in Local and Global Contexts
Greg William Misiaszek
3 The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt

(Re)Imagining Subjects and Citizens
Edited by Jason Nunzio Dorio, Ehaab D. Abdou, Nashwa
Moheyeldine
4 Teacher Education for Sustainable Development and Global

Citizenship
Edited by Philip M. Bamber
5 Exploring the Complexities in Global Citizenship Education

Hard Spaces, Methodologies, and Ethics
Edited by Lauren Ila Misiaszek
6 Conversations on Global Citizenship Education

Perspectives on Research, Teaching, and Learning in Higher
Education
Edited by Emiliano Bosio
Conversations on Global
Perspectives on Research, Teaching,
and Learning in Higher Education
Edited by Emiliano Bosio

First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Emiliano Bosio to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-36544-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-74056-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-34689-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
List of Figures and Tablesvii

Acknowledgmentsviii
List of Contributorsix
Forewordxiii
Introductionxix
PART I
Critical Views in Global Citizenship Education:
Critical Pedagogy, Otherwise/Postcoloniality,
Conviviality, and Planetary Citizenship 1
1 Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship Education3

HENRY A. GIROUX AND EMILIANO BOSIO
2 Global Citizenship Otherwise13

SHARON STEIN AND VANESSA ANDREOTTI
3 Global Citizenship Education as a Counter Colonial

Project: Engaging Multiple Knowledge Systems for
Transformational Change37
LYNETTE SHULTZ
4 From Global to Planetary Citizenship: A Proposal

for Evolving Brazil University Curriculum45
SILVIA ELISABETH MORAES, EDUARDO MORAES ARRAUT,
AND JOSEFINA MORAES ARRAUT
5 Cultivating Global Citizenship Education and Its

Implications for Education in South Africa62
YUSEF WAGHID
vi Contents
PART II
Global Skills for Social Justice, Critical Semiotics, and
the Intersections of Neoliberalism, Internationalization,
and Global Citizenship Education 73
6 Global Skills and Global Citizenship Education 75

DOUGLAS BOURN
7 Educating for Global Citizenship in Diverse

and Unequal Societies 89
MASSIMILIANO TAROZZI
8 Global Citizenship Education as Critical Global Semiotics 103

MAUREEN ELLIS
9 Intersections of Neoliberalism, Internationalization,

and Global Citizenship Education 123
MIRI YEMINI
PART III
Flourishing, Awareness, Responsibility, Participation,
and Humanism as the Underpinning for Global
Citizenship Education 135
10 Flourishing and Global Citizenship Education 137

WILLIAM GAUDELLI
11 Global Citizenship Education as Awareness,

Responsibility, and Participation 153
HANS SCHATTLE
12 Global Citizenship Education and Humanism:

A Process of Becoming and Knowing 170
MARIA GUAJARDO
13 Global Citizenship Education as a Metacritical

Pedagogy: Concluding Reflections 185
EMILIANO BOSIO
Index 190
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
2.1 In Earth’s CARE Global Justice Framework 16
2.2 and 2.3 The House Modernity Built and Its Hidden Costs 24
7.1 A Global Social Justice Framework 90
13.1 Principles of Metacritical Global Citizenship Education 186
Tables
I.1 Example of Interview Questions xxi
2.1 Mainstream Global Citizenship/Global Citizenship
Otherwise23
2.2 Modern Promises and the Colonial Processes
That Subsidize Them 25
2.3 LAPSED Approaches to Social Justice and Change 26
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book came from my dialogues on Global Citizenship
Education (GCE) with Carlos Alberto Torres who I would like to par-
ticularly thank for inspiring my work. I would also like to thank all the
outstanding scholars from all over the world for their contributions and
commitment to support this book, which I am hopeful will make an
important contribution to research, teaching, and learning in GCE and
demonstrate its value toward more just societies.
List of Contributors
Vanessa Andreotti is a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race,

Inequalities, and Global Change in the Department of Educational
Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines
historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of inequalities and
how these limit or enable possibilities for collective existence and
global change.
Eduardo Moraes Arraut is Adjunct Professor of Geomatics at the
Department of Hydric Resources and Environment, Civil Engineering
Division, Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA), where he
teaches the undergraduate and postgraduate courses in remote sensing
(RS) and geographical information systems (GIS). He is also the
co-coordinator for South America of the Group for Sustainable Use
and Management of Ecosystems (SUME), Commission on Ecosystem
Management (CEM), and International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN).
Josefina Moraes Arraut is Adjunct Professor at the Department of
Atmospheric Sciences at the Federal University of Campina Grande.
Josefina teaches several undergraduate and graduate courses on the
topics – Dynamic Meteorology, Synoptic Meteorology, Physical
Oceanography, Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction and supervises various
MSc and PhD students on their thesis work on those same areas. Prior
to this engagement, she worked as a researcher at the Centre of Earth
System Sciences in Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, as
a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere
Studies, at George Mason University and as a visiting research scientist
at the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading.
Emiliano Bosio is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Tokyo Woman’s
Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. He is also a Research Committee
Member at the Center for Global Nonkilling (CGNK) in the United
States and is Contributor to the Academic Network on Global
x List of Contributors
Education and Learning (ANGEL), a UK based network established
in close cooperation between Global Education Network of Europe
(GENE) and the Development Education Research Centre (DERC) at
the University College London, Institute of Education. His work is
centered on developing and integrating innovative, ethical, and critical
approaches to global learning and global citizenship education into
university curriculum across East Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Douglas Bourn is Professor of Development Education and Director of the
Development Education Research Centre at University College London,
UK. He is author of The Theory and Practice of Development Education
(2015), Understanding Global Skills for 21st Century Professions (2018)
and editor of Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Education and Learning
(2020) and was previously (2008–2015) the editor of the International
Journal of Development Education and Global Learning.
Maureen Ellis is Senior Research Associate at the Development Education
Research Centre, University College London, and Associate Lecturer,
The Open University, UK. Maureen does research in Linguistic
Anthropology, Cognitive Semiotics, and Comparative Education. Her
vision/mission is communicating Progressive Revelation; Omega union
of Science and Spirituality; emergent, evolutionary co-creative Quantum
Consciousness.
William Gaudelli is the eighth Dean of the College of Education
at Lehigh University. Dean Gaudelli’s career spans 30 years as a
classroom teacher, researcher, professor, and seasoned administrator.
A prominent international scholar, his research areas focus on
global citizenship education and teacher education and development.
Dr. Gaudelli most recently served as the Chair of the Department of
Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Henry A. Giroux is a world-renowned educator, author and public
intellectual. He holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship
in the Public Interest, and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in
Critical Pedagogy. Professor Giroux has authored, or coauthored over
65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more
than 250 public lectures, and been a regular contributor to print,
television, and radio news media outlets.
Maria Guajardo is Professor in Leadership Studies at Soka University,
Tokyo, Japan. Her area of expertise includes leadership, with a
focus on women, GCE, and leadership development. She served as
the inaugural Dean for the Faculty of International Liberal Arts at
Soka University, then as Vice-President, and is the founding director
of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at Soka University. Prior to her
arrival in Japan, Maria was sought out internationally as a speaker
List of Contributors xi
and trainer on Leadership, Inclusive Excellence, and Racial Healing.
She is the recipient of a U.S. Congressional Commendation for her
advancement of Latino education. Currently she serves as a Trustee for
Soka University of America. Maria, a licensed clinical psychologist,
received her A.B. from Harvard University, and her M.A. and Ph.D.
from the University of Denver.
Silvia Elisabeth Moraes is Professor and Supervisor at the education
postgraduate programme, Federal University of Ceará. Her
postdoctorate research was on Habermas’ theory of communicative
action at the University of São Paulo. She held a Senior Internship
at the Development Education Research Center (DERC), University
College London (UCL). Professors Moraes’ main interests are
curriculum theory, citizenship, theory of communicative action, and
postcolonialism.
Hans Schattle is Professor of Political Science at Yonsei University in
Seoul, South Korea. He works across the usual dividing lines in
political science and international relations, with interests ranging
from globalization, citizenship, media, and democracy to the
politics of Europe and East Asia. Professor Schattle has written
two books, The Practices of Global Citizenship and Globalization
and Citizenship, both published by Rowman & Littlefield, as well
as numerous articles in academic journals. He earned his doctorate
in politics at Oxford and, most recently, he has coedited the volume
Making Social Democrats: Citizens, Mindsets, Realities, published
by Manchester University Press.
Lynette Shultz is Professor and Director of the Centre for Global Citizenship
Education and Research at the University of Alberta. She is an advisor on
several international boards including the Global Centre for Pluralism,
The World University Network, and the International Research Center
on Global Citizenship Education.
Sharon Stein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational
Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her work offers critical
and decolonial analyses of the role of higher education in society, and
seeks to pluralize the available imaginaries of justice, responsibility,
sustainability, and change.
Massimiliano Tarozzi is full professor in Education at the Department of
Life Quality Studies, where he teaches in the areas of General Education
and Global Citizenship Education and he is chairing the International
Research Centre on Global Citizenship Education. He is Director of the
International Research Centre on Global Citizenship Education (IRC-
GloCEd) at the University of Bologna and Coordinator of the Academic
Network on Global Education & Learning (ANGEL) in the UK.
xii List of Contributors
Carlos Alberto Torres is Distinguished Professor of Education at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and former Director of
the UCLA-Latin American Center. He is also the Founding Director of
the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina;
and UCLA. He is considered one of the world’s leading authorities
on Latin American Studies and Global Citizenship Education, and
the principal biographer of Brazilian philosopher and critical social
theorist, Paulo Freire.
Yusef Waghid is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy and education
and reads philosophy of education at Stellenbosch University in South
Africa. He is the principal editor of the acclaimed journal, Citizenship
Teaching and Learning. He is coeditor with Ian Davies, Li Hu Ho,
Dina Kiwan, Carla Peck, Andrew Peterson, and Edda Sant of Global
Citizenship and Education (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan).
Miri Yemini is Senior Lecturer at the Tel Aviv University and Cochair
UNESCO Chair on Technology, Internationalization, and Education.
Foreword
Books speak to us
“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the

threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put
on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress, I enter
the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and
there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born.
And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their
actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space
of four hours, I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty
no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”1
In this book of conversations, Professor Emiliano Bosio raises several

open-ended questions introducing four themes. These are: i) the ration-
ales behind GCE, ii) the operations of global citizenship concept in the
institutional context of universities, iii) the attitudes vis a vis global cit-
izenship in their own universities, and iv) how GCE intersect with the
domains of learning objectives, curriculum, and instruction.
Built through these questions, these dialogues reference critical views
of global citizenship which is the first section of the book; the second
section addresses what are the global skills for social justice; and the
third section discusses the humanistic foundations of GCE. This last
subject is consistent with the model of the United Nations and particu-
larly UNESCO. At the end of the book, there is a synthesis from editor
Emiliano Bosio confronting the dilemmas, conundrums, and challenges
of implementation of GCE in higher education, not only in industrial
advance societies – home of the majority of the authors in this volume –
but also in developing social formations.
Because this book is accessible yet rigorous, and speaks about polit-
ical activism and GCE as a potential social movement 2 , in many ways,
this book follows the pledge of Michael Burawoy for public sociology.
This style of scientific disciplinary work in the eyes of Burawoy should
engage “multiple publics in multiple ways”.3 I would argue that public
xiv Foreword
sociology, like public science, should engage particularly nonacademic
audiences. A book of dialogues is a perfect conduit for this endeavor.
The origins of this book date back to a dialogue that Professor
Emiliano Bosio and I had at UCLA in 2018, when he interviewed me
for his dissertation. I derived a great deal of pleasure in our dialogue
and began to understand better the important research that Professor
Emiliano Bosio was conducting.4 Apropos of our dialogues, I invited
Professor Emiliano Bosio who was ready to finish his doctoral disserta-
tion at the University of London and a seasoned scholar in his own right,
to produce a book of dialogues for the series.
Dialogue is a quintessential feature of academia and scholarship. We
dialogue with authors dead centuries ago and we call them classics. We
dialogue with contemporary authors and we learn from them and even
confront their views which is part and parcel of knowledge construction
and scientific work. We dialogue in our classrooms with our students, in
person and through digital pedagogy but we dialogue all the time about
our areas of expertise, commitments, research findings, and dreams.
Reading Machiavelli some years ago, I was struck by a famous sen-
tence as I discovered later, which become very meaningful to me, and is
the epigraph for the first section of this Foreword. Since my early begin-
nings as a reader, I rarely approached books only as sources of informa-
tion. The good ones allowed me to engage in dialogue with their authors.
Listen to what Machiavelli’s metaphorical analysis tells us; we know
there are no many palaces, courts, or rituals of changing our clothes out
of respect to these dead masters after arriving to our study these days.
However, in many ways, those books that become meaningful for many
generations are somewhat independent of the author, even though the
author communicates with us through her or his prose or narrative. A
vignette will illustrate. I was with Paulo Freire on a lovely spring day of
1983 visiting Stanford University bookstore. In one of the shelves, Freire
saw his famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Rather than getting it,
holding it, caressing the pages of the book as if it will be one of his chil-
dren, he walked past the book and told me that every time he sees a copy
of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he would like to say “good morning”.
This simply vignette helps understand that for Freire, his now-classic
book has taken a life on its own. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a book
that challenges, illuminates, and questions generations of readers while
entertaining all sorts of dialogues for people in the pursuit of knowledge
and praxis for social justice.
Dialogue as a Source of Learning and Democracy
“The moral qualities of dialogue or deliberation account for yet

another conception of democracy relying on the transformation of
people’s preferences. Despite many versions of this general outlook,
all rely on dialogue as a means of containing selfish interest and
Foreword xv
the power of factions based on them. This constraint is achieved
by dialogue’s tendency to exclude those positions which cannot be
sustained on an impartial basis”5
As the editor of this book indicated, “The tone of the interviews – which
inevitably takes the shape of conversations on GCE – connects the nar-
rative of senior educators and makes the book distinctive in three differ-
ent ways. Firstly, while some publications have had elements focusing on
critically analyzing GCE, it is unusual for senior educators’ “voices” who
actually teach GCE to be represented within a book, and it is not common
for specific localized theory and pedagogy regarding GCE to be closely
examined in a form of conversation. Secondly, this work is unique as a sin-
gle author publication that focuses on critically analyzing GCE in terms
of conversation with those educators who have considerable experience
in the field. Thirdly, the intention of this book is to offer a “roadmap”
regarding GCE theoretical approaches and teaching experience.”
We may have underestimated the value of dialogues in academy.
Philosopher of education, Nicholas Burbules highlighted the different
meanings of dialogue which should be part and parcel of our pedagogy,
teaching, and research. Burbules argues that dialogue has many mean-
ings. It could be defined as inquiry, as conversation, as debate, as a game,
as instruction, and as a type of interaction which, in his opinion, can be
also constructed as a pedagogical communicative relation.6 In the same
vein, I have argued in one of my books that dialogue is a method and
experience of learning and struggle.7
Dialogue has been defined as a particular kind of communica-
tive relation, a conversational interaction directed, and intentionally
toward teaching and learning. Dialogue is different from storytelling,
which entertains and may eventually educate. From critical perspec-
tives, through dialogue and narrative, critical experiences can be con-
structed as theories that may speak of truth and sincere caring, ever
more important in this time and age of post-truth dishevelment. Alas,
dialogues also speak about the struggles, dreams, and hopes of the par-
ticipants.8 Dialogues can empower but also disempower. Dialogues that
empower are engaging, imaginative, playful. Engaging dialogue allows
oral stories to come alive, vignettes to be educational, and they become
a tool of enlightenment and empowerment as well as a source of recon-
structed collective histories embedded in individual stories. For instance,
dialogues about peace work, drawing particularly from oral stories of
women peace activists, offer a unique perspective of social struggles in
the United States.9
Dialogues allow for voices to emerge and new narratives to develop
without the restriction of the grammar and syntax of written prose.
The outcomes of spontaneous or planned dialogues do not have to
be judged necessarily in terms of the context of discovery or scientific
xvi Foreword
validation. A good dialogue unleashes sources of creativity, even ena-
bling the craft of fiction, the art of poetry, and the appraisal of the syn-
ergism between theory and practice to emerge in a vivid, even exuberant
form, going beyond idiosyncrasies and viewpoints.10
Dialogues are constructive but they are also disruptive because they
can bring out some of our own contradictions as individuals and/or
scholars. They can question forms of interpretation and style of analysis
that, at least in academia, are considered well established. Dialogues
as experimental, disruptional or simply innovative writing demonstrate
how the boundaries between “literature” and other forms of cultural
writing “have become hopelessly blurred”.11
These dialogues are about GCE as it is taught in universities. GCE
should be part of an educational policy that is technically competent,
ethically sound, and politically feasible, and should find a special place
in our universities’ curricula. There is no question that in the United
States, we do need a reasonable and honest government administration
to create these conditions because Trump’s administration was nothing
of that sort. Even in the shadow of an authoritarian populist regime
in the United States, many scholars in the US universities continue our
commitment to social justice education.
Dialogues on Global Citizenship Education.
“While the World may be increasingly interconnected, human rights

violations, inequality, and poverty still threaten peace and sustaina-
bility. Global Citizenship Education (GCED) is UNESCO’s response
to those challenges. It works by empowering learners of all ages to
understand that these are global, not local issues and to become
active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and
sustainable societies.”12
Dialogical practices are central to address how education (and, particularly,

GCE) relates to the common good. GCE is seen as a key mechanism that
has the potential to identify common interests, problems, and solutions
via negotiation and coordination involving a dialectic of the global and
the local. I have suggested13 that global citizenship should add value to
national citizenship14 and to the global commons. The concept of global
commons builds on three components that define the common good of
humanity: (1) Planet; (2) Peace; (3) People.15 Global commons are defined
by three basic propositions. The first is that our planet is our only home,
and we have to protect it. Secondly, global peace is an intangible cultural
good of humanity with immaterial value. Global peace is a treasure of
humanity. Thirdly, there is a need to find ways for people to live together
democratically in an ever-growing diverse world, seeking to fulfill their
individual and cultural interest and achieving their inalienable rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Foreword xvii
As we have argued elsewhere,16 the central question regarding peace
concerns the process of how we can cultivate the spirit of solidarity across
differences. The authors of these dialogues about GCE believe that this
evolving concept may help global peace, the planet, and all people through
its contribution to civic engagement, via its three key elements – cognitive
(to better understand the world and its complexities), affective (to enable
living together with others respectfully and peacefully), and behavioral (to
activate).17 Other important aspects include considerations for equality of
opportunity, welfare, and cultural diversity in a cosmopolitan view of the
world as proposed by Ulrich Beck18.
We confront many challenges in trying to incorporate GCE into our
curricula – How to build better schools – that is, intellectually richer
schools – particularly for those who are socially disadvantaged in
terms of power and resources? How to build a global democratic mul-
ticultural citizenship curriculum where everybody learns from the rich
diversity of society and where the trends toward fragmentation (i.e.
balkanization and separatism) in modern societies can be prevented
and even reversed? How might the experience of the uneducated,
unemployed, angry, and disenfranchised be included in new models of
learning and praxis?19
Conversations on Global Citizenship Education: Perspectives on
Research, Teaching and Learning provide a rich gamut of experiences
and reflections on how GCE has been played out in the teaching and
curriculum of many universities in diverse parts of the world. It is not
only a very accessible book, but one that has been selected as one of
the Routledge research texts to be put forward for Routledge pledge for
OA funding as part of their partnership with Knowledge Unlatched. If
successful, this book will be made Open Access upon publication with
thanks to funding support from libraries across the globe.
Carlos Alberto Torres
Notes
1 See Joshua Kaplan. (1961). Political theory: The classic texts and their con-
tinuing relevance. The Modern Scholar (14 lectures in the series; lecture
#7/disc 4), 2005. Other relevant sources are J. R. Hale, The Literary Works
of Machiavelli. Oxford University Press, 139 and https://www.goodreads.
com/quotes/66377-when-evening-comes-i-return-home-and-go-into-my/
2 (2017). For an additional perspective on the topic, see Torres, Carlos
Alberto. Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Critical Global Citi-
zenship Education. New York and London: Routledge, 109–128.
3 Burawoy, Michael. (2005). For public sociology (PDF). American Socio-
logical Review. 70:4–28. doi: 10.1177/000312240507000102. Retrieved
September 13, 2020.
xviii Foreword
4 See C.A. Torres & E. Bosio. (2020). Continuing our dialogues, we had pub-
lished two of them in 2020. Global Citizenship Education at the crossroads:
Globalization, global commons, common good and critical consciousness
prospects. Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assess-
ment. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11125-019-09458-w
Torres, C., & Bosio, E. (2020). Critical Reflections on the Notion of
Global Citizenship Education. A dialogue with Carlos Alberto Torres in
relation to higher education in the United States. Encyclopaideia, 24(56),
107–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1825-8670/10742
5 Nino, Carlos A. (1996). The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy.
New Haven, Yale University Press, 101.
6 Burbules, N. C. (1993). Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice. New
York and London: Teacher College Press.
7 (1998). I will reprise briefly herein some of the analyses I did in one of my
favorite books published in 1998 that sought to understand the beginnings
of the critical studies in education in the United States. See Carlos Alberto
Torres, Editor. Education, Power and Personal Biographies. Dialogues
with Critical Educators. New York and London: Routledge.
8 Neil Noddings. (1991). Stories in dialogue: Caring and interpersonal
reasoning. In C. Witherell and Neil Noddings (Eds.), Stories Life Tell.
Narrative and Dialogues in Education. 157–170. New York and London:
Teachers College Press.
9 Judith Porter Adams. (1991). Peacework. Oral Histories of Women Peace
Activists. Boston: Twayne.
10 Rita Guibert. (1973). Seven Voices, Seven Latin American Writers Talk
with Rita Guibert. New York, Alfred A. Knoft.
11 David William Foster. (1985). Alternative Voices in the Contemporary
Latin America Narrative. Columbia: University of Missoury Press, 148.
12 https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced
13 Torres, Carlos Alberto. (2017). Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of
Critical Global Citizenship Education. New York and London: Routledge.
14 A concern is that growing poverty and inequality exclude large segments
of individuals from active citizenship. Both global and national citizenship
depend on material basics and civic virtues.
15 Problems in the global system that undermine peace and prosperity include
but cannot be restricted to: (1) unabated poverty; (2) growing inequality;
(3) neoliberal globalization that has weakened the systems of organized
solidarity of the democratic nation-state; (4) banking education with
authoritarian and inadequate curriculum in elementary, secondary, and
higher education; and (5) destruction of the planet’s eco-system.
16 Desjardins, Richard, Torres, Carlos Alberto, & Susan Wiksten. Social
Contract Pedagogy: A Dialogical and Deliberative Model for Global Citi-
zenship Education. Background paper for the UNESCO’s Futures of Edu-
cation Commission. Los Angeles: Unpublished.
17 UNESCO. (2020). “What Is Global Citizenship Education?” Retrieved
(https://en.unesco.org/themes/gced/definition).
18 Beck, Ulrich. (2006). Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
19 Desjardins, Richard, Torres, Carlos Alberto, & Susan Wiksten. (1998).
Op. Cit, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Democracy, Education, and Mul-
ticulturalism. Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Global World. Lanham:
Maryland.
Introduction
Conversations With Educators
on Global Citizenship Education:
In the Pursuit of Social Justice
Emiliano Bosio
Educators form a cohort whose working life regularly interacts with

a number of different global influences, which means it is imperative
that we develop a better understanding of how complex teaching and
learning has become and how this impacts both the theory and prac-
tice of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) (Bosio & Torres, 2019).
Torres (2017) suggests that GCE is a forward-looking framework that
supports the common good. It requires the individual to look beyond
their own interests and accept moral obligations and respond appro-
priately. Dill (2012, p. 541) adds that “whether real or aspired to, wel-
comed, or opposed, global citizenship education is commonly held to be
a far-reaching paradigm shift” in the ways teaching and learning in the
modern university evolves.
The conversations with educators on GCE offered in this book pro-
vide a global perspective of research, teaching, and learning in higher
education from right across the United States of America, Canada,
Brazil, South Africa, Japan, Israel, and Italy. The central element that the
conversations in this book share is the pursuit of an understanding of the
way in which educators both theoretically and empirically view GCE,
and how these views are essential for a holistic GCE to be introduced
in a society where inequality is increasing, populism and nationalism
is on the rise, supported by post-truth politics, with hatred and fear of
the “other” accompanying it (Torres & Bosio, 2020; Bosio, 2020). Such
considerations mean that the conversations in this book regarding GCE
concern far more than basic thoughts of how it should be delivered.
In this book, GCE is discussed as a way of introducing conscientization
(in Portuguese, “conscientização”) inspired by a desire for social justice
and with its foundations in critical pedagogy (Freire, 2004b). One sig-
nificant part of Freire’s (2004b) concept of critical pedagogy is for edu-
cation to undergo a constant process of engagement and reconstruction
so that it develops students’ political conscience. From this point of view,
using GCE to develop the values and knowledge of students “implies
not only reading the word, but also reading the world” (Goodman,
1992, p. 149) in order to help students in forming critical questions
xx Introduction
to approach the current domination of neoliberal globalization. GCE
pedagogy, as discussed in this book, incorporates culture and politics.
Seen in this light, GCE promotes enhancement of critical, humanistic,
and transformative values incorporating inclusivity ethically, remaining
closely intertwined with the influence education has on students’ values
and practical approaches to life (Young, 2008).
Taking this into consideration, the fundamental question arising from
the educators’ narratives and perspectives of GCE demonstrated in this
book boils down to – Why are we in research, teaching, and learning if
not to be able to help enrich the lives of our students?
This volume gathers together thoughts on this question and others
from senior educators who shared their perspectives in the book. The
aim of the book is then to promote a wider critical awareness of a num-
ber of educational contexts so that we can find synergistic solutions to
the questions of how we can promote GCE in critical and innovative
ways that espouse social justice when the neoliberal globalization narra-
tive is currently so dominant.
Distinctiveness of the Book

The tone of the interviews – which inevitably takes the shape of conver-
sations on GCE – connects the narrative of senior educators and makes
the book distinctive in three different ways. Firstly, while some publi-
cations have had elements focusing on critically analyzing GCE, it is
unusual for senior educators’ “voices” who actually teach GCE to be
represented within a book, and it is not common for specific localized
theory and pedagogy regarding GCE to be closely examined in a form
of conversation. Secondly, this work is unique as a single author pub-
lication that focuses on critically analyzing GCE in terms of conversa-
tion with those educators who have considerable experience in the field.
Thirdly, the intention of this book is to offer a “roadmap” regarding
GCE theoretical approaches and teaching experience. The conversations
offered in this book should be of value to three different audiences:
1 Educators who are seeking to develop their theoretical understand-

ing of GCE into teaching practice;
2 Researchers who are new to GCE and who seek dynamic starting
points for their research;
3 General audience who are interested in learning more about the his-
tory, philosophy, and practice of GCE.
From this point of view, the purpose of the conversations is to offer

clarification as to the thoughts of senior educators in terms of their cho-
sen approaches to GCE within their universities’ study programs and
courses. I endeavored to elicit the thoughts of the educators regardless
Introduction xxi
Table I.1 Example of Interview Questions
Rationales:
• What is your understanding of “educating for global citizenship”?
• How your academic as well as life “journey” has shaped this understanding?
• What are three key elements of educating for global citizenship in higher
education in your opinion?
Operations:
• How can education for global citizenship be made suitable for or attractive
to university students studying in your country?
• Why is or is not education for global citizenship necessary at universities in
your country?
Positions:
• What are the reasons behind positive and negative attitudes of educators
toward global citizenship at universities in your country?
Learning Objectives/Curriculum:
• What competences including knowledge, skills, attitudes/values, and
experiences are university students in your country expected to acquire in
order to become “global citizens” or “global graduates”?
• In your opinion, educating for global citizenship at universities is more
about knowledge, skills, and attitudes/value or some combination of all
three?
• How can university students’ achievements of these competences be
identified?
• What themes should a curriculum for global citizenship include in your
opinion in order to “fit” universities in your country?
of the fact that they were in an “interview situation” and to allow them
to offer a full elaboration of their thinking. A number of questions were
subject to discussion, where appropriate, that had a relationship to the
wider purpose of the book (see Table I.1).
Rationales. To begin with, the first set of questions focused on the
rationales behind the ways in which educators understood GCE.
Specifically, the focus was on eliciting educators’ conceptions of GCE as
informed by a variety of perspectives centered on both their academic
and life experiences. These questions examine both internal influences,
such as personal philosophy and educational ideology, and external
influences. For example, societal expectations, state policy, and specific
academic environments. The examination also looked at the way the
educators’ conceptions of GCE could be shaped by these elements.
Operations. Another set of questions was created to reveal the prac-
tical ways in which educators set up GCE courses to make them useful
and/or interesting to their students. I also tried to elicit why different
educators may have positive or negative attitudes to GCE, remembering
xxii Introduction
the fact that although there is much debate around GCE, with certain
notable exceptions, it is not common to find it holistically implemented
in a cross-disciplinary manner within universities.
Positions. The conclusion chapter third set of questions was created to
investigate the development of GCE within higher education institutions
with reference to the educators’ perspectives. This set of questions was
designed to identify the ways in which educators interpreted and imple-
mented GCE and how enthusiastic they were about the concepts and
objectives of their institutions.
Learning objectives/curriculum. The final set of questions was designed
as part of the investigation into the attributes graduates attained from their
GCE. This set of questions intended to investigate how educators under-
stand learning objectives (which include skills, values, and knowledge) and
citizenship in the context of growing neoliberal globalization. Specifically,
how educators felt the GCE curriculum should incorporate cognitive targets.
Altogether, the rich perspectives offered by the educators via conversa-
tions on GCE in this book present a distinctive description of the ways in
which contemporary GCE is conceptualized and taught. The educators’
perspectives enabled me to conceptualize a proposal for a GCE pedagog-
ical framework aimed at fostering students’ conscientization and social
justice rooted in critical pedagogy — the metacritical GCE — which I
describe in the concluding chapter of this book.
Main Themes and Structure of the Book

This book is divided into three main themes with each theme having a
number of chapters covering different conversations with senior educa-
tors from a range of countries around the world.
The first theme is Critical Views on Global Citizenship Education:
Critical Pedagogy, Otherwise/Postcoloniality, Conviviality, and Planetary
Citizenship. This theme encompasses a number of critical viewpoints
regarding global citizenship and GCE from the Global-north and Global-
south. In Chapter 1, Henry Giroux and Emiliano Bosio discuss the inter-
connection of critical pedagogy and GCE. They contend that there is a
need to promote social justice via a pedagogical and ethical interven-
tion that helps educators and students alike deconstructing ideologies of
oppression. Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti, in Chapter 2, describe
their concept of “GCE/otherwise” in detail. This way of approaching
GCE and global citizenship offers learners the opportunity to become
de/centered, to feel more responsible, and to transform any damaging
aspirations that would prevent them coexisting harmoniously with
the planet and its inhabitants. Lynette Shultz, in Chapter 3, outlines a
concept of conviviality as being the ethical underpinning for GCE and
global citizenship. Conviviality centers on the concept that teaching and
learning should be done in ways that place an emphasis on harmonious
Introduction xxiii
coexistence and wellbeing, encompassing sustainability for sharing the
planet, protecting planetary diversity, living well, and coexisting peace-
fully. Silvia Elisabeth Moraes, Eduardo Moraes Arraut, and Josefina
Moraes Arraut, in Chapter 4, provide a critical perspective from the
Global-South, from Brazil. They examine the concept of planetary
citizenship instead of global citizenship in offering a novel inter/trans-
disciplinary introduction into the Brazilian university curriculum of
planetary citizenship and their self-described “Ecology of Knowledges”.
Lastly, in Chapter 5, Yusef Waghid proposes a defense of GCE along
the lines of democratic actions guided by an opposition to human rights
violations and the unequal treatment of all humans in South Africa. To
him, GCE in a university setting is related to rebuilding an African phi-
losophy of education in the context of cosmopolitan justice
The second theme is Global Skills for Social Justice, Critical Semiotics
and the Intersections of Neoliberalism, Internationalization, and
Global Citizenship Education. Douglas Bourn, in Chapter 6, proposes
the necessity of moving away from narrow approaches to GCE skills
that equip students solely to operate in the job-market and toward social
justice, where skills are located within the globalization context and the
particular requirements of different societies, communities, and cultures.
Massimiliano Tarozzi, in Chapter 7, looks at a “social justice GCE” cen-
tered on postcolonial critical perspectives, with a stress on the ability of
this form of GCE to encapsulate and offer a response to new contempo-
rary educational demands, especially within Europe. Maureen Ellis, in
Chapter 8, looks at GCE in terms of critical global semiotics, promoting
the need for comprehensive consistent global approaches to the compre-
hension of cultural similarities and differences that ignore the borders of
both space and time. She highlights the advantages of the methodologies
and methods of critical global semiotics which offer a way of systemati-
cally addressing questions from the kindergarten upwards. In Chapter 9,
Miri Yemini suggests that although neoliberals have sometimes attacked
and sometimes exploited GCE and internationalization, educators could
find ways of interacting with these processes if they find ways of present-
ing their students with viable alternatives. These alternatives must be
created jointly between students and faculty to shape a holistic system
in which GCE is theoretically underpinned and informed by current dis-
courses regarding the implications and methodology of GCE.
The third and last theme is Flourishing, Awareness, Responsibility,
Participation, and Humanism as the Foundation for Global Citizenship
Education. In Chapter 10, William Gaudelli illustrates the way in which
notions of GCE and “human flourishing” are connected, proposing that
the connection is a way in which value can be created by both teach-
ers and learners giving them an objective and a way to aspire to greater
human development. Chapter 11 comprises a review by Hans Schattle of
the twenty years he has spent in the study of the ways in which “global
xxiv Introduction
citizenship” concepts are shared globally and their interpretation; addi-
tionally, he reflects on the university political science courses he has taught
with a focus on global citizenship. He explains that there have been three
central elements uppermost in his mind regarding GCE – the ways in which
he can help students participate more, be more responsible, and have greater
awareness. This trio of elements is a reminder that GCE encompasses
modes of thought and life in a multiplicity of interlinked communities. In
Chapter 12, Maria Guajardo uses humanistic perspectives to encourage a
broader comprehension of GCE and its contribution to empowering stu-
dents to “fuller humanity”: Having an awareness of personal humanity
and also welcoming to the humanity of all the world’s people.
Finally, in Chapter 13, the editor of the book, Emiliano Bosio, offers
some final reflections of the work as a whole and advances a proposal for
a metacritical pedagogical framework for GCE.
References
Bosio, E. (2020). Towards an ethical global citizenship education curriculum
framework in the modern university. In D. Bourn (Ed.), Bloomsbury handbook
for global education and learning, 187–206. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bosio, E., & Torres, C. A. (2019). Global citizenship education: An educational
theory of the common good? A conversation with Carlos Alberto Torres. Policy
Futures in Education, 17(6), 745–760.
Dill, J. S. (2012). The moral education of global citizens. Society, 49(6), 541–546.
Freire, P. (2004b). Pedagogia da tolerância. [Pedagogy of Tolerance]. São Paulo:
UNESP.
Goodman, J. (1992). Elementary schooling for critical democracy. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Torres, C. A. (2017). Theoretical and empirical foundations of critical global cit-
izenship education. Abingdon. UK: Taylor & Francis.
Torres, E., & Bosio, (2020). Global Citizenship Education at the crossroads:
Globalization, global commons, common good and critical consciousness pros-
pects. Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment. https://
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11125-019-09458-w
Young, M. (2008). From constructivism to realism in the sociology of the curric-
ulum. Review of research in education, 32(1), 1–28.
Part I
Critical Views in Global

Critical Pedagogy, Otherwise/
Postcoloniality, Conviviality,
and Planetary Citizenship
1 Critical Pedagogy and Global
Henry A. Giroux and Emiliano Bosio
1.1 Introduction
We live in problematic times. This is especially true for critical pedagogues
who are faced with the task of advancing global citizenship education
(GCE) in a time of rising right-wing populist governments, growing rac-
ism, and police brutality tragically exemplified by the killing of George
Floyd in the United States. For the last 40 years, neoliberalism has waged
a significant attack on the structure and role of public education. Under
such circumstances, social bonds are being loosened, public goods are
under siege and matters of collective responsibility are under attack by the
market-driven forces of marketization and selfish individualism (Bosio &
Torres, 2019; Giroux, 2020). Given the ongoing attack on democracy, the
social contact and the welfare state, critical pedagogy can play an impor-
tant role in reclaiming the public good and producing civic education,
literacy, and GCE (Bosio, 2017; Bosio, 2019; Torres & Bosio, 2020a/b).
With the subsequent dialogue, we contemplate how GCE can progress
and connect matters of theory and critique to pedagogical practices
informed by critical pedagogy by making the most of civic valor as an
approach to political challenges, allowing hope and politics to occupy
a space defined by morals, values, and public actions that tackle the
motion of everyday experience and the woes of social ills with the might
of individual and collective opposition. We believe that drawing upon
this philosophy can relaunch critical pedagogy and GCE as one uni-
fied force. This is a ‘re/vitalized’ pedagogical approach oriented towards
social justice which aims to resist the oppressive neoliberalism that is
taking over higher education environments (Bosio, 2020; Giroux, 2020).
1.2 Dialogue with Henry A. Giroux

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is the nexus between citizenship and global
citizenship?
HENRY A. GIROUX: Citizenship invokes a notion of the social in which
individuals have duties and responsibilities to others. A globalized
4 Henry A. Giroux, Emiliano Bosio
notion of citizenship extends the concept of the social contract beyond
the boundaries of the nation-state, invoking a broader notion of
democracy in which the global becomes the space for reaffirming and
exercising civic courage, social responsibility, politics, and compassion
for the plight of others. Clearly, citizens’ obligations to the environ-
ment cannot be seen as merely a national problem. At the same time,
there is a globalized notion of citizenship not just as a political issue of
rights and entitlements but also as an ethical challenge to narrow the
gap between the promise and the reality of a global democracy. It is
also important to recognize that the idea of citizenship cannot be sep-
arated from the spaces in which citizenship is developed and nurtured.
This suggests that any struggle over a globalized and meaningful
notion of citizenship that encourages debate and social responsibil-
ity must include fostering and developing democratic public spheres,
such as schools, media, and other institutions in which critical civic
pedagogies can be developed. The space of the pedagogical can-
not be enacted fully without the civic institutions that support its
ideas and practices. The notion of global citizenship suggests that
politics must catch up with power, which today has removed itself
from local and state control. New political structures, global insti-
tutions, and social movements that can reach and control the flows
of uncontrolled power, particularly economic power, must develop.
Real citizenship in the global sense means enabling people to have
a say in the shaping of international laws governing trade, the envi-
ronment, labor, criminal justice, and social protections. Citizenship
as the essence of politics has to catch up with new social formations
that the current political and social institutions of the nation-state
cannot influence, contain, or control.
BOSIO: What are the attributes of the global citizen in your opinion?
GIROUX: Citizens for a global democracy need to be aware of the inter-
related nature of all aspects of physical, spiritual, and cultural life as
part of a broader political and moral project. First, this means hav-
ing a deep-rooted understanding of the relational nature of global
dependencies, whether we are talking about the ecosphere or the cir-
cuits of capital. Second, citizens need to be multiliterate in ways that
not only allow them access to new information and media-based
technologies but also enable them to be border-crossers capable of
engaging, learning from, understanding, and being tolerant of and
responsible to matters of difference and otherness. This suggests
reclaiming, as central to any viable notion of citizenship, the values
of mutual worth, dignity, and ethical responsibility.
At stake here is the recognition that there is a certain civic vir-
tue and ethical value in extending our exposure to difference and
otherness. Citizens need to cultivate loyalties that extend beyond
the nation-state, beyond a theoretical distinction in which the
Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship 5
division between friend and enemy is mediated exclusively by
national boundaries. Clearly, citizenship as a form of empower-
ment means acquiring the skills that enable one to critically exam-
ine the history and to resuscitate those dangerous memories in
which knowledge expands the possibilities for self-knowledge and
critical and social agency. Knowledge need not be only Indigenous
to be empowering. Individuals must also have some distance from
the knowledge of their birth, origins, and specificity of place.
This suggests appropriating that knowledge that emerges through
dispersal, travel, border-crossings, diaspora, and through global
communications.
A cosmopolitan notion of citizenship must recognize the impor-
tance of a culture of questioning to any global concept of democ-
racy. The global public sphere must be a place where authority can
be questioned, power held accountable and dissent seen as having a
positive value. There is a growing authoritarianism in many parts
of the world, particularly the United States. In facing this threat
to democracy around the globe, it is crucial for educators, parents,
young people, workers, and others to fight the collapse of citizenship
into forms of jingoistic nationalism. This means educators and oth-
ers will have to reinvigorate democracy by assuming the pedagogical
project of prioritizing debate, deliberation, dissent, dialogue, and
public spaces as central to any viable notion of global citizenship. In
addition, if citizenship is to be global, it must develop a sense of rad-
ical humanism that comprehends social and environmental justice
beyond national boundaries. Human suffering does not stop at the
borders of nation-states.
BOSIO: What is the role of educators in the context of globalization and
how this can be framed in our discussion on critical pedagogy and
GCE?
GIROUX: I have always argued that educators must be treated as a critical
public resource, essential not only to the importance of an empower-
ing educational experience for students but also to the formation of a
democratic society. At the institutional level, this means giving edu-
cators an opportunity to exercise power over the conditions of their
work, particularly when it comes to educating the critical “global
citizen”. In this view, we cannot separate what educators do from
the economic and political conditions that shape their work, that
is, their academic labor. This means they should have both the time
and the power to institute structural conditions that allow them to
produce curricula, collaborate with parents, conduct research, and
work with communities.
Moreover, it can be suggested that for a critical GCE to be effec-
tive, university buildings must be limited in size to permit educa-
tors and others to construct, maintain, and enhance a democratic
community for themselves and their students. We are talking not
only about the issue of class size but also about how space is insti-
tutionally constructed as part of a political project compatible with
the formation of lived, democratic communities. In addition, par-
ticularly when it comes to implementing notions, such as “global
citizenship”, educators should be given the freedom to shape the
university curricula, engage in shared research with other educators
and with others outside of the university, and play a central role in
the governance of the school and their labor. Educational empow-
erment for educators cannot be separated from issues of power and
governance. Educators should be valued as public intellectuals who
connect critical ideas, traditions, disciplines, and values to the pub-
lic realm of everyday life.
But at the same time, educators must assume the responsibility
for connecting their work to larger social issues, particularly if they
educate for critical global citizenship while raising questions about
what it means to provide students with the values they need to write
policy papers, be resilient against defeat, analyze social problems,
and learn the tools of democracy and how to make a difference in
one’s life as a social agent.
BOSIO: What should be the purpose of a GCE when informed by critical
pedagogy?
GIROUX: A GCE informed by critical pedagogy must take seriously the
connections between theory and practice, reflection and action. All
too often, theory in academia slides into a form of “theoreticism”
in which it either becomes an end in itself, relegated to the heights
of an arcane, excessive and utterly ethereal existence or degener-
ates into a form of careerism, offering the fastest track to academic
rewards and promotions. But theory is hardly a luxury connected
to the fantasy of intellectual power. On the contrary, the theory is a
resource that enables us to both define and respond to problems as
they emerge in particular contexts. Its transformative power resides
in the possibility of enabling forms of agency, not in its ability to
solve problems. Its politics is linked to the ability to imagine the
world differently and then to act differently and this is its offering
to any viable notion of citizenship education. At stake here is not
the question of whether theory matters, which should be as obvious
as asking whether critical thought matters but the issue of what the
political and public responsibilities of theory might be, particularly
in theorizing global politics for the twenty-first century. Theory is
not just about contemplation or paving a way to academic stardom;
it is foremost about intervention in the world, raising ideas to the
worldly space of public life, social responsibility, and collective inter-
vention. If learning is a fundamental part of social change, then the
theory is a crucial resource for studying the full range of everyday
practices that circulate throughout diverse social formations and for
finding better forms of knowledge and modes of intervention in the
face of the challenge of either a growing authoritarianism or a man-
ufactured cynicism.
Moreover, I think a GCE informed by critical pedagogy begins
with the assumption that knowledge and power should always be
subject to debate, held accountable, and critically engaged. Central
to the very definition of critical pedagogy is a common concern for
reforming universities and developing modes of pedagogical practice
in which educators and students become critical agents actively ques-
tioning and negotiating the relationships between theory and practice,
critical analysis and common sense, and learning and social change.
This is hardly a prescription for propaganda. I think critical pedagogy
is often seen as dangerous because it is built around a project that goes
to the very heart of what education is about and is framed around a
series of important and often ignored questions, such as: Why do we,
as educators, do what we do the way we do it? Whose interest does
schooling serve? How might it be possible to understand and engage
the diverse contexts in which education takes place? Critical peda-
gogy at its essence is about the struggle over power, agency, authority,
desire, and what it means to prepare people for learning how to govern
rather than be governed. It is not a method per se but a theoretically
informed set of assumptions about the centrality of education to pol-
itics and envisioning a world in which justice and economic equality
become a thread informing and connecting a larger global universe.
Critical pedagogy must inform GCE in a way that is not simply
concerned with offering students new ways to think critically and
act with authority as agents in the classroom; in this sense, GCE, if
informed by critical pedagogy, must also be concerned with provid-
ing educators and students with the knowledge and values to expand
their capacities both to question deep-seated assumptions and myths
that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social practices
that structure every aspect of society and to take responsibility for
intervening in the world. In other words, critical pedagogy forges a
GCE which, ideally, supports students’ agency through a language
of skepticism and possibility.
BOSIO: Do you think there is a “crisis of values” in the modern univer-
sity, particularly in the humanities? If so, how does this connect
with concepts of GCE, critical pedagogy and the role of educators
in your opinion?
GIROUX: The humanities traditionally has offered both a refuge and
a possibility for thinking about these issues, though under histor-
ical conditions which bear little resemblance to the present. This is
particularly evident as the conditions for the production of knowl-
edge, national identity, and citizenship have changed in a rapidly
globalizing, post-9/11 world order marked by the expansion of new
electronic technologies; the consolidation of global media; Western
deindustrialization, deregulation, and downsizing; the privatization
of public goods and services; and the marketization of all aspects of
social life. The “crisis of values” in the humanities reflects a crisis
within the larger society about the meaning and viability of insti-
tutions that define themselves as serving a public rather than a pri-
vate good. The “crisis of values” is often an argument that leaves
behind how modes of governance, faculty power, and the redefining
of students as consumers is being shaped by the neoliberalization of
higher education. This, of course, leads to a crisis of values, but it
also needs to be understood as a crisis of power.
The ongoing “vocationalization” of higher education, the commod-
ification of the curriculum, the increasing role the university plays as
part of the national security state and the transformation of students
into consumers have undermined the humanities in its efforts to offer
students the knowledge and skills they need for learning how to govern
as well as develop the capacities necessary for deliberation, reasoned
arguments, and social action. The incursion of corporate and military
culture into university life undermines the university’s responsibility
to provide students with an education that allows them to recognize
the dream and promise of a substantive democracy. While it is true
that the humanities must keep up with developments in the sciences,
the new media, technology, and other fields, its first responsibility is
treating these issues not merely pragmatically as ideas and skills to
be learned but as sites of political and ethical intervention, deeply
connected to the question of what it means to create students who can
imagine a democratic future for all people.
In its best moments, this era of crisis, fear, and insecurity has
reinvigorated the debate over the role that the humanities and the
university more generally might play in creating a pluralized pub-
lic culture essential for animating the basic precepts of democratic
public life. Matters of history, global relations, ethical concerns,
creativity, and the development of new literacies and modes of com-
munication should be central to any humanities education and the
conversation it enables. But at the same time, such conversations
have for the most part failed to consider more fundamental issues
about the need to revitalize the language of civic education as part
of a broader discourse of political agency and critical citizenship in a
globalized society. More specifically, a better understanding of why
the humanities has avoided the challenge of those critical discourses
capable of interrogating how society represents itself and how and
why individuals fail to critically engage such representations is cru-
cial if educators are to intervene in the oppressive social relation-
ships they often legitimate.
Given these contexts, educators in the humanities must ask new
kinds of questions, beginning with: How do educators respond to val-
ue-based questions regarding the “usefulness” of the humanities and
the range of purposes it should serve? What knowledge(s) are of most
worth? What does it mean to claim authority in a world where borders
are constantly shifting? What role does the humanities have in a world
in which the “immaterial production” of knowledge becomes the most
important form of capital? How might pedagogy be understood as
a political and moral practice rather than a technical strategy in the
service of corporate culture? And what relation should the humanities
have to young people as they develop a sense of agency, particularly in
relation to the obligations of critical global citizenship and public life
in a radically transformed cultural and global landscape?
As citizenship becomes increasingly privatized and youth are
increasingly educated to become consuming subjects rather than
critical social subjects, it becomes all the more imperative for educa-
tors working within the humanities to rethink the space of the social
and to develop a critical language in which notions of the public
good, public issues, and public life become central to overcoming
the privatizing and depoliticizing language of the market. Central
to this issue for me is the role that higher education might play as a
democratic public sphere.
BOSIO: In one of your well-known books you refer to the notion of
“teachers as intellectuals” (Giroux, Freire & McLaren, 1988)– why
this notion is relevant in contemporary societies and how this con-
nects with critical pedagogy and GCE?
GIROUX: I have always believed that the notion of the intellectual carries
with it a number of important political, cultural, and social reg-
isters. In contrast to the notion that intellectuals are a specialized
group of experts, I have argued that everybody is an intellectual in
that we all have the capacity to think, produce ideas, be self-critical,
and connect knowledge (wherever it comes from) to forms of self-
and social development. At the same time, those intellectuals who
have the luxury of defining their social function through the produc-
tion of intellectual ideas have a special responsibility to address how
power works through institutions, individuals, social formations,
and everyday life so as to enable or close down democratic values,
identities, and relations. More specifically, I believe that the most
important obligation that intellectuals have to knowledge is only
fulfilled through understanding their relationship to power not as
a complementary relation but as one of opposition. This suggests
not only understanding how power works but also how to struggle
for it, over it and use it in the service of justice and individual and
social empowerment. I also think as Jacques Derrida suggested that
courage is a special quality demanded of intellectuals and since the
1980s, it seems to be in short supply as the forces of repression have
grown more intense both in the United States and abroad.
I think intellectuals, whether in or outside of the academy, must con-
nect ideas to the world and engage their skills, knowledge, and values
as part of a larger struggle over democracy and justice. Intellectuals
have a responsibility not only to make truth prevail in the world and
fight injustice wherever it appears but also to organize their collective
passions to prevent human suffering, genocide, and diverse forms of
unfreedom linked to domination and exploitation. In this context,
a GCE informed by critical pedagogy has a role to play. Herewith,
intellectuals have a responsibility to analyze how language, informa-
tion, and meaning work to organize, legitimate, and circulate values,
structure reality, and offer up particular notions of agency and iden-
tity. For public intellectuals, the latter challenge demands a new kind
of literacy and critical understanding with respect to the emergence of
the new media and electronic technologies and the new and powerful
role they play as instruments of public pedagogy. Critical reflection
is an essential dimension of justice and it can be central to GCE, and
it is precisely with respect to keeping justice and democracy alive in
the public domain that intellectuals have a responsibility to the global
world. Today, the concept of the intellectual, as Pierre Bourdieu
reminds us, has become synonymous with public relations experts,
sycophantic apologists, and fast-talking media types. Educators as
public intellectuals need a new vocabulary for linking hope, social
citizenship, and education to the demands of a substantive democracy.
This can be a possible understanding of GCE.
I am suggesting that educators, particularly those involved with
teaching GCE, need a new vocabulary for connecting not only how
we read critically but also how we engage in movements for social
change. I also believe that simply invoking the relationships between
theory and practice, critique and social action will not do. Any
attempt to give new life to a substantive democratic politics must
address both how people learn to be political agents and what kind
of educational work is necessary within many kinds of public spaces.
People need to use their full intellectual resources to provide a pro-
found critique of existing institutions and to struggle toward fulfill-
ing the promise of a radical global democracy. As public intellectuals,
educators, and other cultural workers need to understand more fully
why the tools we used in the past feel awkward in the present, often
failing to respond to problems now facing the United States and other
parts of the globe. More specifically, we face the challenge posed by
the failure of existing critical discourses to bridge the gap between
how society represents itself and how and why individuals fail to
understand and critically engage such representations in order to
intervene in the oppressive social relationships they often legitimate.
It is also crucial for educators as public intellectuals to take seri-
ously what it means to provide the tools for both students and others
outside the academy to function as intellectuals. This means making
clear to others the necessity as Stuart Hall once put it of being at
the forefront of intellectual work and transmitting those ideas not
just within the academy but to a broader public. Intellectuals have
to be alive to the high stakes pedagogical value of persuasion, rheto-
ric, providing a discourse in which others can recognize themselves
while merging intellectual complexity with clarity and accessibility.
I refuse to accept the notion that arcane, leaden writing signals some
kind of blessed and incisive intelligence. I also think that intellectu-
als have a responsibility to both reach across academic specialties
and connect them at the same time. All public intellectuals should
be border-crossers. Moreover, I think intellectuals can never lose
sight of the need to keep matters of politics and power connected to
global issues of distributive justice.
By combining the mutually interdependent roles of critic and
active citizen, intellectual work at its best can exercise civic courage
as a political practice, a practice that begins when one’s life can
no longer be taken for granted. Such a stance not only connects
intellectual work to making dominant power accountable but also
makes concrete the possibility for transforming hope and politics
into an ethical space and public act that confront the flow of every-
day experience and the weight of social suffering with the force
of individual and collective resistance and the unending project
of democratic social transformation. The road to authoritarian-
ism begins when societies stop questioning themselves and when
such questioning stops, it is often because intellectuals either have
become complicit with such silence or actively produce it. Clearly,
critical intellectuals have a responsibility to oppose this deafen-
ing quiet in the face of an emerging global barbarism, evidence of
which can be seen in a number of growing religious, political, and
economic fundamentalisms.
BOSIO: Henry, your writings have undoubtedly inspired educators
worldwide who seek to provide a critically oriented education to
their students. Do you have any specific message for them?
GIROUX: Yes, these are very difficult times but the stakes are very high and
if we value democracy and have any hope whatsoever for the future,
we must continue the struggle for connecting education to democracy,
learning to social change, and excellence to equity. The only other
option is either cynicism or complicity and no educator deserves that.
I also think it is important to recognize that these struggles are going
on all over the world and that we are not alone and should not be
alone in taking on these crucial battles – battles that will determine
the fate of global democracy in the twenty-first century.
1.3 Conclusion
As we suggested in the introduction, these are challenging times for
critical pedagogues and citizenship educators. Neoliberal forces have
engaged in an ongoing assault on the edifice of public education and
the democratic values of solidarity and collectivism are gradually being
questioned or even superseded by notions of competition and individual-
ism. Critical pedagogy can help inform GCE in a way that helps neutral-
ize the forces of neoliberalism. We believe that GCE can be advanced,
even strengthened via critical pedagogy by drawing on civic courage as
a political practice which transforms hope and politics into an ethical
space and public act that confront the flow of everyday experience and
the weight of social suffering with the force of individual and collective
resistance. The application of these principles can reinvigorate critical
pedagogy and GCE simultaneously. This reinvigorated approach can
find space to operate and even challenge the dominant neoliberalism
present in university environments.
References
Bosio, E. (2017). Educating for global citizenship and fostering a nonkilling
attitude. In J. Evans Pim & S. Herrero Rico (Eds.), Nonkilling education
(pp. 59–70). Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling.
Bosio, E. (2019). The need for a values-based university curriculum.
University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?
story=2019092415204357.
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book for global education and learning (pp. 187–206). London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Bosio, E., & Torres, C. A. (2019). Global citizenship education: An edu-
cational theory of the common good? A conversation with Carlos
Alberto Torres. Policy Futures in Education, 17(6), 745–760. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1478210319825517
Giroux, H. A. (2020). On critical pedagogy. Bloomsbury Publishing.
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a critical pedagogy of learning. Greenwood Publishing Group.
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higher education in the United States. Encyclopaideia, 24(56), 107–117. https://
doi.org/10.6092/issn.1825-8670/10742
2 Global Citizenship Otherwise
Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti
2.1 Introduction
We call our approach to educating for global citizenship in the context of
higher education “global citizenship otherwise”. This approach to global
citizenship and global citizenship education (GCE) invites learners to
decenter themselves, deepen their sense of responsibility, and disinvest
from harmful desires so that we might learn to (co)exist differently on a
shared planet. We came to this approach to global citizenship through
a shared recognition of the common circularities of neoliberal, liberal,
and critical approaches to global citizenship (Andreotti, 2011; Pashby,
Costa, Stein, & Andreotti, 2020; Stein, & Andreotti, 2020; Stein, 2015),
and thus, a sense that other possibilities were needed.
In particular, we found that although these different approaches are
rooted in contrasting intellectual genealogies and political commitments,
in practice, they tend to be oriented by the same underlying set of colo-
nial entitlements to: redemptive narratives; heroic leadership; formulaic
solutions; canonical authority; hope for continuity (of the existing sys-
tem); looking and feeling virtuous; and transcending complicity in harm.
When these entitlements are challenged, they tend to prompt affective
responses that may contradict and supersede one’s intellectual critique.
Global citizenship otherwise is, therefore, an invitation for learners to
identify and interrupt these colonial entitlements, trace their harmful
and unsustainable conditions of possibility, and engage in a long-term
process of disinvesting from those entitlements so that another way of
being might become possible.
Global citizenship otherwise is partly inspired by decolonial, postco-
lonial, and Indigenous critiques that denaturalize the harmful under-
side of the shiny promises offered by nation-states (Byrd, 2011; Walia,
2013), global capital (Coulthard, 2014), universal knowledge (Santos,
2007; Shiva, 1993), social mobility (Donald, 2019), and separability
(Silva, 2016), which we have summarized as the primary dimensions
of the modern conditions of existence. We describe these dimensions
using the metaphor of the “house modernity built” (Stein, Hunt, Suša,
14 Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti
& Andreotti, 2017). Yet while these important theories are useful for
recognizing enduring colonial patterns and asking difficult questions,
they can only gesture toward the kind of education that might prepare us
to surrender our learned sense of superiority and separation, and affirm
our radical interdependence with and responsibility to each other and
the earth itself. To seek within these theories, a prescriptive (re)solution
would be to route them back into the same set of colonial entitlements
(and accompanying affective investments) that they challenge.
Thus, we do not frame decolonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous the-
ories as the basis of an alternative approach to GCE, but rather under-
stand them as offering useful questions about the limits of common
approaches to GCE and issuing an invitation for a pedagogy that can
enable us to “dig deeper” (to develop more nuanced self-implicating
analyses) and to “relate wider” (to expand sensibilities and responsi-
bilities without turning our backs to our complicity in harm). In other
words, instead of treating GCE as a means to cultivate particular values
in learners that will then determine their actions, we approach GCE
as an opportunity to invite learners to deepen their intellectual engage-
ments, sensitize themselves to the complexities, complicities, and contra-
dictions involved in making change and develop a more expansive sense
of entanglement with the world.
In this approach to GCE, critiques of colonialism are mobilized to
identify how narrow imaginaries of justice, responsibility, and change
continue to shape teaching and learning in formal education. It is these
imaginaries that have produced many of the global challenges we now
face, and thus, any solution – or approach to GCE – that is developed
from within these imaginaries will likely produce more of the same
problems (Andreotti, 2012). A common response to the circularity of
seeking solutions from within the same system that caused the problems
is to seek solutions elsewhere – for instance, from within non-Western
knowledge traditions. Certainly, important interventions in the field of
global citizenship go in this direction. At the same time, this can (re)
create colonial patterns of engagement, particularly when these knowl-
edge traditions are instrumentalized as objects of consumption, rather
than treated as opportunities to encounter and be taught by difference.
These patterns include engagements oriented by a search for innocence
and affirmation of one’s “goodness” (Tuck & Yang, 2012); selectively
engaging with other ontoepistemologies, then extracting and grafting
parts of them back onto one’s own (Ahenakew, 2016); and the colonial
romanticization and idealization of difference, which oppose colonial
pathologization while remaining within the same colonial grammar of
reasoning and desire.
As diagnosed by several decolonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous
scholars, these tendencies are often rooted in desires to transcend com-
plicity in colonial harm without giving anything up (Jefferess, 2012;
Global Citizenship Otherwise 15
Spivak, 1988). In particular, for those who desire to hold on to the per-
ceived entitlements, certainties, and securities that are offered by the
house modernity built, it can be very difficult to actually receive the gifts
and insights of other systems of knowledge (Kuokkanen, 2008). Thus, in
order to interrupt and unravel enduring colonial patterns of education,
we will need to consider how coloniality shapes not just mainstream
ways of doing (methodology) and knowing (epistemology), but also ways
of being (ontology) (Andreotti et al., 2018; Stein, 2019). Further, because
our habits of being are kept in place not only through habits of doing
and knowing, but also habits of hoping and desiring, educators will also
need to address these as well (Kapoor, 2014).
Here, Spivak’s (2004) notion of education as an uncoercive rearrange-
ment of desires becomes useful. This approach suggests that while indeed
it is educators’ role to denaturalize harmful desires, it is not our role to
determine whether or how they might ultimately be rearranged. Some
educators may actively create a state of destabilization for learners, while
others recognize that the contemporary context itself has done much of
this “unsettling” work for us. Regardless of the approach, we practically
cannot, and ethically should not, use coercive pedagogical authority to
force people to desire something we want them to desire. However, we can
support them to navigate today’s complex global challenges by inviting
them to consider how their desires both enable and foreclose certain pos-
sibilities, and by creating opportunities in which they can start to miss the
possibilities that are absent from modern imaginaries (Ahenakew, 2016).
In order to illustrate what this might look like, we describe an educa-
tional framework that can be used to gesture toward otherwise possibil-
ities in nonprescriptive, noncoercive ways: the In Earth CARE’s Global
Justice Framework, which emphasizes the interrelated dimensions of eco-
logical, cognitive, affective, relational, and economic justice (Andreotti
et al., 2018). To illustrate this framework, we use the metaphor of mush-
rooms, representing the ecological and economic dimensions of transfor-
mation and underneath them, the mycelium of the cognitive, affective,
and relational dimensions, which is the substrata from which the mush-
rooms emerge.
This framework suggests that if we do not address the cognitive, affec-
tive, and relational dimensions of global learning and social change,
then no shift in the ecological or economic dimensions will be possible.
We visually represent this framework as a creative social cartography
(Figure 2.1), which are non-normative pedagogical tools. These tools are
not intended to describe an accurate reality but rather to move conver-
sations beyond points where they often get stuck, thus inviting different
kinds of conversations. These cartographies can help us trace historical
and systemic processes, draw attention to points of tension, make visible
aspects that are often made invisible and connections that are usually con-
veniently hidden and ask us to see our own perspectives with skepticism.
Figure 2.1 In Earth’s CARE Global Justice Framework.
In the “In Earth’s CARE Global Justice” Framework, for ecological jus-
tice, we emphasize the need to reframe “the environment” as a set of living
(human and other-than-human) beings, rather than a set of resources to
be extracted/exploited, and to sense and treat the earth itself as an entity
rather than as property to be owned. For cognitive justice, we emphasize
the need to interrupt a monoculture of thought based on a single rational-
ity, recognize the possibilities and limitations of all knowledge systems, and
enact intellectual accountability in order to understand and connect the
dots between the different structures of knowing and being that keep our
existing harmful (ecological and economic) systems in place. For affective
justice, we emphasize the need to work through the (unevenly distributed)
traumas, fragilities, and fears that have been generated within the existing
system and to learn to be comfortable with difficulty, complexity, uncer-
tainty, complicity, failure, and disillusionment in the work of transforma-
tion. For relational justice, we emphasize the need to develop reciprocal
(rather than extractive or consumptive) relations between one’s self, the
earth itself, other humans, as well as other-than-human beings, including
both present and future generations of all species. Finally, for economic
justice, we emphasize the possibility of enacting modes of coordination
and collaboration that support metabolic wellbeing in ways that exceed
traditional debates about “the distribution of resources”, which even in
their critical form tend to objectify and commodify the lives and labor of
both humans and other-than-human beings.
2.2 Dialogue with Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? How has your
academic and life’s “journey” shaped this understanding?
SHARON STEIN AND VANESSA ANDREOTTI: Our approach to global citi-
zenship otherwise developed through our academic work, our lived
experiences, and most recently, collaborations with our research
collective, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. This is a trans-
disciplinary collective of researchers, artists, educators, students,
and activists doing research, scholarship, and artistic, pedagogical,
and cartographic experiments that bring together concerns related
to racism, colonialism, (un)sustainability, climate change, biodiver-
sity loss, economic instability, mental health crises, and intensifica-
tions of social and ecological violence.
In many ways, global citizenship otherwise is the latest manifes-
tation of our long-term, multidimensional efforts to think beyond
mainstream approaches to global education and social change. These
mainstream approaches tend to take a normative and prescriptive
approach in an effort to change peoples’ minds and subsequently
change their actions. Our dissatisfaction with this approach lies in at
least three dimensions. The first dimension is that we challenge the
notion that our role as educators is to tell people what to think and
how to act; rather, we seek to create spaces in which people are invited
to denaturalize existing frames of reference so that other possibilities
for knowing, being, and relating might ultimately become viable.
In this work, we do not wish to center ourselves or our perspec-
tives, nor do we think the solution is to center learners; instead, we
ask what it might mean to center the earth itself. The second dimen-
sion is that we challenge the notion that changes on the intellectual
level (ways of thinking) will result in changes on the ontological
level (ways of being). We are rarely fully transparent to ourselves
about our desires, motives, and investments, and many things are
unconscious. Thus, we are interested in working at cognitive but
also affective and relational layers of engagement, which we find
enables us to better understand where people really are positioned
in relation to complex topics and difficult conversations. Finally, we
believe that “otherwise” possibilities are likely unimaginable from
where we currently stand because we are “so deeply embedded and
enlivened by colonial logics” (Patel, 2015, p. 88). This is not only
an issue of the challenges of imagination but also about the fact
that our livelihoods (including in the university) continue to be sub-
sidized by violence. Thus, we seek to create pedagogies that invite
learners to sit with and be taught by the complexity, complicity, and
uncertainty involved in long-term, nonlinear change, and to engage
with multiple theories of what it might look like.
The global citizenship otherwise approach also emerged out of a
need for different kinds of educational spaces than are generally avail-
able. On the one hand, there are spaces where critique becomes weap-
onized and may manifest in forms of self-righteousness in a search
for innocence and/or epistemic authority. While often the critiques
articulated in these spaces are incredibly important and we are grate-
ful for them, we do not think a punitive approach or an approach that
relies on guilt, resentment, or shame is the long-term answer. On the
other hand, we find spaces where people are seeking community and
prioritize “going along to get along.” In those spaces, critical ques-
tions may be avoided in order not to create discomfort, conflict, or
animosity and to keep peace, connections, and a sense of together-
ness. While we understand the need for people to feel accepted in all
their complexity, we believe that genuine relationships and collective
movements are born out of the struggle of addressing difficult issues
together. We have, therefore, sought to create an approach to global
citizenship that can foster difficult conversations without relation-
ships falling apart and create opportunities to interrupt our satisfac-
tion with existing habits of being, knowing, desiring, and relating.
BOSIO: What are three key elements of GCE in the modern higher edu-
cation institution?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: Rather than prescribing three “key” elements
of education for global citizenship, we will review three different
orientations to global citizenship and emphasize three dimensions
of engagement for the orientation that we work most closely with.
Most approaches to global citizenship in modern higher education
fall under an orientation that we refer to as “soft reform”, in that
they advocate for things like greater social and ecological aware-
ness, expanded empathy, and engaged civic participation within
the dominant socioeconomic system and related institutions. Some
approaches to global citizenship go further and seek to challenge
and expand the limits of the currently dominant socioeconomic sys-
tem. We call this orientation “radical reform”.
However, a few approaches to global citizenship seek to prob-
lematize the current system at its very roots – in particular, its eco-
logical limits and inherently harmful structures of knowing, being,
and relating. We call this orientation “beyond reform”. This ori-
entation speaks of the need to work within the system as long as it
exists, while also opening up or regenerating other possibilities for
collective existence otherwise as we learn to “be” differently. This
orientation is based on the premise that the challenges we collec-
tively face are due to harmful habits of being that cannot be solved
with more knowledge, information, or aligned cognitive frames
alone. From this approach, it is not only our intellectual capacities
but also our affective and relational capacities that will help us figure
out together how to navigate these challenges. Through these three
dimensions of engagement, we might be able to feel, to imagine, and
to relate differently to everything around and within us.
Each of these approaches – soft, radical, and beyond reform – offers
something and each has limitations (see Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew &
Hunt, 2015). While in our own work we tend to engage most deeply
with the beyond reform approach, we are not seeking a position of
hegemony – that is, we are not trying to convince more people to take
a “global citizenship otherwise” approach, nor are we trying to make
this a new universal approach to GCE. We respect people’s specific
interests, contexts, and capacities, and uphold their right to make deci-
sions for themselves. Thus, we can only invite people to engage with
this approach and offer it to those who are interested.
BOSIO: In describing your approach to GCE in the context of higher
education, you refer to “global citizenship otherwise”. In this view,
GCE encourages the global citizens to “decenter themselves, deepen
their sense of responsibility, and disinvest from harmful desires so
that we might learn to (co)exist differently on a shared planet”. Can
you discuss how global citizenship otherwise may be translated
into pedagogical practices in higher education, for example, in the
classes that you teach currently or taught in the past?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: Before we answer this, we should note that the
pedagogical frameworks and strategies that we describe here were
specifically developed for our primary context, in particular for
learners in the “global North” or in the “North of the South” who
have been socialized within modern schooling and institutions. We,
therefore, do not suggest that they are universally relevant or effec-
tive for all contexts and learners.
Our approach to global citizenship emphasizes that current global
challenges are not primarily the result of a lack of adequate knowl-
edge or information, but rather an investment in an inherently vio-
lent modern/colonial “habit-of-being” (Shotwell, 2016). Thus, we
suggest that several denials are enacted in an effort to protect this
habit-of-being from being challenged. Three clusters of illusions
drive these denials:
• Illusions related to human-centeredness, merit, innocence, and

benevolence – which are premised on a denial of our complicity
in the systemic violence of exploitation and expropriation that
subsidize modern promises, securities, desires
• Illusions related to linear progress and the presumed continuity
of an inherently unsustainable system that promises unending
growth and consumption – which are premised on a denial of
the ecological limits of the planet, and
• Illusions related to superiority, unrestricted autonomy, and sep-
aration (from land, other beings, and each other) – which are
premised on a denial of interdependence, entanglement with,
and responsibilities to, a wider metabolism.
If we are facing problems of denial rather than problems of ignorance,

then we will need pedagogies that address not only the intellectual
but also the affective and relational dimensions of learning. Through
these pedagogies, we seek to mobilize disillusionment as a productive
force that can help people find balance-in-movement in the “eye of a
storm” – the storm being the uncertainty and instability of our cur-
rent economic, political, and ecological context. We use the metaphor
of the eye of the storm because we know we will get caught in the
storm’s vortex if we walk either too fast or too slow. In this practice,
we suggest that the need to balance the work of “hospicing” ways of
knowing and being that are dying (including learning from their gifts
and mistakes) and assisting with the birth of forms of coexistence and
political possibilities that are still undefined and are potentially (but
not necessarily) wiser (see Andreotti et al., 2015).
Because this work can be quite unsettling and uncomfortable, it
is difficult to do this work in the formal classroom, particularly in
our currently consumerist context. In this context, learners may be
seeking an experience that will affirm their perspectives, choices,
and self-image. Because our work tends to interrupt and problem-
atize these desires, much of this work is done in informal spaces,
such as workshops and trainings, with community organizations
or nonprofit groups that have become dissatisfied with the existing
available possibilities, and are, therefore, looking for something quite
different. When we do engage this work, we generally ask people to
first consider our “Broccoli Seed Agreement”. The metaphor at work
here is that through our pedagogical approach, we offer broccoli
seeds instead of the candy (comfortable answers) that many people
are seeking; thus, for those who chose to engage with our work, we
ask them upfront to take responsibility for their own learning (i.e.
for planting, growing, and harvesting the broccoli), for instance, by
observing their responses and resistances, deciding how far to push
themselves and their learning, and not looking to us as facilitators
to approve (or disapprove) of their learning process or conclusions.
It is important to begin this work by problematizing “business as
usual” and developing a sense of the hidden costs of our lifestyles,
the scale of the problems we are facing in terms of environmental
destruction and human exploitation, and the difficulties of interven-
ing in these patterns without reproducing more of the same harm.
Thus, we generally start by asking people to engage at least some of
the basic critiques and resources that draw attention to the hidden
costs of mainstream institutions and relations, and the root causes of
global injustice, so that they can develop a self-reflexive form of crit-
ical literacy and start to “connect the dots” of systemic, interrelated
problems. For instance, we often invite people to calculate their “eco-
logical footprint” at www.footprintcalculator.org and their “slavery
footprint” at www.slaveryfootprint.org. These tools are limited in
what they can do and we certainly encourage people to engage them
with a critical eye, but they nonetheless give a general sense of how
many planets we would need if everyone had the same patterns of
consumption that one has and how much human suffering is already
necessary to sustain these patterns today. While, on the one hand,
many people would prefer not to think about these things, so as to
keep enjoying these pleasures and comforts uninterrupted, in the
current state of affairs where these pleasures and comforts may be
affecting the very possibility of the continuation of life in the planet,
we invite people to consider our responsibility toward current and
future generations of human and nonhuman lives. Our pedagogy
offers one possibility for interrupting existing satisfactions, invest-
ments, and desires, so that we might problematize them and perhaps
begin the difficult process of disinvesting from them, welcoming
other previously unimaginable possibilities for existence, and devel-
oping previously exiled capacities.
After introducing and engaging the basics of critique, our peda-
gogical approach for global citizenship otherwise tends to emphasize
two primary strategies – creative social cartographies to support par-
ticipants as they “dig deeper” into the complexities and paradoxes of
collective challenges, to connect the dots and rationally explore the
limits of rationality; and affective, embodied, and land-based exer-
cises that are designed to support participants as they “relate wider”
to develop the stamina for the difficulties of this work and to tap into
exiled capacities that can support wellbeing and working through
the messes that we have made. We have included some of the creative
social cartographies in this chapter (more here: decolonialfutures.
net/creativecartographies), but the specific cartographies and exer-
cises that we engage in our practice will depend on the specifics of the
context and the group that we are working with.
BOSIO: In your previous work on GCE (e.g. Andreotti, 2011; Stein,
2015), and again in this chapter, you seem to imply that there is a
“common circularity” of neoliberal, liberal, and critical approaches
to GCE. Can you exemplify what is “common circularity” in your
view and how this may relate to your GCE teaching approaches?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: In a recent article with colleagues Karen Pashby
and Marta da Costa (see Pashby, Costa, Stein, & Andreotti, 2020),
we reviewed existing typologies of GCE. In this review, we found
that most approaches to GCE are articulated from within imaginar-
ies of global education and social change that emphasize a shift in
our way of doing things, but which proceed with the same direc-
tion forward (i.e. they seek to change the means, but keep the ends
the same). Some approaches to GCE advocate for shifting our way
of thinking, challenging normalized assumptions and power rela-
tions, and offering deeper historical and systemic analyses of global
problems. Within different ways of doing and thinking about GCE,
there are many variances; however, overall most of these approaches
are rooted within a shared (modern/colonial) way of being in which
existence is defined by knowledge, where humans are separated from
nature, and a single form of (Cartesian, teleological, logocentric,
allochronic) rationality prevails. Anything that falls outside of what
is imaginable within this way of being is unintelligible and, thus, pre-
sumed to be either worthless or simply nonexistent (Santos, 2007).
Alternatively, possibilities for existence that fall outside the modern/
colonial way of being are subjected to forms of projection and appro-
priation, that is, they are extracted from their own contextual relevance
and placed in the modern/colonial way of being in ways that betray
their integrity (Ahenakew, 2016). It is, therefore, difficult for people to
imagine, let alone engage, global citizenship in ways that do not become
circular. Thus, rather than describing for them what this looks like, we
often pose questions that invite people to sit at the edge of the modern/
colonial way of being so that they can start to miss what is absent. One
way of doing so is to share a creative social cartography that compares
assumptions of mainstream global citizenship (soft and radical reform)
and global citizenship otherwise (beyond reform) (see Table 2.1).
BOSIO: Your work on GCE is informed by “decolonial, postcolonial,
and Indigenous critiques”. You are also using the metaphor of the
“house modernity built” (Stein et al., 2017) to summarize phenom-
ena permeating modern societies, and I would suggest, the moder-
nity university. Phenomena may include, as you suggest, notions of
global capital, universal knowledge, social mobility, and others. Can
you offer your perspectives on how you would address the “house
modernity built” when conceptualizing and designing a “curricular
program” for GCE?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: The house modernity built synthesizes sev-
eral analyses produced by marginalized communities of struggle
as well as de-/postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, and critical ethnic
studies scholars, which identify the root causes and contemporary
implications and symptoms of an inherently unsustainable and vio-
lent system that separates us from the earth and from each other
Table 2.1 Mainstream Global Citizenship/Global Citizenship Otherwise
Mainstream GC GC Otherwise
Understand the global dimension Develop the capacity to face and embrace
of local issues; Develop complexities, uncertainty, paradoxes,
consensus on values and ways and internal contradictions without
forward; Expose people becoming irritated, overwhelmed,
to different voices and anxious, or depressed; Understand how
perspectives; Develop skills we are complicit in harm; Rationally
for action explore the limits of a single rationality
(self-reflexive multilayered reasoning)
“Make a difference”; “Be a hero/ Develop stamina to engage with difficult
ine”; Give people hope for the issues and conversations without
future; Empower and motivate relationships falling apart and without
people to act locally and turning to harmful kinds of hope for
globally in ways that are redemption; Develop familiarity with
authorized by official being in/with the uncomfortable, the
institutions unknown, the unknowable, the
unexpected, and tuning into different
modes of accessing personal and
collective joy (possibility of relating
differently through radical tenderness)
Encourage (self-congratulatory Interrupt patterns of consumption
forms of) tolerance, empathy, related to fears, (in)securities, anxieties,
virtue, care, autonomy, courage and perceived entitlements at
to stand up against injustice, individual and collective levels; Find
choosing from (prescriptive) balance-in-movement at the “eye of the
ethical frameworks storm”; Nurture humility, generosity,
compassion, patience, and response-
ability “before will” (not dependent on
choice, convictions, or convenience)
(tap metabolic intelligence and
compost harmful desires)
Active, educated citizens involved When the limits of the planet and the
in in/formal civil society and dominant system are reached in
democratic processes can fix the different contexts at different times, we
system so that it better serves will be forced to figure out how to be,
the collective good relate, imagine, and work together
differently; Although we cannot predict
with certainty or plan for this time, we
can prepare to take up this challenge
collectively (attempt to extend the glide
and soften the crash)
Human rationality, ingenuity, We can learn from the recurrent
and innovation will enable us to mistakes that our current habit of
engineer a society that is being reproduces and when the time
sustainable and in balance with comes, there is a chance that a wiser
nature way of being will emerge and we will
only make different mistakes in the
future (encounter possibilities that are
viable but unthinkable within current
frames)
THE HOUSE
MODERNITY BUILT
S
ST
O
C
EN
CA
D
L P
ID
BA ITA Unsustainable
H
LO L growth
G
UNIVERSAL
REASON
NATION
STATE
Over-
Waste disposal
Expropriation
consumption
SEPARABILITY
dispossession,
Destitution,
genocide
T
A NE
PL
House subsidised & maintained

House exceeds limits of planet by violence
Figures 2.2 and 2.3 The House Modernity Built and Its Hidden Costs.
(see Figures 2.2 and 2.3). Broadly, these analyses point to the fact
that the colonial processes that actually enable modern promises to be
fulfilled are often disavowed and externalized because to see these
connections can make those inside the house uncomfortable and
challenge the satisfactions that they/we get from the promises that
the house offers. This metaphor enables us to make these invisible
connections visible so that we can deepen our understanding of the
challenges we face (see Table 2.2).
Most theories of change are made up of a diagnosis of the pres-
ent and a proposition about a horizon for change. In our case, the
house of modernity can be understood as the diagnosis and In
Earth’s CARE as the proposition in response. However, as with
our other creative social cartographies, the house modernity built
(and In Earth’s CARE) is not intended to be a normative theory
of change that we believe everyone should adopt, but rather a
prompt for learners to reflect upon their own theories of change. For
instance, we invite learners to ask how they would answer the fol-
lowing questions based on their preferred theory of change: What is
the problem? What is the nature of the problem, and its underlying
cause? What would be the solution at a collective or systemic level?
Table 2.2 Modern Promises of the House and the Colonial Processes That
Subsidize Them
Modern Promise Colonial Process
Roof: global Continuous growth Racialized expropriation and

capitalist without consequence; exploitation of humans and
economic fulfilment through other than-human-beings
system wealth accumulation (including land/the earth
itself)
Wall: nation-state Security through the Sanctioned violence in the
political system protection of property; form of policing borders and
cohesion through shared ‘othered’ people, and global
national identity militarism
Wall: universal A single, universal Epistemicide; denial of the gifts
knowledge rationality and set of of other knowledge systems;
system humanist values that treating knowledge and
offer certainty, language as a means to index,
predictability, and control, and order the world
consensus and define existence
Stairs: Upward socioeconomic Worth determined by a
hierarchical mobility as the earned person/being’s perceived
social system reward for individual capacity to produce value
hard work and “natural within modern economies
ability” (i.e. “merit”)
Foundation: Autonomy and Denial of one’s entanglement
premised on independence of with, and responsibilities
separation (certain) humans; (before will) to, a wider
relationships are ecological metabolism;
presumed optional objectification, and
and based on choice instrumentalization of other
and free will beings
What can individuals do to contribute toward that? As well, the

invitation is for learners to self-reflexively ask: What are the contri-
butions, paradoxes, and limits of this theory of change? How does
this theory of change relate to other theories of change?
Apart from asking students to develop a hyper-self-reflexive stance
(Kapoor, 2004) using the metaphor of the house modernity built, we
also ask them to use critical tools like HEADS UP (Andreotti, 2012)
to critically engage with mainstream examples of GCE, such as that
of UNESCO, and offer examples of initiatives that are setting their
horizons of hope beyond the house modernity built, specifically:
• beyond modern forms of social economy (e.g. capitalism and

socialism)
• beyond nation-states and borders as mediators of relationships
• beyond separation between “man” and nature (anthropocentrism,
patriarchy, and separability)
• beyond a single rationality and story of progress, development,
and evolution
• beyond social mobility as the purpose of life, and
• beyond consumption (of goods, knowledge, relationships, expe-
riences, and critique) as a mode of relating to the world.
We have embedded this curricular approach in several courses at our

university and we have also used it in teacher and informal educa-
tion. Through the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective,
we run residencies and experiential learning programs that are ori-
ented by this approach to GCE.
BOSIO: You refer to global citizenship otherwise as “an invitation for
learners to identify and interrupt these colonial entitlements, trace
their harmful and unsustainable conditions of possibility and engage
in a long-term process of disinvesting from those entitlements so that
another way of being might become possible”. How would you teach
your students to develop such a pivotal critical approach to GCE?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: In our work, we seek to denaturalize the colo-
nial entitlements and colonial horizons of hope and strategies for
change that tend to be reproduced in many approaches to education,
including GCE. One way that we do this work is again through cre-
ative social cartographies, including “LAPSED”, which we gesture
to in our introduction and which draws attention to common prob-
lematic patterns of response to social problems (see Table 2.3; also
Table 2.3 LAPSED Approaches to Social Justice and Change
(heroic) Framing oneself or a particular person or population as

Leadership uniquely worthy and qualified to determine the approach and
direction of change, often in a way that they are presumed to
be above critique or complicity
(canonical) Pursuing certainty by identifying knowledge authorities that are
Authority presumed to be the most universally relevant and epistemically
privileged
(virtue) Positioning oneself as innocent/virtuous by curating one’s
Posturing self-image and attempting to ensure that one is seen as saying
the “right” thing and doing “good”
(formulaic) Seeking simplistic answers to complex problems so as to feel
Solutions secure that solutions already exist and are easy – we only need
to find and apply them
(projective) Feeling or seeking empathy for a particular (generally
Empathy marginalized) individual or group by identifying with that
individual or group and/or otherwise projecting a particular
narrative onto their existence
(redemptive) Enacting solidarity or change efforts motivated by a desire to
Desire restore one’s sense of goodness and absolve oneself of
complicity in harm
see the “HEADS UP Checklist” in Andreotti, 2012). The purpose of
this cartography is not to catalogue and condemn these patterns but
rather to invite people to self-reflexively observe their own actions,
analyses, and responses in relation to these patterns so as to poten-
tially interrupt them and open up new possibilities that would be
oriented by different kinds of desires and commitments.
This work is not only a matter of deconstruction, as in addition
to denaturalizing these patterns, we also create opportunities for
learners to ethically encounter other possibilities for existence (with-
out repeating the common patterns of projection, consumption, or
appropriation of difference). Nonetheless, we do not offer precon-
ceived alternatives to our existing system because of the risk that
we will project our desires and entitlements onto those alternatives
if we try to imagine them from here. Thus, we invite learners to
work through harmful desires and entitlements so that something
else that is unimaginable from where we currently stand may start
to become viable.
BOSIO: You are suggesting that in order to untangle forms of colonialism
rooted in certain educational approaches, it has to be contemplated
how coloniality shapes not just “mainstream ways of doing (meth-
odology)” but also “knowing (epistemology) and ways of being
(ontology)”. How shall educators address these in their daily prac-
tices and when they design a curriculum for GCE?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: One way that we invite educators to consider
the differences between ways of doing, knowing, and being is to
work with them to create questions that would be asked by those
engaging at each of these layers in relation to their context or area
of work so that they can start to understand the distinct offerings
of each layer. For instance, in relation to GCE, we might illustrate
this with the following questions (see Pashby et al., 2020, for a more
extensive set of questions):
Methodological: What kinds of activities will teach students
the values that will support democracy, fairness, and progress for
all humanity? How can we foster students’ sense of connection,
empathy, and responsibility for individuals beyond their immediate
context? What opportunities would enable students to experience
“thinking globally while acting locally”? What form of cultural
competency will prepare people to work respectfully and effectively
across differences? What kinds of lesson plans would enable teach-
ers to easily include GCE into their existing curricula?
Epistemological: Who decides what counts as “global citizen-
ship”, how come, in whose name, and for whose benefit? How can
global citizenship be politicized and address unequal global politi-
cal, economic, and ecological systems? How should global citizen-
ship be reframed to be more substantively inclusive of diverse ways
of knowing (beyond tokenism)? What kinds of analyses and frame-
works could prompt learners to take responsibility for their individ-
ual role in the structural global problems that emerge from histories
and ongoing legacies of global inequality (beyond charity)?
Ontological: How might our dominant way of being trap us into
a single possibility for existence, and foreclose (often violently) on
other possibilities? What desires, denials, and entitlements preclude
us from seeing the limits of this way of being – and how might
we start to unravel them? What would it look and feel like if our
responsibility to all beings was not a willed choice, but rather some-
thing “before will”? How can we create educational opportunities
for learners to see and feel that we cannot be divided into “good”
and “bad” but rather that we contain the full spectrum of human-
ity within us and we are often both subject to harm from others as
well as complicit in harming others? How can learners engage other
possibilities for existence without projection, tokenism, romantici-
zation, and appropriation of those possibilities?
BOSIO: Your EarthCARE’s CARE Global Justice framework describes
“the interrelated dimensions of ecological, cognitive, affective, rela-
tional, and economic justice”. Can you describe these dimensions
and how you would design a curriculum for GCE around these
dimensions?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: As noted in our introduction, the “In Earth’s
CARE Global Justice” Framework integrates ecological, cognitive,
affective, relational, and economic approaches to local and global
justice. GCE informed by this framework is less concerned with
cultivating prescriptive approaches to problem-solving and more
concerned with preparing people to work with and through the
complexities, uncertainties, paradoxes, and complicities that char-
acterize efforts to address unprecedented challenges.
We are experimenting with several strategies that work in this
direction, including artistic, embodied, and land-based practices.
Where possible, we incorporate these practices into our teaching
at the university. In one course, which we called “Experiments in
Entangled Co-existence: Facing the Inter-sectional Violences of
Modernity”, students learned through the traditional approach of
academic readings and discussions, alongside alternative pedagog-
ical practices, such as revolutionary dance, dreaming exercises,
drum-making with a local Indigenous elder, work on the univer-
sity farm, a poetry workshop, and a critical labor history tour
of the city. Instead of only teaching students about the theories
and/or theorists whose work inspired the creation of the course,
we sought to offer opportunities for students to develop vocab-
ularies and tools of situated and (self-) reflexive analyses related
to modernity’s violences, the differences between separability and
entanglement, and the implications for different forms of social-
ity and solidarity – all while inviting them to consider how these
related to their own contexts. For the final course assignment, stu-
dents chose a topic related to the themes of the course and could
choose between writing an academic essay on the topic, creating
an artistic piece, or developing a knowledge translation piece that
targeted a specific audience.
BOSIO: Sharon and Vanessa, you both have a significant experience in
teaching at the university level in the context of Canada and beyond.
Why is or is not GCE necessary in the modern university, particu-
larly in Canada?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: Today, we are tasked with preparing higher edu-
cation students to face numerous local and global problems which
we summarize under five primary challenges:
1 The systemic colonial violence that underwrites the mainte-

nance of the dominant system (which is premised on invisibi-
lized exploitation and expropriation).
2 The inherent ecological unsustainability of the dominant system
(which is premised on unending growth and consumption that
ignores the limits of the planet).
3 The emergence of multiple unprecedented “wicked problems”,
such as political polarization, resurgent nationalisms, extreme
weather, labor precarity, mass migration, the cancellation of
civil, human, and labor rights, and a global mental health crisis
(which are rooted in systemic violence and ecological unsustain-
ability, but represent exponential growth in their scope, scale,
and intensity).
4 The intellectual and affective difficulties of imagining “other-
wise” when faced with the intensification of wicked problems
(which is reinforced by a lack of stamina for addressing uncer-
tainty and complexity, and perceived entitlements to autonomy,
coherence, and control).
5 The imperative to ethically integrate the gifts of multiple knowl-
edge traditions and practices, in particular those of Indigenous
communities, so that we might draw on an “ecology of knowl-
edges” (Santos, 2007) to respond to these problems in ways
that contribute to greater collective wellbeing (which is difficult
given tendencies to seek overarching solutions and to engage
marginalized knowledges through appropriation, projection,
consumption, or idealization).
There is significant potential for GCE to contribute to the prepa-

ration of learners with the stamina, critical literacy, and self-
reflexivity that will be required in order to face the uncertainty,
complexity, and conflict inherent in these (and related) challenges.
However, in order for GCE to be more responsive, rigorous, and rel-
evant in the context of the many global challenges we currently face,
we will need to historicize the approaches that have thus far oriented
GCE, acknowledge what has changed and why, and consider what
kinds of theories and practices might have a generative impact in the
current context, especially given the conditions of dispersed knowl-
edge authorities and fragmented attention. This work will need to
account for the full range of possible responses to contemporary
uncertainty and instability – including politically reactionary ones.
BOSIO: What are the reasons behind positive and negative attitudes of
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly Canadian
universities?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: Apart from colleagues from the now-closed
Center for Global Citizenship Education at the University of Alberta
and a few early and midcareer scholars around Canada, most of our
colleagues in education have set their priorities around canonical
questions specific to a particular discipline. GCE generally does not
fit these disciplinary canonical concerns. Therefore, some colleagues
perceive GCE to be a topic that should be critiqued in its mainstream
formation, but GCE is not generally thought to be worthy of further
scholarly consideration and it may not even be recognized as a legit-
imate field of policy, practice or research. However, GCE is indeed
used within the language of institutional policies and strategies of
many Canadian universities (often referring to the improvement of
competitive advantages in students’ CVs, as well as the need to pre-
pare students to “make the world a better place”), and in K-12 schools.
Therefore, both school teachers and higher education administrators
who are tasked with developing and implementing these policies and
strategies are generally very interested in GCE.
BOSIO: How can education for global citizenship be made suitable for
or attractive to students studying in Canadian universities? What
knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, and experiences are gradu-
ates expected to acquire in order to become global citizens?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: Part of the difficulty in enacting a “beyond
reform” approach to global citizenship, or global citizenship other-
wise, is that it is premised on a pedagogy of interrupting the desires
and perceived entitlements that many of us have come to expect
within existing institutions. This interruption is, in part, an inter-
ruption of socially authorized denial, something that is proactively
not talked about in formal education, in the media, or in modern
institutions (Mills, 2007; Vimalassery, Pegues, & Goldstein, 2016).
Thus, talking about what is often denied, and talking about the
function of denial itself, can be uncomfortable and frustrating,
prompting feelings of guilt, shame, and anger. This is why our
approach takes the form of an invitation – generally, only those
who are looking for it will be interested – and those who are not
might strongly resist it and take out their resistance on those who
bring it up. This is also partly why we do not put forward global
citizenship otherwise as a normative approach, but rather invite
people into a space in which they can engage with a fuller range
and complexity of different approaches to GCE; for instance,
through mapping tools like social cartographies (see Andreotti,
2011; Stein, 2015; Pashby et al., 2020). In doing so, we invite peo-
ple to better understand and situate themselves within these dif-
ferent approaches. We then invite those who are interested in the
beyond reform approach to dive deeper with us.
But even beyond clarifying the specifics of different approaches,
we are, in general, in higher education working within a cacopho-
nous landscape of theoretical and political perspectives, aided by
the rapid proliferation and spread of information (Bauman, 2001).
Despite the diversity of intellectual perspectives that are available,
this landscape is effectively dominated by modernity’s financial
and affective economies: knowledge that creates profit and that
thereby serves global capital accumulation is most highly valued
by institutions. Meanwhile, knowledge that affirms one’s value
within these economies tends to be most prized by individuals.
Thus, the competition for epistemic authority based on political or
moral arguments that characterized earlier iterations of moderni-
ty’s intellectual economy – and the approaches to global citizenship
that were developed within it – appear increasingly outdated. The
most basic challenge is to simply retain people’s attention, which is
followed by the more considerable challenge of doing so in a way
that invites deepened engagements and relations. In other words,
the challenge is for us to figure out how we can invite people to not
just eat broccoli, but to actually grow it themselves when it is so
much more appealing and easier to eat packaged candy.
That said, as the promises that previously animated institutions
like higher education become increasingly precarious and go increas-
ingly unfulfilled, we find that more and more people (including both
faculty and students) are looking for something different and more
fulfilling. This does not necessarily make the process of withdraw-
ing from our desire for candy easier, nor does it mean that these
people are looking for the particular approach we have to offer. But
we nonetheless hold the space for those who are looking for it.
BOSIO: You are suggesting that educators may help learners “to navigate
today’s complex global challenges by inviting them to consider how
their desires both enable and foreclose certain possibilities and by
creating opportunities in which they can start to miss the possibilities
that are absent from modern imaginaries”. In this perspective, is GCE
in the modern university, particularly in Canadian universities, more
about knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, or some combination
of all four in your opinion? How can students’ achievements of these
attributes (knowledge, skills, values, and disposition) be identified?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: We have been working on several tools that
can help students reflect on the learning that emerges in different
immersion experiences. One of these surveys is presented below
as an illustration. It organizes dispositions (Andreotti, Biesta, &
Ahenakew, 2015) around the five dimensions of justice in the “In
Earth’s CARE” Framework:
Cognitive Justice/Wellbeing
• Deepen analyses of historical and systemic forms of violence

against the planet and Indigenous communities.
• Critically examine your assumptions, desires, and complicities
in harm.
• Observe patterns of interpretation (how you are reading and
being read).
• Think in multiple layers acknowledging tensions and paradoxes
at the intersection of different histories and world views.
• Work through the unknown and the unknowable and realize
something you did not know about yourself.
Affective Justice/Wellbeing
• Become comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort.

• Hold space for internal complexity.
• Identify and work through projections, fragilities, traumas, and
insecurities affecting habits and decisions.
• Process emotions and release tension without narrative framings.
• Learn to observe oneself observing with engaged detachment
(learning to meta-analyze one’s own narratives and affective
feedback loops).
Relational Justice/Wellbeing
• Work through the complexities of relationships with people who

come from different backgrounds and belief systems.
• Explore different possibilities for being and relating not
grounded on shared meaning, identity, or conviction.
• Feel part of a wider metabolism (planet/land) and collective
body (group/community).
• Interrupt intellectualization in order to sense and relate differ-
ently to people and land.
• Learn through difficult events with humility, compassion, gen-
erosity, and patience.
Economic Justice/Wellbeing
• Interrupt patterns of consumption of knowledges, experiences,

and relationships.
• Decenter yourself and center collective needs (do what is needed
rather than what you want to do).
• Interrupt patterns of entitlement coming from social, economic,
and/or racial privilege.
• Respond in generative ways to teachings (knowledge exchange)
that do not resonate with you.
• Interrupt calculations based on self-interest in order to give and
receive differently.
Ecological Justice/Wellbeing
• Reflect on the challenges of global justice from different cultural

perspectives.
• Grapple with the complexities of addressing consumption and
addiction as barriers to change (including cycles of food and
waste production).
• Open up possibilities for thinking, relating, and being beyond
what is authorized within modernity.
• Identify some of the challenges of “digging deeper and relating
wider” in GCE work.
• Develop stamina and resiliency for the slow and challenging
work that needs to be done in the long term.
BOSIO: Ultimately, what are three themes a higher education curriculum

for GCE should include in your opinion?
STEIN AND ANDREOTTI: From our perspective, GCE curriculum should
support people to connect dots in terms of addressing “human
wrongs” (a play on the concept of “human rights,”); address how
desires and denials are produced (especially how formal education
has contributed to the problems we are currently facing); and pre-
pare people for the difficult work of hospicing a violent and unsus-
tainable system that is collapsing, and assisting with the birth of
something new and undefined. In this approach to global citizen-
ship, learners are encouraged to:
• Identify and transform problematic ongoing patterns of North/

South, Indigenous/nonIndigenous, and racialized/white engage-
ments that tend to be hegemonic, ethnocentric, depoliticized,
ahistorical, and paternalistic.
• Develop complex, systemic, multilayered, and multivoiced ques-
tions and analyses that challenge and provide alternatives to
simplistic solutions.
• Work with and through the discomforts and difficulties
that arise when a particular habit of being is interrupted and
denaturalized.
• Carefully weave new local and global relationships so that we
might collectively mobilize critically informed approaches to
global justice in multiple contexts, and engage constructively
with difficult issues that emerge in processes of deep intercul-
tural, intergenerational, and intersectional learning and change.
• Cultivate awareness of how we are implicated in the problems
we are trying to address – that is, how we are all both part of the
problem and the solution in different ways.
• Expand frames of reference, acknowledging the gifts, contra-
dictions and limitations of different knowledge systems, moving
beyond “either-or” toward “both and more”.
• Move reciprocally from theory to practice and from practice to
theory, understanding the essential and dynamic link between
theory and practice and valuing each equitably.
• Open our social and ecological imagination to different forms
of knowing, being, and relating and different futurities beyond a
single story of progress, development, and evolution, and
• Sense our connectedness with and responsibility toward each
other and the planet.
2.3 Conclusion
Our approach to GCE otherwise seeks to create spaces where people can
have difficult conversations without relationships falling apart, and engage
in challenging and uncomfortable processes of reallocating individual
and collective colonial desires, noncoercively. This requires that we work
with and through both individual desires and structural harms, but it is
a “tough sell” as this process is often uncomfortable and frustrating. In
many ways, people have to already be looking for something very different
and even then, that does not mean that they will not still become frustrated
or annoyed by the process – hence, the “Broccoli Seed Agreement”.
We engage this work assuming that no one person, knowledge sys-
tem, or approach to global citizenship has the answers and that we are
all insufficient and indispensable to the task of learning to be other-
wise. This means that Western and other forms of rationality, although
important in keeping us learning and accountable, are inadequate in
themselves to help us figure out another way of coexisting on a finite
living planet. Further, while we recognize that vulnerabilities are une-
venly distributed as the dominant system protects the interests of the
dominant groups and places unbearable burdens on the backs and lands
of marginalized groups, we believe that neither inclusion nor redress
within the existing system are adequate responses in the long run.
In fact, we work from the proposition that this system cannot con-
tinue forever and we will, therefore, be forced to find another way of
being. However, in order to do so, we will need to face our individual
and collective messes or we will end up destroying our life-support sys-
tems and further harming each other to protect our right to consume
what is left. This approach is not about seeking innocence, redemption,
or purity (Shotwell, 2016). Rather, it is about preparing to face “the end
of the world as we know it” (Silva, 2014) – which is not the end of the
world, full stop, just the end of certain ways of knowing, feeling, relat-
ing, desiring, and being in the world. The task of GCE, in this context
and from this approach, is to help un-numb and enliven our capacities
for humility, generosity, humor, (self)compassion, patience, and vis-
ceral responsibility that is not dependent on convictions, convenience,
or choice.
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3 Global Citizenship Education
as a Counter Colonial Project
Engaging Multiple Knowledge Systems
for Transformational Change
Lynette Shultz
3.1 Introduction
An important starting point of understanding global citizenship is
to acknowledge that living on a shared planet is the most significant
and urgent concept needed to address the myriad of very urgent issues
that threaten the existence of all life on the planet. A global citizen is
interested in and able to respond to not only global crises but the wide
diversity of knowledges, cultures, and dreams of people living on the
planet. Much of my current writing and teaching in the area of global
citizenship takes up the idea of conviviality as the ethical foundation
of global citizenship and global citizenship education (GCE) (Shultz &
Abdi, 2017, 2018; Shultz & Elfert, 2018).
The concept of conviviality is rooted in ideas of modes of living
together and a concern for wellbeing. While national and other frames
of citizenship provide structures of inclusion and exclusion, global cit-
izenship highlights those areas of shared concern – how to sustain life
on a shared planet, how to protect the diversity of life on the planet,
and how to live well and in peaceful coexistence. Global citizenship and
GCE provide frameworks for understanding and working with these
shared concerns. The umbrella of GCE is wide and transdisciplinary,
bringing together such foci as peace studies, environmental studies, anti-
colonial studies, equity studies, feminist studies, and antipoverty work.
This work shifts epistemologies and relationships bringing me to under-
standing the work of GCE as that of conviviality, an ethical foundation
that makes sense of these shifts.
Conviviality is connected to Haraway’s (2016) call for “making odd-
kin”, the forging of good and deep relations across categories of differ-
ence, including human and nonhuman, to sustain life on the planet. This
brings decolonial and countercolonial imperatives into a reshaped under-
standing of what a peaceful existence on a healthy planet might entail,
where humans are decentered and hierarchies of difference are disman-
tled. By focusing on relations, it also provides an ethical foundation for
resistance to current neoliberal notions of a marketized education as a
38 Lynette Shultz
way to sort individuals and a way to take seriously the many calls for
countercolonial relations and actions.
The role of education in this project of conviviality is a vital one and
the work of GCE can make an important contribution. Of course, it is
important to not ignore the many pieces of curriculum that do propose
global citizenship as a framework for a socially and economically mobile
citizen. These emerge mainly from efforts to support a globalized world
economic system of capitalism that requires a mobile global workforce
as well as mobile capital (see Shultz, 2007). There is so much more being
contributed. Within higher education, working with the multiscalar
relations of “the global” brings one face to face with the legacies of cur-
rent neoliberal globalization, often referred to as neocolonialism and five
centuries of European colonialism that continue to shape international
relations and certainly the geopolitics of knowledge.
This challenges us to expand our understanding of “the modern” uni-
versity. Higher education has made massive shifts under neoliberal pol-
icies that demand education systems create a hyperpossessive, mobile,
individual, ready to respond to the marketization of all aspects of the
world and willing to compete with every other hyperpossessive, mobile
individual on the planet. The modern university is now a corporate
university.
In addition, while there are some that declare that the project of neo-
liberal globalization has erased impacts of the relations of European
colonialism, I think there is more compelling evidence that these colo-
nial relations have been intensified. When we refer to the “modern”
university, we tend to reference the “European University”, based on a
particular understanding of modernity that positions European society
and universities, and by extension the Euro-American society and uni-
versities, as the central source of knowledge. This knowledge system sep-
arates all relations – humans from the natural world, and human from
human, with a focus on individualism over collective ontoepistemologies
and historical relations of power, creating hierarchal categorization by
sex, race, geography, culture, and class. Relations of domination are at
this system’s very core (see Mignolo, 2011; Santos 2007, 2014; Odora
Hoppers & Richardson, 2012).
Transforming the historically embedded colonial divide is the start-
ing point of some very important GCE research and teaching. There
are outstanding efforts to create countercolonial education spaces where
policies and practices begin to reflect a world of diverse people and
knowledge. This diversity is the strength we need if we are to address the
urgent issues on our planet. This is a very radical and transformational
space for education.
In terms of education curriculum and pedagogy, global citizen-
ship is what Meyer and Land (2003; Meyer & Land, 2005) call a
threshold concept and it is the case for both students and researchers.
Global Citizenship Education 39
Yukawa (2015) highlights five characteristics of a threshold con-
cept: transformational, transformative, integrative, irreversible, and
bounded. Global citizenship demands an engagement with trouble-
some knowledge that is transdisciplinary but also highly relevant to
specific disciplinary foci. It is the knowledge that requires shifting
how one thinks and views both specific content but also the world in
which this knowledge exists.
It is also a transformative and irreversible concept in that it results in
shifts in worldview, even if this is to acknowledge that one has a “world-
view”. Students are transformed when they understand their own epis-
temological foundation and that knowing this is irreversible. Manfred
Max Neef (2005) contributed an important understanding of transdisci-
plinarity and ethics, and GCE exists within such an epistemological and
ethical space, again supporting the notion that it is a threshold knowl-
edge concept. GCE involves the difficult work that is needed to address
urgent issues across the planet, for example, climate chaos, the wide-
spread rise of fascist movements, increased militarization including the
threat of nuclear war, rising inequality, the massive overuse of natural
resources, and expansive food insecurity. These all are linked, intercon-
nected as global issues.
A key role of higher education and the university is providing knowl-
edge through research and teaching to address the needs of society.
These issues have links to traditional notions of modernity and move
through the world along the pathways of European colonialism, margin-
alizing people, knowledge, and land taken through colonial settlement.
The current global issues and these colonial legacies require transformed
thinking about life and relations on the planet, and GCE provides both
conceptual and practical space to do this.
3.2 Dialogue with Lynette Shultz

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? Specifically, how
has your academic and life’s “journey” shaped this understanding?
LYNETTE SHULTZ: I have been working with ideas and practices of GCE
for two decades, first doing project work for ActionAid in the UK
and later for Canadian development NGOs and finally, as an aca-
demic interested in education policy, global social justice, and the
geopolitics of knowledge. The field of global citizenship and GCE
studies has shifted over this time and I have done some mapping
of the concepts and practices to try and understand “how global
citizenship works” in both education and development fields (where
it first emerged). At the University of Alberta, where I am located,
there has been an opportunity to do this work through institutional
spaces being opened up by senior administrators as well as from
university – community partnerships, many of these international
40 Lynette Shultz
partnerships. This resulted in support for the Centre for Global
Citizenship Education and Research and for a transdisciplinary,
academic “global citizenship certificate” at the undergraduate level
available for all University of Alberta students.
It is not surprising that educationists have had a leading role in
global citizenship studies. Education work requires a kind of opti-
mism, a belief that people can learn new things and can transform
relations and structures around them. Working on a global scale
demands a conceptual optimism and the ability to, as Paulo Freire
described, to “read the world”, and read its multiscalar complexity
and not shy away from what you see and to retreat into “us and
them” binaries. The challenge for someone like me who is located
as a person of European ancestry with a settler history on colonized
land and living a life where I can easily access the benefits of techni-
cal and economic advantages in this century is to avoid slipping into
valorizing a disconnected elite worldview as is the case too often in
GCE work.
I am grateful for my many teachers throughout my life who have
helped me see the beauty of nature, of simplicity, of living a life in
respectful relationship with the land. These many teachers taught me
the importance of social justice activism while also learning to work
for good relations in whatever place I find myself. I have worked
to educate against hierarchies of race, gender, and geography that
continue as colonial legacies and in GCE, this includes such things
as decolonizing the geopolitics of knowledge, antiracism education,
understanding the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous people, and
earth jurisprudence. These must all be connected if we are to edu-
cate about sharing a planet and a future.
BOSIO: What are the three key elements of GCE in the modern higher
education institution?
SHULTZ: Higher education in most countries was shaped by colonial
understandings of knowledge but has now been reshaped by 30 years
of neoliberal policy and practice promoting competitive individual-
ism, marketization, and the “skillification” of a global mobile (and
perpetually precarious) workforce. It is impossible to understand
any current issue in education outside of these forces. Our task is,
however, to imagine how it might be different, a profoundly urgent
task. I find students, wherever I am teaching, to be longing for a dif-
ferent way to be in the world. There is a deep despair that is surfaced
whenever we discuss the important issues of our time. Solastalgia is
a term coined in 2007 by Glenn Albrecht who wanted to understand
the connection between human stress and environmental stress. It
has its origins in the concepts of “solace” and “desolation” and the
pain of isolation from one’s home. Most people I meet express this
deep sense of despair, of solastalgia, when they talk about the “state
of the world”. It is certainly the case of students who come to study
global citizenship.
BOSIO: You suggest that “working with the ‘the global’ brings one face
to face with the legacies of current neoliberal globalization, often
referred to as neocolonialism”. When you teach about global citizen-
ship, in what ways do you discuss with your students about neolib-
eral and neocolonial legacies?
SHULTZ: If we want to teach for understanding “the world”, stu-
dents must encounter the ideas and writing of people who are not
Eurocentric epistemologically, ontologically, and experientially.
When I refer to the legacies of colonialism, I am looking at how colo-
nialism set up center-periphery relations, with an understanding that
knowledge existed in Europe and the rest of the planet was waiting
to be provided with this knowledge. Of course, societies thrived for
millennia based on their knowledge systems, social structures, and
ways of educating. Encounters with European armies, religions, and
educators demonstrated the violence of the colonial project, where
the bodies, minds, and land of people around the world were taken
and these acts justified through the rhetoric of European superior-
ity. Indigenous people around the world are still emerging from the
oppression of these events and relations and we see a global resur-
gence of Indigenous societies. Our education systems are slow to
reflect this resurgence. I have published quite a bit about the geopoli-
tics of knowledge and the need for countercolonial curriculums (see,
for example, Shultz, 2018; Shultz & Abdi, 2017). My students learn
about this colonial history and anticolonial movements but they also
learn ways to overcome this history from the work of scholars and
educators and in communities.
BOSIO: As you suggest, “the modern university is now a corporate uni-
versity”. It is difficult to disagree with you on this. In your opinion,
how can educators, at the ground level, contribute to a different type
of university, perhaps a type of university that values more sustain-
ability and less profit-making?
SHULTZ: I do not see any of these institutions changing until there are
wider changes in neoliberal policies. It will take a significant trans-
formation; a radical transformation. The neoliberal knowledge econ-
omy puts universities right in the center of the commodification of
the ideas, students, teachers, and researchers who work with ideas
and with education. We can learn from grassroots social movements
about how to create transformational changes but we have to be
bold. We might organize around climate change resistance or species
extinction. Or perhaps the weight of neoliberal policies might be too
much to carry. Writers such as David Harvey have long discussed how
neoliberalism requires authoritarianism to maintain itself. Creativity
and research don’t do well in captivity; so, there seem to be more
42 Lynette Shultz
examples of educators finding ways to work with their communities
in ways that transform how knowledge is shared. It is not necessarily
the case that our current universities will be the place where trans-
formational decolonial work will begin.
BOSIO: The “idea of conviviality” that you propose herewith is very
interesting. How does “conviviality” relate to GCE and students’
global learning?
SHULTZ: A conviviality-focused GCE highlights that living on the planet
is about building good relationships with other people, communi-
ties, and species. It lifts the cloud of individualism that has settled
on people through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, making it
difficult to see that we have a shared planet and a shared future.
What is “global”? It is the interconnection of all the “locals” on
the planet. It requires thinking in a “multiscalar” way to “read the
world”. Relationships, whether strong or weak, violent or peaceful,
familiar or strange, hold this “multiscalar” world together. So, GCE
must ask:
How can we live together on this planet? Framing this as conviv-
iality affirms that the work is in the messy, dynamic, and complex
relationships that bind us to life. Conviviality accepts difference and
sheds light on the importance of learning how to build and sustain
relations based on respect, responsibility, and the dignity of differ-
ence. I am interested in not only human-based relations but also
in nature. This brings in the possibility of building policy regimes
based on the Rights of Nature, of what some are calling “Wild
Law” and Earth Jurisprudence (see, for example, Peter Burdon,
2011). Indigenous scholars from many colonized lands are work-
ing to bring Indigenous knowledge and experience into academic
spaces (see, for example, Borrows et al, 2018; Burdon, 2011; Clarke
& Haraway, 2018; Smith, 2012). These initiatives and knowledge
contributions are transforming our notions of relations and offer a
serious countercolonial pedagogical space.
Of course, this raises questions about the university itself and,
as discussed earlier, how higher education has been shifted to fit a
marketized/marketizing system of knowledge exchange. How can
we imagine finding institutional space for anticolonial and decolo-
nial work?
3.3 Conclusion
In this discussion, I have outlined how I understand the contribution
GCE can make in a tangled and interconnected world. I have argued for
more than an integrated curriculum and certainly more than one that is
driven by a marketized knowledge economy. In many ways, what I have
described as being needed is already emerging; in spaces where
Indigenous people are rising up as land and water protectors; where
children are nurtured in “Forest Schools” and learn all their subjects
through their daylong interactions with the land and nature surround-
ing them; where Indigenous ceremonies are gently shared in support
of an increasing number of Indigenous students who are taking their
place as scholars; where students from local communities around the
world gather in online global classrooms to research and discern the best
responses to our most pressing global issues. These are radical spaces of
conviviality and of GCE.
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44 Lynette Shultz
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4 From Global to Planetary
Citizenship
A Proposal for Evolving Brazil
University Curriculum
Silvia Elisabeth Moraes, Eduardo Moraes
Arraut, and Josefina Moraes Arraut
4.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we present our first inter-/transdisciplinary experience
within the proposal to include planetary citizenship (PC) and the Ecology
of Knowledges in the curriculum of Brazilian universities. PC is discussed
according to the views and practices of three academics from Letters/
Education, Biology/Ecology, Physics/Meteorology. PC is conceived here
as a floating signifier (Laclau, 2007) to be articulated in a variety of con-
crete projects proposed by different groups according to their demands
and aspirations. PC has already been developed in a series of recent publi-
cations where the authors contextualized the topic in their area, Education
(Moraes 2014, 2015; Moraes & Freire, 2016; Moraes & Freire, 2017).
We recognize the important aspects of global citizenship (GC), but
pinpoint its limitations, including those related to its acceptance in the
Brazilian University context. In our view, PC captures elements that seem
key for the curriculum of universities in Brazil and, perhaps, abroad. We
support our proposal of PC in the Brazilian university on the reflections
of Rio 92, that introduced Environmental Education in the curriculum;
on Gutierrez & Prado’s ecopedagogy (2013), an educational movement
coordinated by the Paulo Freire Institute (IPF) and the Latin American
Institute for Education and Communication (ILPEC) of Costa Rica, on
Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s Ecology of Knowledges (2007), Edgar
Morin’s planetary consciousness (2011), and on our studies and experi-
ence as university professors.
4.2 Evolution of a Planetary Citizenship in Brazil

Capra, in his famous book The Turning Point (1982), observes that
our civilization is living a period of profound changes. Three of these
changes are shaking the foundations of our lives and affecting our
social, economic, and political system – the decline of patriarchalism
that has been in action for at least three thousand years, the end of
fossil fuel era, and a paradigmatic shift in our thought, perception, and
46 Silvia E. Moraes, Eduardo M. Arraut and Josefina M. Arraut
values of a determined vision of reality that we call the scientific par-
adigm. Although all three are equally important, in this text, we will
concentrate on analysing the paradigm that has dominated our culture
for hundreds of years, shaping western society and influencing the rest
of the world. Associated to the scientific revolution, enlightenment and
industrial revolution, this paradigm includes the belief of the scientific
method as the only valid approach to knowledge, the view of the uni-
verse as a mechanical system composed of elementary material units,
the conception of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence,
and the belief in unlimited material progress to be reached through tech-
nological and economic growth. The transformation we are living now,
says Capra, will probably be more dramatic than previous ones. “It is
not a crisis of individuals, governments, or social institutions; it is a
transition of planetary dimensions” (ibidem, p. 30).
Curriculum design is included in this paradigmatic shift. The sci-
entific paradigm originated the disciplines which have provided edu-
cation for our professionals in Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Biology,
Geology, and Mathematics. Scientific research has progressed in all
areas. From the beginning until the middle of the 20th century, the
Social Sciences – History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Education
– did their best to be accepted in the podium by using quantitative
methods of analysis of their research topics. In curriculum practice,
this tendency originated fragmentation, linearization and alienation of
knowledge, portrayed in the strict division of disciplines, class hours,
multiple-choice exams, memorization of concepts. The selection of
topics had a lot to do with the interests of the social/political group
that was in power.
The notion of curriculum has evolved. Areas such as Ecology are per
se interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and political. They are situated on
the boundary where formal education meets new emerging epistemolo-
gies like those suggested by postcolonial theory. This new curriculum
continues with traditional scientific knowledge but incorporates inte-
gration, interactiveness, complexity, creativity, contextualization, and
local and global knowledge within its framework. Postcolonial theory
has unveiled to us the immense richness of our Indigenous and African
matrices discussing the power relations among nations that experienced
the European colonization and how these relations have affected our
Culture, Science, and Arts. There have been movements toward over-
coming barriers and prejudices in the shape of projects, discussion
forums, and other initiatives originating at the school and the university.
Sousa Santos’ Ecology of Knowledges (2007) is one of these movements.
The Ecology of Knowledges is an attempt to overcome the abys-
sal thinking (Santos, 2007), this invisible but real line that separates
Global North from Global South. The Ecology of Knowledges consists
of “bringing visibility to a wide range of cultural, epistemological, and
experiential possibilities made invisible by a hegemonic logic that not
From Global to Planetary Citizenship 47
only disqualifies and delegitimizes these other forms of social action
as makes them absent, unworthy of being considered reasonable to the
rational logic in progress” (Moraes & Freire, 2017, p. 31).
In 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, we had the most influential events for the
drafting of planetary citizenship – the United Nations Conference on the
Environment and Development, better known as Rio 92 or the Earth
Summit, where participating countries agreed and signed documents,
such as Agenda 21, a comprehensive attempt to promote sustainable
development as a new standard on a planetary scale; the Earth Charter,
a document on sustainable development and environmental protection
that had been drafted by the United Nations World Commission for
Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) in 1987. The
principles in the Earth Charter represent the building of planetary cit-
izenship through solidarity, respect for the environment, responsible
actions, equality, and freedom (Sousa, 2019).
Motivated by Rio 92, the Brazilian Ministry of Education launched
the National Curricular Parameters Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais
- Ministério da Educação e Cultura (PCN-MEC, 1998), which included
Environment, Ethics, and Cultural Pluralism as transversal themes. In
times of intense doubts about the traditional curricular model, the PCN
was planted in fertile soil, for it not only promoted a substantial change
in the schools but it also started influencing the university curriculum
(Moraes 2005).
In 1999, the Paulo Freire Institute (IPF) and the Latin American
Institute for Education and Communication (ILPEC) of Costa Rica,
coordinated by Francisco Gutiérrez and Cruz Prado, launched the
Ecopedagogy, an educational movement that indicates ways for the con-
stitution of planetary citizenship that goes beyond the environmental
dimension since it also comprehends the political, economic, cultural,
and social dimensions in human life. A curriculum review, consistent
with the educational perspective of the Ecopedagogy (Gutierrez & Prado,
2013), must focus on the development of a conscience and a peaceful,
fair, and sustainable environmental and social coexistence required by
the exercise of planetary citizenship. Values, knowledge, principles, and
attitudes must be integrated to assist the education of a planetary citizen.
Edgar Morin has long been a major author in Brazilian educational
studies. In his view, pedagogy is responsible for a radical fractionation of
knowledge, causing the individual to lose connection with the universal.
A broken interaction between local and global provides a resolution of
existential questions completely detached from the context in which they
are situated. Complex thinking allows us to embrace the uniformity and
variety contained in totality. Morin perceives the school class as a com-
plex entity that encompasses a variety of dispositions, socioeconomic
strata, emotions, and cultures, the perfect space for a paradigm transfor-
mation. In his book Terra-Pátria (1993; 2011) we find the idea of a plan-
etary consciousness that is being formed in the world of which evidences
can be identified in our everyday lives – we have become more aware
of inhabiting one planet under permanent threat due to the proliferation
of nuclear weapons; a planetary ecological conscience has emerged as a
reaction to environmental degradation and pollution; decolonization has
brought into the scenario different cultures and civilizations through
telecommunications, translation of literature and philosophical works,
popularization of music, dance, paintings, cinema, and literature; interna-
tional partnerships in scientific research have produced significant results
in many areas; campaigns and organizations around the world have been
very effective in promoting solidarity; and, finally, the impact of the Earth
seen from the Moon, floating in the immensity of the Universe, has planted
the seed of planetary consciousness.
Our idea in this investigation has been to uncover how different fields
are putting or starting to put together projects with inter-/transdiscipli-
nary themes that can be identified as pertaining to planetary citizenship.
Questions such as what skills and competencies should students acquire
to become a planetary citizen, how can contents of the courses/disci-
plines relate the local, national, and global to the planetary, and what
contribution the Ecology of Knowledges perspective can give to each
field of expertise have been at the heart of this investigation.
4.3 Conversation with Silvia Elisabeth Moraes, Eduardo

Moraes Arraut, and Josefina Moraes Arraut
BOSIO: How has your academic and life’s “journey” shaped an under-
standing of global citizenship?
SILVIA ELISABETH MORAES (SEM), EDUARDO MORAES ARRAUT (EMA), AND
JOSEFINA MORAES ARRAUT (JMA): The life-journeys of the authors
of this chapter are somewhat intertwined. The three of us were at
Bilingual Schools in Rio de Janeiro – American (1981–1985) and
British (1985–1992) – where SEM was a teacher and EMA and JMA
were students. We had contacts with people from many countries,
in the teaching staff as well as in the student body. Globalization,
employability, cultural diversity, and sustainability were issues that
often appeared during lessons and in staffroom discussions. After
that period, we all moved to a smaller town in the interior of São
Paulo where our academic paths differed. SEM went for a PhD in
Education at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP),
EMA got a degree in Biology at Universidade Federal de São Carlos
(UFSCar) and JMA, a degree in Physics at Universidade de São
Paulo – São Carlos (USP-São Carlos)1.
SEM’s dissertation analyzed the curriculum of the International
Baccalaureate (IB) of the American School in São Paulo, focusing on
the role of an international school in the global and national context
(Moraes 1995, 1997, 1998, 2004). This study showed the evolution
of a school from a closed system, with a curriculum initially focused
exclusively on the country of origin, to a second moment of inte-
gration with the Brazilian national system and, finally, to a third
moment where three parallel and increasingly integrated curricula
are developed – Brazilian, American, and International.
During his undergraduate and later in the MSc in Ecology at
UNICAMP, EMA studied the song of the Brazilian population of
humpback whales in the Abrolhos archipelago (Arraut & Vielliard,
2004). He also spent a couple of months working with these animals
in East Australia. The realization that every continent has a popu-
lation of humpback whales that annually migrates along its coast
opened EMA’s eyes to the fact that humans and the rest of nature
all share a single planet and that, hence, the fate of living beings is
inexorably interconnected.
Between 2004 and 2009, EMA carried out a PhD in Remote
Sensing at National Institute for Space Research (INPE) with a period
at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WILDCRU), Oxford
University. Then, in 2013–2014, he went back to WILDCRU for
postdoctoral research. These experiences put him in contact with the
Amazon and Amazonian manatees, as well as with the common buz-
zard in the UK and the African lions in Zimbabwe (Arraut & Vielliard,
2004; Arraut et al., 2010, Arraut & Marmontel 2016; Arraut et al.,
2017; Arraut, Loveridge, Chamaille, Fox, & Macdonald, 2018). This
multicultural experience helped him understand that nature conserva-
tion and human welfare issues are not constrained by political borders
and that western society has much to learn from local, Indigenous
peoples when it comes to managing the environment.
JMA’s choice for undergraduate and master’s studies was the
Physical Sciences. There she found that the physical view of the
world, centered around simple and universal objects like forces and
matter/energy and their movements, has an appearance of neutrality
relative to human issues. However, nuclear weapons and our waste-
ful and highly technological economies, both relying on quantum
mechanics, made the paradigm of neutrality an uneasy one for her
as a student. Global thinking came mainly in the form of overhang-
ing threats science has directly or indirectly brought upon humanity
and the planet, as well as, to be fair, the possibility of global scale
transportation and communication.
Pursuing a PhD in Meteorology (Arraut & Barbosa, 2009; Arraut
& Satyamurty, 2009; Barbosa & Arraut, 2009), later working at
Brazil’s Center for Earth System Sciences (Arraut et al., 2011; Arraut
et al., 2012) and engaging in postdoctoral work in climate change
at the Center for Ocean Land Atmosphere Studies at George Mason
University was a step away from the paradigm of the neutrality of
sciences. Climate and climate change studies, as well as weather fore-
casting, are areas of knowledge in high demand by society. Themes
such as ethics, sustainability and environmental education are rarely
included in the official curricula. However, they emerge during field
campaigns or in meteorological service institutions, where risk and
disaster alerts are often discussed.
The concept of GC appeared more strongly when SEM repeat-
edly saw students of her pedagogical disciplines (Licenciaturas2 ,
2008–2012) at the Federal University of Ceará, choosing contempo-
rary issues as the topics for their interdisciplinary thematic projects
and giving evidences of the planetary consciousness mentioned by
Morin – renewable energy, Amazonia, global warming, consumerism,
evolution, hunger in the world, pollution, and biodiesel. The universe,
ethanol, television, industrial waste, global warming, water, affirm-
ative action, cellular phones, res publica, and citizenship (Moraes
2005, 2008, 2014; Moraes & Freire, 2016, 2017). The need for the
university to lead a curriculum reform became clear then. By suggest-
ing topics that were dear to them at the time, the students were implic-
itly proposing the university to assume leadership in the necessary
curriculum reform. In the back of their minds was the pressing need
to be prepared for a professional life in the globalized world.
Motivated by the experience with these students and the research
that emerged from the interaction with them, with the financial
support of CAPES3, SEM went in 2013 as a visiting scholar to
the Development Education Research Centre (DERC), University
College London.
In the United Kingdom, SEM interviewed ten academics from five
top British Universities about the theme of global citizenship (GC).
They were asked about the meaning they attributed to GC, what
skills one should acquire to be a global citizen, and how each area
of expertise is contributing to the articulation of GC. The univer-
sity appears as a main discursive context for GC and the mean-
ings attributed by UK scholars to internationalism, globalization,
cosmopolitanism, global market, employability, sustainability, and
cultural diversity is part of the floating signifier GC in the discursive
context of their institutions and projects (Moraes, 2014).
Back in Brazil, the term “global” suffered some distrust from our
part as we realized that it is the product of an arbitrary division of
Global North and Global South, created by a very particular point
of view – that of Global North researchers – and that, ironically,
seems to play against the idea of a unified planet. Global is, in our
view and in that of Brazilian academics with whom we exchanged
ideas, excessively and probably irreversibly related to economic and
cultural globalization.
Moreover, the information gathered from UK academics also indi-
cated that their focus was in scientific knowledge more than in any
kind of Indigenous knowledge. As our life experience showed, it made
little sense to not include in society’s body of knowledge that which
comes from the multitude of local cultures that still exist in Brazil
and elsewhere, some of which having hundreds of years of experi-
ence of effective environmental management. We, therefore, adopted
the Ecology of Knowledges perspective (Sousa Santos, 2007). The
concept of planetary citizenship appears to us as an evolution of GC
since it includes the Ecology of Knowledges as a framework for a
more democratic academic curriculum.
As an environmental scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for
Space Research and later as a professor at a Federal University in the
heart of Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region, JMA has, on many occa-
sions, either seen or been part of the conflict between the globalized
culture, to which academic knowledge may be seen to belong and tra-
ditional ways of life and cultural identities. These experiences have
led her to believe that a strong sense of cultural identity is crucial to
ensure a true exchange in the sense of the Ecology of Knowledges.
Becoming a professor at a Federal University, located in a midsized
town in the impoverished semiarid region of the country’s Northeast,
was a step toward a more active practice of planetary citizenship.
Teaching and supervising research proved to have its challenges in a
culture that has been strongly influenced by the scarcity of water and
resources. Empowering students is a prerequisite, and an important
way to do it is by attributing value and showing appreciation for their
culture and customs. This has been an enriching experience which is
now beginning to bear fruit. It is also inspiring reflections about the
role of cultural identity in the scope of the Ecology of Knowledges.
Meanwhile, it has been important to continue with international col-
laborations (Dogar et al., 2018).
This sense of identity is often present amongst traditional pop-
ulations that maintain their cultural practices and way of life and
an interchange with academics and the university can have a role in
strengthening the voice of these populations. However, this strong
sense of identity can be absent as in the marginalized miscegenated
urban populations in Brazil. Popular culture initiatives have been striv-
ing to rebuild this identity by teaching popular dance, music, rituals,
and festivities within their original cultural framework. Academics in
the field of dance have brought us the notion that a very important
path for planetary citizenship in the universities is the inclusion of a
contextualized view of local popular culture in the official curricula
of the Arts, Sciences and even Engineering courses.
At this moment of our history, we are surrounded by references
and initiatives in favour of a citizenship, active and critical in different
educational spaces, from the perspective of cultures of sustainability
and of recognition that each ethnic or cultural group has its own ways
of seeking meaning and fulfilment in life. However, both cultures are
in great danger, which makes our proposal even more urgent.
BOSIO: What is the core difference between global citizenship and plan-
etary citizenship?
SEM, EMA and JMA: Global citizenship is born with the globalization of
capitalism, which brings about a demand for global markets and
with it a need for a global scale homogenization of consumer habits
and tastes. Furthermore, there is the globalization of production,
which requires dissemination of production methods and of the
training and skills of the workforce. This has called for homoge-
nization of education, in which the worldview and culture of the
dominant capitalist countries prevail over local knowledges, so that,
to some degree, globalized education is an instrument of abyssal
thinking, as described by Santos (2007). If it is to avoid chaos on a
global scale, consumerist society needs a new set of values and a new
attitude toward its own life and life in general on this planet. Krenak
(2019) expresses the Indigenous view that our environmental crisis
and our human crisis come from the hegemonic view of humanity
as separate from nature. Indigenous and other traditional societies
fill their lives with meaning through the association of the individual
with nature and with the community.
The idea of a planetary citizenship comes from the realization
that a culture of coexistence is a primary necessity in today’s world.
It arises as a dialectic response to global citizenship, stemming
from the realization that the different human identities and ways
of being in our world are an expression of the inherent richness and
diversity of the human soul. It is based on the notion of Ecology of
Knowledges, which opens an avenue for educational goals and strat-
egies, as will be explained further ahead.
At this point, it must be said that an Ecology of Knowledges is
only possible when all the cultures and individuals involved have
a strong sense of identity, meaning that they feel secure relative to
their own self-worth, as well as to the worth of their traditions, val-
ues, culture, and overall way of being in this world.
BOSIO: What forms of knowledge and skills do learners need to effec-
tively engage in today’s global societies? How does this connect with
your conceptualization of “planetary citizenship”?
SEM, EMA and JMA: First and foremost, learners need to understand that
there are no such distinct things as “humanity” and “nature”. There
is only nature, of which humans emerged from and continue to be
a part of, whether they realize it or not. In addition, they need to
acquire a clear mental perception that they do not live in a city, a
state, or a nation, but in a single and finite planet that they share with
all other components of this nature – they literally need to be able to
visualize and feel this. With those concepts in mind and a curriculum
that helps them develop critical thinking, the possibilities for their
development as planetary citizens become greatly expanded.
Many of our universities are still using traditional educational
practices, based on expository lectures and written exams. This is
highly unsuitable for the body of students we work with today.
Some of them are urban young people that have a shortened atten-
tion span and the expectation of immediate fulfilment due to instant
communication and the constant distractions of technology in general.
Other students are from rural areas and not at all familiar with the
independent and lonely living, working, and learning habits of the cit-
ies. On the other hand, these disparities between our more traditional
views of education and learning and the needs of our students are a
rich breeding ground for some of the skills and values that must be
encompassed by planetary citizenship.
There is a vivid dispute between the old and the new curriculum.
The old one clings to rigid objectives, rigid methodologies, leaving
little space for student’s initiatives. The new one is bold; it looks at the
future. The new curriculum will educate meteorologists, engineers,
and educators ready to participate in the international environmen-
tal discussions. This view is slowly emerging and planetary citizen-
ship is a proposal for the new curriculum. It aims to encourage and
foster programs, discussion forums, and social mobilization – local,
regional, national, and international – having the main challenge to
contribute to the construction of citizenship, active and critical, from
the perspective of a culture of sustainability. Its conceptualization is
in permanent construction by different groups within the university
in accordance with aims and perspectives of their areas of knowledge.
BOSIO: How would you foster “planetary citizenship” in your students
in the classes that you teach currently and taught in the past?
SEM, EMA and JMA: Students in the south-eastern universities come from
all over the country. For such a cultural and academically mixed body,
project-based learning has proven flexible enough for approaching top-
ics of planetary relevance, such as urbanization, ecosystem services,
urban ecosystems, urban heat islands, ecological corridors, global
warming, and species reintroduction. Students in north-eastern univer-
sities come from an almost feudal power context where they have no
contact with modern science. For them, it is important to have a defi-
nition of the semiarid – technical data, such as soil, climate, vegetation
and cultural origin, and family – learn about Amazonia, Antarctica,
extratropic subtropics and the South Sea. For both groups, the pro-
ject-based learning gives them a definite and practical context in which
to understand the basic knowledge. The projects also require skills in
scientific paper reading, programming, and data analysis. It is very
unusual for a student to be gifted in all three aspects; therefore, the
projects require collaboration within and amongst groups. It is also
very true that the projects are challenging for all of them because they
require a researcher’s approach to knowledge. Students do not often
see themselves as researchers. In fact, many of them enter graduate-level
studies without even imagining themselves as researchers.
BOSIO: How would you practically incorporate your framework for
planetary citizenship in curricular programmes in a modern higher
SEM, EMA and JMA: Universities, such as UNICAMP, Federal University
of Bahia, and UFC have opened up Indigenous Intercultural
Graduation Courses which aim at educating Indigenous teachers for
schools located in villages and reserves in line with the specific social
and cultural reality of each people and according to national legisla-
tion on Indigenous school education.
The Faculty of Education (UFC) has a flexible curriculum design
and the elective subjects in graduation and postgraduate courses are
good institutional spaces where professors suggest new research top-
ics and courses where students can come up with subjects of their
interest. The curriculum illustrates both traditional and contem-
porary trends, such as rural education, environmental education,
spirituality, culture of peace, Africanism and Afro/descendance, eth-
nicity, culture, subjectivity, and gender. It offers important insights
for contemporary debates involving intercultural studies, colonial-
ity/decoloniality, dialogues about new paradigms, and their influ-
ence on educational processes. (http://www.facedpos.ufc.br/2015).
At the Civil Engineering Division of Technological Institute of
Aeronautics (ITA), the incorporation of planetary citizenship can
occur via projects agreed upon by teachers of different disciplines so
that a single project is developed in the contexts of each one of them.
For example, an airport project course and remote sensing are taught
in the same semester. As remote sensing techniques are expanding
the possibility of selecting airport sites with reduced environmental,
social, and economic costs, student assessment is to be made based
on the development of projects that use remote sensing techniques to
improve airport site selection process.
In addition to technical skills, social and communication skills
are also valued and fostered. Students who are naturally empathic,
self-assured, and assertive will be called upon to organize meetings
and the collaboration within and between the groups and to ensure
that less confident colleagues receive incentive and assistance. All
these collaborative strategies have an additional common goal – they
help students see themselves as agents in processing, transforming,
and diffusing knowledge and, in this way, aid them in the develop-
ment of a researcher identity.
BOSIO: Silvia, Eduardo, and Josefina, you have significant experience in
teaching at the university level in Brazil and beyond. Why is or is not
education for planetary citizenship necessary in the modern univer-
sity, particularly in Brazil?
SEM, EMA and JMA: Education for planetary citizenship is not only
necessary but vital in the university nowadays. The political
agenda at the federal and state levels continues to be dominated
by a view that dates to the early mid-20th century, irrespec-
tive of whether the leading political party is more left-winged or
right-winged. For example, the Program for the Acceleration of
Growth (PAC) that was pushed forward by the last left-winged
government viewed the Amazon as a massive hydroelectric power-
generating basin that also offered a suite of minerals, oil, and gas.
Unsurprisingly, it was under the left-wings’ watch that Belo Monte
dam was built. Owing majorly to political pressure from the envi-
ronmental sector and the uncovering of corruption schemes, the
Belo Sun gold mine, whose plant is to be located next to Belo Monte
dam so that it draws energy from it, was not built. Now, with a
more right-winged federal government in power, the plan is to fol-
low through with the building of the Belo Sun mining company.
Neither governments have been able to see the value of the Amazon
from the perspective of the Indigenous cultures or biodiversity.
However, our journeys as teachers and researchers and our family
ties with other academics have led us to believe that abyssal thinking
(Santos, 2007) is being undermined from within. Furthermore, our
experiences in multidisciplinary federal educational institutions in
the southeast and in the northeast of Brazil have put us in contact
with resilient indigenous and other traditional cultures, as well as with
researchers and educators who work or have worked with them. This
has made us realize that some of these nonhegemonic cultures are still
thriving in their ability to remain alive, confident in their own iden-
tities and fulfilled with a dignified approach to the dialogue with the
oppression they currently live under. The Ecology of Knowledges has
been an important theory in the deconstruction of the myth of racial
equality in Brazil and the university is a privileged place for the devel-
opment of such a concept since one of its responsibilities is to transpose
boundaries and borders of prejudice and intolerance. Therefore, we
feel even more responsible and courageous to go on with this study.
BOSIO: How can education for planetary citizenship be made suitable
for or attractive to students studying in Brazilian universities? What
knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, and experiences are gradu-
ates expected to acquire in order to become planetary citizens? How
can students’ achievements of these attributes (knowledge, skills,
values, and disposition) be identified?
SEM, EMA and JMA: In our proposal, students work in groups of differ-
ent areas of specialization. This gives them a more complete under-
standing of the issues to be approached and develops their sense of
cooperation, of being responsible for the changes required by time
and place contexts. From our experience, students seem to become
motivated when they need to develop projects that might have a
positive social, environmental, or economic impact; in other words,
when they seem to be able to connect the work that they are doing
with problems we are facing in the country. Such projects, in addi-
tion to providing meaning for their education, help them acquire
knowledge, develop skills, and gain experiences that can be valuable
in other contexts.
Just as in the intertwined dualities of Yin and Yang, globalized
education for leadership and for scientific research brought about
an international exchange of students and professionals that puts
different cultures into direct contact, leading to the beginnings of a
dialogue between worldviews and group identities that undermines
abyssal thinking from within. Meanwhile, the Brazilian context
shows that some of the cultures which, to use Santos’ denomina-
tion, are at the depth of the abyss, like some remaining Indigenous
populations that are still in contact with a natural habitat, are very
much alive and searching for new depths of spiritual growth and
even of the fruition of life, as put by Krenak (2019). Furthermore,
rural groups that descend from independent communities of run-
away slaves and even some urban and miscegenated groups have
remained loyal to a search for meaning in life by means of reli-
gious practices of African and Indigenous origin and by cultivat-
ing ancestral cultural expressions of music, dance, food, festivities,
and family and social ties. There have been fruitful interchanges
between these groups and artists, intellectuals, and educators, in
various research and educational contexts, that are leading to an
injection of new values in educational, research, and artistic prac-
tices. These practices and experiences undermine abyssal thinking
from without.
BOSIO: Is educating for planetary citizenship in the modern univer-
sity, particularly in Brazilian universities, more about knowledge,
skills, values, dispositions, or some combination of all four in your
opinion?
SEM, EMA and JMA: SEM and EMA’s opinion is that educating for plan-
etary citizenship is a combination of all four. For JMA, although
knowledge and skills are extremely important to face the challenges
of our complex globalized world, educating for planetary citizenship
is more about values and dispositions. They seem more fundamental
since they can better enable individuals and groups to improve their
knowledge and skills when necessary. Knowledge in the sense of
being exposed and interested in learning about the various interpre-
tations and possibilities of the concept planetary citizenship; skills
as the ability to use this knowledge in situations that demand action;
values as the principles that underlie and guide this practice, such as
cooperation, solidarity, understanding, and otherness; and dispo-
sitions as an aptitude and an attitude to act, to develop, and/or to
change something.
BOSIO: How can students’ achievements of these attributes (knowledge,
skills, values, and disposition) be identified?
SEM, EMA and JMA: In a context, where students arrive with a little sci-
entific knowledge base, identifying and overcoming difficulties, such
as understanding fundamental Physics and Mathematics, practicing
logical reasoning, group work skills, communication, public speak-
ing, computer skills have equivalent weight than that of acquired
knowledge. The subjectivity of this sort of assessment brings some
difficulty because other students may express dissatisfaction at hav-
ing been awarded a lower grade than a colleague or colleagues if
they do not understand the reason. To circumvent or avoid this, it is
necessary to call the attention of students when they are overcom-
ing their limitations, which breeds self-confidence, self-esteem. The
development of group work skills is also vital for improving social-
ization and fostering horizontal collaboration among students and,
in a more general sense, helping to overcome loneliness and anxiety
that often accompanies graduate students.
An attempt to identify achievements in knowledge, skills, values,
and dispositions, we suggest looking at the work Education post-
graduate students have recently developed at UFC. Mihaliuc (2019)
proposes the inclusion of planetary citizenship as a transdisciplinary
theme in the Law courses at the University of Fortaleza. She places
planetary citizenship within a new paradigm that reinforces the per-
spective of a critical, reflexive, and socially responsible Bachelor of
Law, committed to cooperation and a culture of peace, with respect
for the environment, cultural diversity, and justice as a common
good. For Lima (2017), planetary citizenship as a curriculum theme
for school and university is urgent because this would help democ-
ratize the power relations still very present in school and academic
spaces. Sousa (2019) studied a school in Maracanaú, a district of
Fortaleza, and appointed the relevance of digital literacy for the edu-
cation of planetary citizens. Matias (2019) discussed the develop-
ment of planetary citizenship in youngsters through the teaching of
art at a professional secondary school in Caucaia, another district
of Fortaleza. Vieira (2017) discussed the importance of creativity in
the education of planetary citizens. They can all be found at http://
www.repositorio.ufc.br.
BOSIO: What are three themes a higher education curriculum for plane-
tary citizenship should include in your opinion?
SEM, EMA and JMA: From what we have concluded so far in our areas of
specialism – Education, Ecology, and Meteorology – the key elements
of educating for planetary citizenship in the modern university are
the Ecology of Knowledges, Ecoliteracy, and Employability. We
include in every one of them Identity, Ethics, and Creativity.
The Ecology of Knowledges (Santos, 2007) as an attitude of dia-
logue and coordination between the official/Western knowledge
and those others that have long been excluded from the scenario.
In every area, there is knowledge that has not been included in the
strictly academic approach.
Ecoliteracy, as defined by Capra (1997), is an understanding of
the principles of organization of ecosystems and the application of
those principles for creating sustainable human communities and
societies. An ecoliterate person is prepared to be an effective member
of a sustainable society, with well-rounded abilities of head, heart,
hands, and spirit, comprising an organic understanding of the world
and participatory action within and with the environment.
Employability is a sine qua non condition for critical action. A
planetary citizen must have a worthy occupation so that he/she can
influence/change the system from within.
Identity makes the Ecology of Knowledges possible when all cul-
tures and individuals involved have a strong sense of meaning that they
feel secure relative to their own self-worth, as well as to the worth of
their traditions, values, culture, and overall way of being in this world.
Ethics is here seen as the rules that guide human interaction which
must be constructed democratically, i.e. as the product of decisions
within groups – to maintain identities – and among groups – to favor
social cohesion.
Creativity is side by side with innovation. Innovation, considered
a great asset for the 21st century, has creativity as an essential input.
This ability is considered multidimensional as it involves cognitive
processes, personality characteristics, environmental conditions,
and the interaction of these variables (Revista FAPESP, 2019).
These elements must be part of every project that articulates the
signifier planetary citizenship.
4.4 Conclusion
Poverty, widespread pollution of oceans and rivers, climate change,
conflicts among peoples of different nationalities, among several other
issues, show that the global consumerist society is in desperate need of
a new set of values and a new attitude toward its own life and life in
general on this planet if it is to survive. The notion of global citizenship
emerged as a means to deal with this, but after a few decades, it has
become too focused on market insertion, a single kind of knowledge
(scientific) and has been subject to divisions which are against the very
purpose of its idealization (Global North and Global South). This has
caused it to lose support in countries that have been disfavoured by the
way the concept evolved, as is the case of Brazil. Planetary citizenship,
on the other hand, emphasizes the role of Indigenous and other tradi-
tional societies not only as having the right to exist, but also as bearers
of knowledge that may help Western society to overcome the problems it
created for itself and others. The emphasis on planet earth itself, instead
of on its shape (the globe), also makes it clearer that no segregation
between peoples is acceptable.
This chapter presented the views and practices of planetary citizen-
ship (PC) of three professors/researchers from three Brazilian univer-
sities with different specialisms – Letters/Education, Biology/Ecology,
Physics/Meteorology. The life-journeys of the authors provided a back-
ground for their adhesion of planetary citizenship as a major theme in
the university. Many educational institutions are in a process of chang-
ing the curriculum, looking for more flexibility, innovation, student and
teacher protagonism, and openness to new epistemologies. This is a
great opportunity for our proposal of developing planetary citizenship
as a floating signifier to be articulated in concrete projects proposed by
different groups according to their demands and aspirations.
Notes
1 UNICAMP: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP; UFSCar: Universi-
dade Federal de São Carlos, SP; USP: Universidade de São Paulo, São Car-
los, SP.
2 Teacher degree courses where students of various areas of knowledge
come to obtain pedagogical skills.
3 Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES),
Brazilian research-funding agency.
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do Ceará.
5 Cultivating Global Citizenship
Education and Its Implications
for Education in South Africa
Yusef Waghid
5.1 Introduction
To be invited to contribute to a volume of essays on GCE is not only
an honor but also a recognition that scholars from the Global South –
the marginalized other – have something to say about a discourse that,
in many ways, has been dominated by an Anglo-Saxon tradition for
many years. There is a plethora of literature on GCE that can broadly
be categorized according to three interrelated strands – a participatory
form of human engagement that recognizes citizens’ rights and identities
(Arthur, Davies, & Hahn, 2008); a human rights discourse that opposes
war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace through
attentiveness to democratic public life (Peters, Britton, & Blee, 2008);
and discourse of equal moral respect to all humans (Wallace Brown &
Held, 2010).
Firstly, there is a recognition that all humans, irrespective of their
cultural orientation, have the right to participate as active citizens in
political and societal life, which requires that they (humans) have a right
to be listened to and acted upon. In other words, their citizenship rights
are honored because other humans engage with them through listen-
ing, articulation, and (dis)agreement. Any instance of exclusion and dis-
missiveness would deny them their rights to global citizenship. This is
a strand of GCE in its most basic form. That is, humans everywhere
engage actively about public matters that concern them, underscored by
acts of democratic engagement, such as listening, speaking their minds,
and taking one another’s assertions into controversy.
Secondly, GCE as a human rights discourse holds that any form of
human injustice accelerated through war crimes, human rights viola-
tions, and hostile actions that undermine peaceful and democratic living
should be quelled through actions that invite people to abandon their
acts of violence. This implies that people ought to hold one another
responsible for human injustices on the basis of finding democratic ways
to interrupt the devastating consequences of human injustices. Thirdly,
the cultivation of GCE is focused on eradicating human inequalities
Cultivating Global Citizenship Education 63
based on race, culture, and class. Equality implies granting equal access
to all citizens to the basic civil liberties, education, health and welfare,
security, shelter, and protection. In this way, GCE recognizes the rights
of all humans to equal moral treatment.
5.2 Conversation with Yusef Waghid

EMILIANO BOSIO: How GCE relates to your journey as a South African
educator?
YUSEF WAGHID: As a South African educator in schools and universities
for more than four decades, I have witnessed the political demise of
repressive apartheid education. At first, through the promulgation
of the White Paper on Education Transformation in 1997, both the
public and private sectors of education were overhauled to increase
access of participation, the inclusion of all “races”, and the delib-
erative engagement of teachers, students, and community members
in curriculum renewal and institutional governance. The rights of
all citizens to education and to be taught in the language of their
choice at schools and universities have been legitimized through the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights. No longer could “race” be used
as an institutionalized category to exclude citizens from their right
to educational advancement and to participate in their learning for
the sake of political and societal upliftment. My own appointment
as a professor at the institution where I currently work is a testimony
to the transformation of the education system in the country consid-
ering that I also became the first philosopher of education and dean
of color at my institution in more than one hundred years since its
inception.
I am not intimating that only procedural transformation occurred,
but rather that appointments have also been enhanced meritoriously
and substantively as well. This is so based on equitable redress and
the urgency of the newly found democratic education dispensation
in the late 1990s to become more open to the demands of a compet-
itive global economy and equitable redress in South Africa. That is,
educators of all “races” have been appointed at educational institu-
tions on the grounds of their potential to enhance the much-needed
democratic and transformational ethos that began to emerge after
1994.
As it happened, participants at educational institutions became
progressively attuned to global citizenship as they were invited to
engage in iterations and compromises on their educational futures.
In this regard, I am reminded of my own work on education for
democracy that I managed to advance and integrate into the univer-
sity curriculum to the extent that our roles as scholars in philosophy
of education assumed an academically activist orientation. In other
64 Yusef Waghid
words, through our democratic pedagogical influence, we managed
to disrupt the hegemonic curricular advances of the previous system
of university education.
Similarly, our work in philosophy of education also assumed a
social justice orientation through which we endeavored to cultivate
notions of inclusion, freedom, and equality in and through our ped-
agogical work. In a way, our pedagogical work is underscored by an
integrated understanding of GCE mentioned above – iterative dem-
ocratic action, critique and the quest for social justice, and a rec-
ognition of equality and inclusion. No longer did we witness with
impunity how the education system pedagogically oppressed teachers
and students because with the demise of apartheid, the right to ques-
tion, interrogate, critique, and to offer alternative understandings was
encouraged through democratic processes of iteration and reflexivity.
The pedagogical changes were so overwhelming that some stu-
dents were even reluctant to embrace their newly found freedoms,
but instead, complained and insisted that teachers assume a less
critical demeanor in university classrooms. A colleague thought she
did the right thing by reprimanding me to be less provocative and
belligerent in classroom discussions as if iterations should always be
neat, unmessy, and unthreatening. Nevertheless, democratic educa-
tional transformation, commensurate with understandings of GCE
mentioned earlier, seemed to have permeated curricular discourses
and many teachers and students were surprised by its sudden
upheaval in disrupting pedagogical actions. Hence, postapartheid
education never remained static and there was always pedagogical
space for more changes to come. Next, I examine the rationale that
underpins GCE in South African educational institutions.
BOSIO: What is the rationale of GCE in South African educational
institutions?
WAGHID: After the establishment of the country’s first democratic gov-
ernment in 1994, South Africa was not only set upon a political
discourse of democratization of all structures and institutions, but
also one of moral compromise and reconciliation. It was not as if
the country was mandated to set in motion a constitutional democ-
racy constituted by the equal moral treatment of all citizens but
more specifically, it became necessary for the country to embark on
nation-building and reconciliation after decades of apartheid rule. It
was under apartheid that serious human rights violations happened
in the country, and through the agency of a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission established in 1996 that a series of public hearings were
set into motion to hold people politically and morally accountable
for injustices committed under the aegis of apartheid rule. Political
and moral figures like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu became
protagonists of restorative justice in the sense that the recognition of
the political and moral rights of all citizens was considered as neces-
sary to cultivate a legitimate democratic dispensation.
Along the lines of a notion of restorative justice, educational insti-
tutions were summoned to implement a discourse of democratic
emancipation, coupled with the demands of equity and redress and,
concurrently, to implement practices that accentuate the recognition
of human dignity, moral responsibility, and justice for all. The basis
of such a form of justice is twofold – firstly, humans should recog-
nize the possibility to reconcile and that antagonism and conflict
among humans should be subverted. That is, humans are consid-
ered as equal to one another based on their humanity so that they
abandon any acts of reprisal and exclusion. Secondly, when humans
reconcile, they open themselves up to one another to listen and talk
with one another and that any possibility for resentment would be
undermined by their willingness to forgive (Waghid, Waghid, &
Waghid, 2018, p. 47).
Put differently, restorative justice opens up opportunities to
engage deliberatively and forgivingly with the possibility that peo-
ple’s moral autonomy would not only be enhanced but that they
can heal scars brought about by discrimination and repression. It is
through restorative justice that educational practices can be enacted
according to notions of equality, freedom, inclusion, and respon-
sibility (Waghid, Waghid, & Waghid, 2018, p. 48). When restora-
tive justice becomes the rationale of education, human coexistence
and cooperation constituted by respect for the dignity of all and the
acknowledgment of one another’s humaneness will manifest.
Put differently, restorative justice “is a sustainable act of righteous
human living whereby humans should always remain conscious of
the possibility of doing wrong against other humans …” (Waghid,
Waghid, & Waghid, 2018, p. 49). It should be everywhere to prevent
any form of human injustice from recurring. By implication, restorative
justice is aimed at enhancing humans’ interconnectedness and educa-
tional responsibility to cultivate deliberative democratic environments
that not only harness human engagements but also their responsi-
bility to be attentive to one another’s vulnerabilities. Consequently,
one finds that a manifesto informs the postapartheid South African
education policies on values, education, and democracy (DoE, 2001).
Such a manifesto aims to cultivate the following communitarian val-
ues in and through educational programs – democracy, social justice,
equity, equality, nonracism, nonsexism, ubuntu (human dignity and
humanness), an open society, accountability, the rule of law, respect,
and reconciliation (DoE, 2001).
BOSIO: What is your personal understanding of GCE?
WAGHID: Cultivating GCE is to consider contributing to a justice that
is still to come (Derrida, 2004). This implies that humans ought to
66 Yusef Waghid
assume new ways of taking responsibility so that their actions enlarge
the rights of humans and resist human rights violations (Derrida,
2005, p. 17). On the one hand, Derrida (2004, p. 153) purports the
responsibility of such a form of education is to ensure that the rights
of those who make up educational institutions, such as universities
and schools, are to open up one risk against another – always risking
the worst. On the other hand, the public responsibility of educational
institutions, such as a university, is to engage in provocative reflec-
tion to imagine a moral future that is not yet (Derrida, 2004, p. 155).
In the above sense, the responsibility of schools and universities
ought to be twofold – to take risks and to be provocative-reflective –
referred to by Derrida (2004, p. 151) as “[t]he new responsibility of the
thinking [educational institution]”. Such an understanding of educa-
tion would extend the responsibility of its institutions beyond reason,
critique, and technical and instrumentalist thinking, and toward an
institution taking an activist stand. The conception of responsibility,
for which I am arguing here, is strongly connected to a moral action
that is informed by a sense of fairness and justice. To Derrida (2004),
justice comes in the form of responsibility to the other as difference –
that every individual has a responsibility to live with the other and
to treat the otherness of the other justly. It also means that in order
to live responsibly as global citizens, we have to live with others and
be mindful of how we treat one another. In not acting responsibly,
one does not enact one’s humanity in relation to the other and, by so
doing, fails to recognize that one’s humanity is so because of a rela-
tional co-belonging (Waghid & Davids, 2013).
The upshot of the above understanding of justice is that GCE
ought to remain in becoming. That is, GCE ought to be directed
toward the cultivation of justice, whereby humans are brought into
educational spaces to deliberate freely and openly about their claims
for a just education and society. Educational institutions focused on
the cultivation of responsibility and justice-oriented education for
global citizenship invariably reimagine their curricula concerning
issues of race, gender, and class, whereby discrimination, marginali-
zation and exclusion, in particular, are denounced.
BOSIO: How do you approach GCE in a university setting, particularly
in South Africa?
WAGHID: My own work on GCE in a university setting is related to
reconstituting an African philosophy of education in the context
of cosmopolitan justice. African philosophy of education involves
analyzing societal problems on the continent and concomitantly,
examining the implications of such problems for education. For
instance, in an examination of ongoing student protests, symbols of
colonial hegemony and escalating tuition fee hikes that increase the
possibility of disadvantaged students not completing their university
education, one finds that disruptive student action ensues that often
contributes to the dysfunctionality of higher education institutions.
Dysfunctionality is accelerated when students fail to attend lectures,
disrupt other students from attending classes, and in some cases,
buildings are vandalized and burned down.
Elsewhere, I posit that “cosmopolitan justice requires that all stu-
dents be treated justly and that equal access to education should
not exclusively privilege those students who can afford to pay for
their tuition fees” (Waghid, Waghid, & Waghid, 2018, p. 90). By
implication, if African institutions of higher education cannot pro-
vide equal opportunities for students to advance their studies, then
ways have to be found to counteract such a dilemma. In this regard,
cosmopolitan justice requires that compassionate action be taken to
support underprivileged students in settling their tuition fees. If a
shared compromise cannot be reached in the student fees dilemma
in South Africa, at least in terms of cosmopolitan justice, I cannot
see how functionality would and should return to university cam-
puses. This is not an advocacy for violence but rather an insistence
that a dystopia like a fee’s dilemma cannot and should not remain
unresolved.
The point about the tuition fees predicament in South Africa raises
an important aspect about education for restorative justice – it can-
not be the responsibility of marginalized students alone to ensure
that they pay their tuition fees and complete their university stud-
ies. Cooperative responsibility is required, whereby the privileged
also commit themselves to support the underprivileged in complet-
ing their university education. A cosmopolitan or global citizenry
assumes collective and cooperative responsibility for all students in
the pursuit of university education. This also implies that privileged
institutions like mine, together with the public (including govern-
ment) and private sectors, have to commit themselves more justly
toward resolving the ongoing tuition fees dilemma. If a solution is
not imminent, the cosmopolitan South African community has not
really started working in earnest toward the cultivation of a cosmo-
politan citizenry that can be responsive to the democratic (including
economic and political) demands of its diverse student population.
During the apartheid past, educational institutions prejudiced the
privileged, and it would not be unjust if a democratic society uses its
enormous economic and political resources to attend to a major pre-
dicament that confronts higher education in South Africa. Simply
put, if university education can only benefit the country economi-
cally, politically, and socially in future, it does not make sense not
to enact some of the demands of GCE, in particular, ensuring equal
access to and just opportunities to those underprivileged that are so
desperate to acquire university education.
68 Yusef Waghid
BOSIO: How do you educate for global citizenship in a university
classroom?
WAGHID: I teach an online course for postgraduate students in GCE
that uses a Rancière (2010) notion of living philosophy. In his book,
Chronicles of Consensual Times, the French philosopher Jacques
Rancière (2010, p. 79) invites us to ponder on two considerations.
On the one hand, he refers to consensus – a concept we have come
to (dis)associate with Rancière. He explains that “the consensus
governing us is a machine of power insofar as it is a machine of
vision”, intent upon getting us to believe that “what is, is all that is”
(Rancière, 2010, p. viii). On the other hand, and in response to con-
sensus, he proposes a restoration of philosophy for all. Bringing such
a philosophy to life involves people devoting themselves to problems
they encounter in their daily lives and “to change the life of those
who dedicate themselves to it” (Rancière, 2010, p. 79).
In our course, students are invited to reconsider problems on the
African continent, such as political dictatorships; ethnic conflict and
violence; and poverty, famine, and hunger. They are then summoned
to think through the problems using the practice of a living philoso-
phy and to come up with ways how such problems can be addressed.
This “living philosophy” for Rancière (2010, p. 79) provides “a phi-
losophy for nonprofessionals, identical to the experiment of chang-
ing one’s life” (Rancière, 2010, p. 79).
Put differently, a “living philosophy” is a philosophy that
becomes “life meant learning” – that is, such a philosophy is less
perilous and teaches us “to take good care of ourselves and how to
live life harmoniously in the everyday. [S]imultaneously [it teaches
us] to enjoy the thrill of travelling in the Platonic chariot across the
radiant heaven of ideas and … hav[ing] the half-hearted comfort of
thought and body in the smallest things in life” (Rancière, 2010, p.
81). Thus, for Rancière (2010, p. 81), a “living philosophy” is mostly
concerned with a reconciliation of two theses – “the sky to which
one flees and the earth in which one takes root”. It is such an idea of
a living philosophy that we encourage students to use it to address
some of the most pressing problems on the African continent as a
way of contributing to the cultivation of GCE.
Firstly, when students have analyzed the political and social
problems pertaining to political dictatorships, ethnic conflict and
violence, poverty, famine, and hunger, they are invited to proffer
constitutive meanings of what makes the problems what they are. In
other words, they should not only look at how the problems man-
ifest but more intrinsically, to the rationale that underscores the
problems. In our analyses of the political and social problems on the
African continent, we have found that a misunderstanding of author-
itarianism seems to constitute such problems. Authoritarianism, as a
political act, seems to be a mechanism whereby governmental oppo-
sition and civil society are not allowed to question the rules that
govern their participation. Furthermore, regimes do not necessarily
need to be perceived as legitimate by the entire population to remain
in power (Schlumberger, 2007, p. 15). Considering authoritarianism
as a political problem on the African continent, democracy remains
off the agenda. The reason is that the ruler’s survival depends on
the support of the military that has been awarded economic benefits
and chances that still make it count among the politically relevant
core elite (Schlumberger, 2007, p. 16). In Rancièrean way, identify-
ing authoritarianism as a political problem, students would then go
on to imagine what ought to be done to remedy the problem.
Secondly, when students imagine how authoritarianism would be
quelled and replaced by democratic governments, they come up with
reasons why democracy would invoke the legitimate voices of an
entire population. They would also imagine how political protes-
tations and activism should be combined with contestation, agree-
ment, and disagreement to establish legitimate democratic regimes.
In other words, counteracting authoritarianism implies that stu-
dents come up with ways to actuate political reforms in repressive
nation-states. In developing imaginary fictions about future dem-
ocratic societies, students are also encouraged to take issue with
Rancièrean thought on using violence to quell injustice. According
to Rancière, evil “cannot be righted except at the expense of another
evil which remains irreducible” (Rancière, 2010, p. 115). Students
thus use this conception of a living philosophy to show that there
should always be a possibility to combat evil nonviolently or without
the use of eviler. Moreover, for him to argue that “[t]here is good
and bad violence … violence which oppresses and violence which
liberates” (Rancière, 2010, p. 114) is, in fact, a recipe for continu-
ous evil. In this sense, we find it problematic to conceive of violence
as not causing harm or affliction, and as such, the idea of violence
being good presents a particular contradiction that can only yield to
more justifications of violence.
Thirdly, students are then urged to think about how education
can be altered in light of democratic engagement. It is then that
practices of deliberation, iterations, shared compromises disagree-
ment are reimagined in the context of educational encounters. At
the core of such a proffering is the idea that educational encounters
ought to become more provocative, engaging, and deliberative if
education were to have any influence on political change. The fact
that students themselves engage equally and iteratively is a vindi-
cation that political and social problems would most appropriately
be addressed on the basis of deliberative iterations and (dis)agree-
ment. Of significance to the cultivation of democratic iterations in
70 Yusef Waghid
pedagogical actions is the understanding that dystopias, such as
human rights violations, repressive political moves, and the exclu-
sion of marginalized citizens, are contested in light of democratic
imaginaries of change.
5.3 Conclusion
GCE involves cultivating pedagogical spheres of deliberative iterations,
activism against human rights violations, and the enhancement of equal
political and moral respect among citizens. Central to enactment of
GCE is the notion that humans ought to be treated justly – that is, with-
out discrimination, prejudice and exclusion. When just human actions
guide pedagogical encounters, the possibility exists for students and
teachers to become more provocative, deliberative, and iterative. In this
way, GCE can manifest legitimately and constructively in teaching and
learning at educational institutions in South Africa and elsewhere.
In this chapter, I offered a defense of GCE along the lines of demo-
cratic actions guided by an opposition to human rights violations and
the unequal treatment of all humans in South Africa and elsewhere. To
be a global citizen is to remain open and reflexive about that which
influences one, and at the same time, be attentive to what can still be
actualized. The very idea of linking global citizenry with education is a
recognition that these two interrelated human actions are underscored
by notions of engagement that takes into consideration deliberation, iter-
ation, and (dis)agreement.
The argument of this chapter is built on the understanding that global
citizenship can be cultivated in educational institutions through the
practice of a living philosophy of education. Through such a philos-
ophy of education, teachers and students can (re)consider real human
engagements in their particular contexts and the underlying dystopias
that make such actions defective or not. Concurrently, teachers and stu-
dents are provoked to imagine alternative possibilities for more desirable
political and social living.
Finally, I argued as to why pedagogical encounters ought to become
more deliberative, iterative, and equal to disrupt and reconceptualize
some of the political and societal ills about human actions that seem to
dominate political and civil life on the African continent.
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Part II
Global Skills for Social

Justice, Critical Semiotics,
and the Intersections
of Neoliberalism,
Internationalization,
and Global Citizenship
Education
6 Global Skills and Global
Douglas Bourn
6.1 Introduction
The term “global citizenship” can be seen everywhere today – in mission
statements of universities, in ethical policies from companies, amongst
international policymakers, and by civil society organizations. Behind
the term being the “flavor of the month” is a recognition that people
and communities throughout the world seek and desire the knowledge
and skills to engage in the globalized societies and economies they are
now part of. The interest in the usage of the term has been heightened
by political and social developments in North and Latin America, and
Europe in recent years with the calls from political leaders for a more
economically nationalistic approach to social change. The election of
Donald Trump in 2016 and the Brexit phenomenon in the United
Kingdom suggest a reaction to the onward drive toward globalization
and the domination of global forces. The response to these events by
educationalists has been from a desire to demonstrate the value and
need for the promotion of terms, such as “global outlook” and “social
justice”. Terms such as global citizenship have, therefore, become even
more political and ideological than they were a decade ago.
However, the term “global citizenship”, as the Brazilian educationalist
Moraes (2014) has commented, has become no more than a “floating
signifier”, meaning all things to all people. Similarly, the South African
writers Jooste and Heleta (2016) have suggested that the term “global
citizenship” is a western construction, developed to support western
interests. They instead prefer the term “global competencies”. The term
is, therefore, contested but this means it should become seen as part
of educational debates and not as just a slogan or mission statement
as has happened in some universities around the world (see Bourn,
2018). Global citizenship also as a term needs to be considered with the
added word “education” which moves it from a philosophical or soci-
ological discussion to a pedagogical one. Also, within education, there
are different interpretations and meanings of the term with regard to
formal, school-based education, and say, higher education. Concerning
76 Douglas Bourn
the former, the emphasis has been through organizations like Oxfam
(2016) and the initiatives from UNESCO (2014) pedagogically focused.
Whereas in higher education, the emphasis has been much more on the
mission statement, student values, and with only occasional considera-
tion of higher education (Blum, Bourn, & Kraska, 2018; Schattle, 2008).
There has also been recent literature that has focused on knowledge
as an integral component of GCE (Reimers et al., 2016) or being essen-
tially a values-based perspective (Sharma, 2018). Whilst some of the lit-
erature has referred to skills and competencies (Dill, 2013; Oxfam, 2016;
Gaudelli, 2016; Davies, Pashby, Sant, & Shultz, 2018; Davies et al. 2018),
there has to date been no major study that has located the discourses
around global citizenship within a skills framework. One of the excep-
tions to this has been the work of Jooste and Heleta (2016). They take
a critical approach to the terminology but as have indicated elsewhere,
there is a lack of clarity as to how they are defining competencies. To
take the debates forward within a clear pedagogical discourse, the ways
in which GCE has been aligned with practices and debates in development
and global education and global learning have been particularly helpful.
They provide an intellectual coherence and a distinctive pedagogical
approach that can inform debates around the value of the usage of the
term “global citizenship”.
6.2 Development and Global Education,

and Global Learning and Global Citizenship
In my volume on Development Education (Bourn, 2015), I show how a
discourse and a body of educational practice has evolved, primarily in
Europe and North America, which has been located in learning about
global issues that have a strong value based around social justice and
promotes a participatory and learner-centered approach. The fields of
development and global education emerged out of educational practice,
led predominantly by nongovernmental organizations in Europe, North
America, and the Asia-Pacific region. These fields emphasized the value
and importance of learning about global issues with a strong emphasis
on participatory methodologies.
This discourse has been heavily influenced by the work of the Brazilian
educationalist Paulo Freire and his promotion of a critical pedagogical
approach that questioned the value of just reproducing bodies of knowl-
edge relating theory and learning to practice. To Freire, knowledge is
constructed through dialogue and only emerges through continuous
reflection, discussion, and reconceptualization (Freire, 1972). Henry
Giroux has developed Freire’s thinking through the concept of critical
pedagogy, particularly the need to develop a critical awareness of the
oppressive realities many of us live within. Relevant to the discourses on
GCE is Giroux’s emphasis on the democratic potential of learning that
Global Skills and Global Citizenship 77
is questioning, thinking critically, and actively engaging in society for
social change (Giroux, 2011).
Elsewhere, I have written about the importance of Freire and Giroux
in terms of taking forward the discourses on development education and
global learning that has a stronger critical pedagogical basis (Bourn,
2015). To me, these same themes apply to GCE which, in many coun-
tries, has come out of this practice of development education and global
learning. An example of this can be seen in the work of Oxfam (2016)
and Temple and Laycock (2008). This influential international aid
agency has emphasized global citizenship to encourage learning about
global issues and has a strong active citizenship component, encouraging
young people particularly to seek and secure global social change.
In other literature. including in England a curriculum policy docu-
ment for schools, global citizenship was seen as a theme alongside social
justice, sustainable development, conflict resolution, and human rights
(DFES, 2005). Here the emphasis was on connecting the global to the
broader school-based initiatives on citizenship.
6.3 Global Citizenship Education as a

Distinctive Pedagogical Approach
In some countries and policy and practice initiatives around the world,
“global citizenship” has become the dominant term replacing global edu-
cation or learning or development education. For example, this can be
seen in initiatives in the European Union-funded Global Schools project
that involved a range of countries in Europe (Tarozzi & Mallon, 2019).
It can also be seen in a range of initiatives in Canada and the United
States (Peck & Pashby, 2018) and East Asia (Chong, 2015; Ho, 2018).
However, the main themes within these initiatives are little differ-
ent from other policies and programs which have used global learning
or even development education as the dominant themes. For example,
there is little difference in aims between the Global Schools initiative
and the Global Learning Programme in England from 2012 to 2018
(Hunt & Cara, 2015). There could be an argument for suggesting that
GCE as a term has resulted in a greater emphasis on participatory forms
of learning and a linkage to the broader citizenship discourse. These
emphases have also been promoted by civil society organizations and it
is not, therefore, surprising that it is with such bodies that one can see
the greatest emphasis on the usage of the term.
In some respects, it could be argued that the differing names that have
been used are less important than the intentions and aims behind them.
For example, in Europe, the usage of specific terms, be they development
education, global learning, global education, or global citizenship, has
been influenced by domestic policy agendas and the influence of pro-
grams from civil society organizations.
78 Douglas Bourn
What, however, is evident that through both policy documents and
practice initiatives, where global citizenship has been used, the emphasis
has been on general aspirations and goals. There are some exceptions
to this, such as the materials produced by UNESCO, Oxfam and the
work of Tarozzi and Torres (2016). But in the main, the focus in the aca-
demic literature has been dominated by more philosophical discussions
about what is meant by being a global citizen or relating the usage of the
term to national initiatives on citizenship education (see Dower, 2003;
Schattle, 2008; Dill, 2013;).
With regard to higher education, there has perhaps been a richer
and more nuanced debate with discussions relating GCE to interna-
tionalization strategies and ways in which universities promote their
courses in terms of graduate attributes. Here also one can see elements
of ways in which global citizenship is used instead of equipping grad-
uates to be effective workers in the global economy or to be general
humanistic cosmopolitan citizens. Rarely in higher education do you
see evidence, apart from the work of authors, such as Andreotti (2006),
Bamber (2016), or Stein (2017), of the need for a more critical and
transformative approach to the promotion of global citizenship within
higher education.
6.4 Skills Agenda and Global Citizenship

Within the discourses and practices around global learning and GCE,
there has also been a tendency to focus on the acquisition of knowledge
or the promotion of specific value bases, such as justice and fairness. The
rationales for these emphases have been because the drivers for much of
this educational practice have come from civil society organizations and
policymakers with an interest in securing engagement and support for
their programs and policies around learning about global and develop-
ment issues. For example, relating initiatives to goals around securing
global poverty or sustainable development encourages an emphasis on
increased knowledge of specific issues, such as climate change or having
a sense of empathy with securing a more just and sustainable world.
What, however, can be a consequence of this approach is a lack of rec-
ognition and discussion as the value of skills.
Where skills have been discussed within these discourses, they have
related to the recent OECD initiatives around global competencies (see
Asia Society and OECD, 2018) or focusing specifically on the individual
skills, learners might need to secure effective employment in the global
economy (OECD, 2017). Skills can often be seen in technical skills, such
as the ability to achieve a specific task or as what have been termed soft
skills, such as cooperation, teamwork. Whilst there have been attempts
to locate the debates around skills within the broader social and eco-
nomic context, such as the work of Trilling and Fadel (2009), there is
little recognition of the relevance of understanding the forces of globali-
zation or to make direct connections with the discourses around global
citizenship.
Whilst many of these skills could be seen as implicit within the broader
discussions on global citizenship, there is no context to the approaches
and neither is there any recognition of social justice or skills for social
engagement.
In my volume on Understanding Global Skills (Bourn, 2018), I sug-
gested there is a need to move beyond this rather narrow approach to
one that located skills within the context of globalization and the spe-
cific needs of cultures, societies, and communities.
These themes are very relevant to the discourses around GCE because
the emphasis in both the literature and practice-based material has been
on moral questions, emphasizing the emotional feature of being a global
citizen. Dill (2013) does refer to the growing debates around global com-
petencies but he tends to focus on the initiatives on the 21st-century
skills and more specifically new technology. Sharma’s work (2018) is
important however in that her writings on GCE whilst having a strong
values base do refer to skills.
6.5 What Do We Mean by Global Skills?

My engagement in the debates on global skills began in 2008 when I
produced two reports, with colleagues (Bourn, 2008; Bentall, Blum, &
Bourn, 2010), on what the concept might mean within further and voca-
tional education in the UK. In these publications, global skills were seen
as including working with people from a range of social and cultural
backgrounds, openness to a range of perspectives and understanding of
the importance of global forces.
I further developed my thinking in this area in Bourn (2011). This
article aimed to locate the debates and practices around global skills
within three distinct thematic areas:
• Skills for work in a global economy

• Skills to engage people from different cultures
• Skills for making sense of and engaging with the globalized world
This separation into three distinct themes mirrored broader debates that
have taken place around global education and GCE in terms of an eco-
nomic or neoliberal interpretation, a broader cosmopolitan or human-
istic approach, and a postcolonial or critical pedagogical perspective
(Kraska et al., 2018; Stein, 2017).
But what I continued to find was the lack of attention given to the
influence of globalization on skills needs and development and the con-
sequential power imbalances. This led me in Understanding Global
80 Douglas Bourn
Skills for the 21st Century Professions (Bourn, 2018) to propose the fol-
lowing framework:
• An ability to see the connections between what is happening in your

own community with those of people elsewhere in the world
• Recognize what it means to live and work in a global society and the
value of having a broad global outlook on the world that respects,
listens to, and values perspectives other than their own
• An ability to understand the impact of global forces on one’s and
other people’s lives and what this means in terms of a sense of place
in the world
• Understands the value of using ICT and how best to use it in a way
that is self-reflective and critical and questions data and information
• Openness to a continued process of self-reflection, critical dialogue,
and questioning one’s own assumptions about the world
• Ability to work with others who may well have different viewpoints
and perspectives than yourself, be prepared to change one’s own
opinions as a result of working with others and to seek ways of
working that are cooperative and participatory in nature
• Confidence, belief, and willingness in wanting to seek a more just
and sustainable world
These themes can help make an important contribution to the discourses

and practices in and around GCE because they link together themes,
such as globalization, pedagogy, and social action. They put a process
of learning to be the heart of any framework on global skills which can,
in turn, influence GCE. The framework outlined above can specifically
help the skills development of teachers through demonstrating how they
can enable learners to make connections between their own lives with
people elsewhere in the world. It also means understanding the impact of
global forces, recognizing the value of different voices and perspectives
and, above all, engaging in a process of dialogue, self-reflection, and
potential personal transformation.
This approach not only brings in an important recognition of skills
but also can locate global citizenship more directly within a pedagogical
discourse of global social justice.
6.6 Dialogue with Douglas Bourn

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of global citizenship
and GCE? How has your academic and life’s “journey” shaped the
understanding of global citizenship and GCE?
DOUGLAS BOURN: My understanding and usage of the term “global cit-
izenship” has been as part of an ongoing discussion with learners
about how they see themselves in the context of the globalized world
we all live in today. In many societies, people of all ages have com-
plex identities and the usage of the term “global citizenship” can be
a way of encouraging reflection about the interrelationship of one’s
identity to local, national, and global influences.
I personally have not been a strong supporter of the usage of the
term “global citizenship” because I have found it to be used in an
elitist way, of being applicable to only a small section of society.
I discussed this point in my book’s chapter on Students as Global
Citizens (Bourn, 2009) and have seen the promotion of the term
being often associated with the more elitist universities as a way of
indicating the special and global nature of their student body and
also within private and international schools.
GCE, however, can be a useful term to use if it is a way of encour-
aging a more participatory approach to learning about global issues.
This, for example, can be seen in the materials produced by Oxfam
(2016, p. 9) where “Education for global citizenship is seen as a mul-
titude of participatory teaching and learning methodologies, includ-
ing discussion and debate, role play, ranking exercises, cause and
consequence activities, and communities of enquiry”.
My own experience from being Director of a civil society organi-
zation that had an implicit reference to global citizenship to my more
recent work as running a research center in development education
has been that the term can be a useful one to use as a way of encour-
aging dialogue and debate about how one sees oneself in a global
context. What, however, I would also try to avoid is having a defin-
itive definition because this can lead to a narrowing of perspectives
or encouraging unrealizable expectations or goals.
BOSIO: What is the relationship between global, local, and national in
your opinion? How does this relationship link to GCE?
BOURN: Globalization is about the local and the national as much as
it is about the global. Global forces impact upon an individual’s
lives as well as that of a local community. All too often, the local,
national and global, are seen as competing tensions or as a series
of concentric circles. I would suggest a rather different approach
that starts from the individual or the community and looks at what
influences their development. The extent to which forces from else-
where in the world influence what happens locally will vary accord-
ing to social, economic, and cultural factors. Kukita (2019) in her
research on young people and global citizenship in Japan found the
global influences and outlooks built on the local and the national
albeit in a form that was not immediately obvious. Nayak (2003)
in her study on young people in the North-East of England showed
the influence of cultural forces from elsewhere on the world on local
identities.
82 Douglas Bourn
Global citizenship can play a role in helping individuals and com-
munities have a greater understanding of their sense of place and to
see the linkages between local, national, and global. It can also help
break down the divisions that have emerged in a number of societies
over the last decade between nationalism and globalism.
BOSIO: What forms of knowledge and skills do learners need to effec-
tively engage in today’s global societies?
BOURN: There are excellent examples in England through the work of
the Global Learning Programme and also the framework for GCE
by Oxfam. Both highlight the importance of critical thinking, deep-
ening knowledge about global issues and promoting learning that
recognizes different voices and perspectives. What this means also
is that the knowledge and skills that should be encouraged need also
to be contextualized. This means taking into account specific local,
national, and cultural contexts, the language that is used to promote
these issues and the methodologies to be undertaken. For example,
what is meant by ‘living and working in today’s global societies’ may
well mean very different things if you are living in Nigeria, India,
Jamaica, China, or the UK. There are, of course, some common
approaches related to encouraging more critical thinking and look-
ing at issues from different perspectives but how this is done and
the starting points for engaging learners may well need to be very
different.
BOSIO: The notion of “global skills” seems to emerge as a key element
of GCE according to your conceptualization. How do you foster
global skills in your students in the classes that you teach currently
and taught in the past?
BOURN: Within our Masters Programme on Development Education
and Global Learning at UCL-Institute of Education, one can see
evidence of global skills at both a generic level across the course and
specifically in one of the modules where the term is itself discussed
in online discussion forums. Concerning the former, this can be seen
in the activities in our modules on looking at issues through a range
of voices and perspectives. Andreotti’s “Through Other Eyes” mate-
rials are used as an example of this. Then more specifically in one
of our modules on the theme of globalization, there is a specific
activity on global skills where students are asked to review models
of how the term is used and come to their own conclusion about
their appropriate relevance and value. The students are asked spe-
cifically to choose an area of educational practice to consider how
the ideas of global skills or competencies might be interpreted and
implemented. They are then asked to identify what they think are
the key skills/competencies required in the area they have chosen.
In doing so, the students are also asked to consider the extent to
which these skills/competencies might be different in diverse social,
cultural, or economic contexts. This means, for example, you may
be a teacher in a multicultural school in an urban area. Would the
skills/competencies needed for working in a monocultural rural area
be the same or different? Similarly, are the skills/competencies iden-
tified likely to be the same or different to those needed in other areas
of educational practice? What we also try and do in our course is
to relate global skills to debates around global social justice and to
encourage moving beyond either neoliberal and economic interpre-
tations or cosmopolitan ones, but to encourage more critical peda-
gogical approaches.
BOSIO: How would you practically incorporate your framework for
“global skills” in curricular programs for GCE in a modern higher
BOURN: I would not approach like this. Frameworks like the one I out-
line on global skills should not be lifted and used directly in courses
but more used as guiding influences. What is important in discus-
sions on global skills and global citizenship with educators is not
to try and impose one way of working. From my own experience
at UCL, the strategy you take to engage educators in discussion on
these issues needs to be handled very sensitively. Any attempt to
impose new guidelines without considerable consultation and dia-
logue is likely to result in considerable resistance. There is a need,
however, for skills to be directly reflected within GCE-related
courses. This means including reference to specifically looking at
key terms, such as critical thinking, cultural understanding, forms
of participation, and engagement in societies. But as suggested ear-
lier, this needs to take account of specific cultural contexts for
the students. For example, in the MA on Development Education
and Global Learning I am involved with, a number of the stu-
dents are teachers in international schools around the world and,
therefore, their approaches to GCE will be influenced by their own
experiences.
What, however, I would encourage is to promote debates around
global skills that bring in themes of social justice and social respon-
sibility which can move thinking beyond the personal to the wider
societal needs.
BOSIO: Doug, you have a significant experience in teaching GCE-related
subjects and researching on the topic of global citizenship at the uni-
versity level in the UK and beyond. Why is or is not GCE necessary
in the modern university, particularly in the UK?
BOURN: Global citizenship themes and debates pose questions for higher
education about the purpose of universities in the age of globaliza-
tion. How do universities both through the formal curriculum but
also more widely through its culture, lifestyle, and aims encourage
learning that equips graduates for not only working but living in and
84 Douglas Bourn
engaging in a global society. This to mean needs to be an essential
component of all higher education courses, regarding the subject
matter or discipline. Also, by posing the inclusion of global citizen-
ship into degree courses, it raises the wider question of the purpose
of universities. There is ongoing debate about the influence of neo-
liberal thinking within higher education. Whilst global citizenship
can be interpreted in a neoliberal way, equipping the graduate to
have the skills to work in the global marketplace, it does pose ques-
tions around global social responsibility.
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly in British
universities?
BOURN: I am not sure there is a lot of negativity around the term
“global citizenship” within UK universities. There will be individ-
ual educators who will object to the term for philosophical or ide-
ological reasons. This will always be the case but I think there have
been significant changes toward the term in the UK and elsewhere
in the world in recent years because of the rise of economic nation-
alism. Brexit has had a major impact on UK universities at all levels
and there has been a realization by both senior leaders and educa-
tors of the need to equip graduates with a global outlook, to have a
sense of global social responsibility and to be conscious of the need
for us all to work toward a more sustainable way of living. Global
citizenship as a term has creeped into the discourses and policies
almost by stealth. There has been in the UK at least no major pol-
icy initiatives or champions for the term. What tends to happen
is that institutions see the need to address the area and include
it within future policies but there appears to be lack of ambition
as to how it could be more central to policies and practices. The
tendency is to develop some form of optional global citizenship
course, organize special lectures, or see the usage of the term as
essentially a marketing tool.
BOSIO: How can education for global citizenship be made suitable for or
attractive to students studying in British universities? What knowl-
edge, skills, values, dispositions, and experiences are graduates
expected to acquire in order to become global citizens?
BOURN: There are dangers of encouraging an approach that suggests
some form of ideal or goal to be global citizens. Global citizen-
ship should be seen as part of the pedagogy for equipping students
with the knowledge, skills, and values to be active participants in
the globalized economy and society. What is noticeable is that it
is often students themselves who have demanded more courses or
activities that have a sense of global citizenship. An obvious exam-
ple is the engineering student network, Engineers Without Borders.
They organize courses and work with universities to provide oppor-
tunities for overseas experiences. Similar examples can be seen in
Medicine (See Bourn, 2018).
Universities should ask students how they would like to see more
emphasis given to global citizenship themes and approaches. What
it should not be is adding onto a course, an extra lecture, or session
on global citizenship. The reason I have started promoting the term
“global skills” is because within higher education, all courses have
to demonstrate the skills to be acquired and the desired learning
outcomes. This is where the global comes in.
BOSIO: Is GCE in the modern university, particularly in British univer-
sities, more about knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, or some
combination of all four in your opinion?
BOURN: I have not done sufficient research to fully answer this ques-
tion. But from my anecdotal evidence, what you will find across UK
universities are a range of responses from reference in mission state-
ments to specific courses. An area that is increasingly being posed,
in part in response to the climate emergency activity, is the linkage
between global citizenship and strategies on sustainable develop-
ment. This also incidentally is having an impact on international-
ization strategies as questions are increasingly being raised about
educators engaging in large amounts of overseas travel. From my
experience at my own university, there has also been a tendency in
the past for strategies on internationalization and sustainable devel-
opment to go along parallel lines. What global citizenship does, and
this is now happening at my university, is to bring the areas more
closely together.
skills, values, disposition) be identified?
BOURN: All too often global citizenship is reduced to being an optional
extra, something that is not assessed. Some educators would argue
that once you start to bring it into formal assessment, it ends its
creativity and innovation and can reduce it to be just another tick
box exercise. I would suggest, on the other hand, that whilst you
need innovation, also to make global citizenship to be embedded in
courses, this means inclusion within learning outcomes which means
forms of assessment. I would be looking for examples that not only
encourage learning about global issues, but looking at issues from
different perspectives and also including some form of active and
participatory learning. This would be looking for evidence of skills
development in group-work, working cooperatively, learning how to
change viewpoints, and self-reflection.
BOSIO: What are three themes a higher education curriculum for GCE
should include in your opinion?
86 Douglas Bourn
BOURN: I would try and avoid talking about themes or even forms of
knowledge but desirable learning outcomes. This means therefore:
• Increased knowledge and understanding about how globaliza-

tion and global forces impact upon the specific curriculum sub-
ject area
• Recognizing that in all forms of learning that are different
social and cultural perspectives. Understanding them and what
they mean
• How can the learner develop skills that can connect their learn-
ing to broader social, economic, and cultural needs regarding
ensuring a more just and sustainable world?
By taking this approach, you are then able to link the learning to the
core aims of the courses. It also means that forms of assessment can
directly make reference to global citizenship approaches. Such learn-
ing outcomes may also, of course, need to be refined to take account
of specific disciplines and subject areas. What these outcomes might
mean for engineers and doctors, for example, are likely to be slightly
different to those of teachers. But there are some common elements
related to the impact of globalization, recognizing, and understand-
ing different cultural voices and the relationship of their learning
to broader social goals. I have found making reference to the UN
Sustainable Development Goals helpful here.
6.7 Conclusion
Global citizenship, as this chapter has demonstrated, is an increasingly
popular theme within academic debates, policies, and programs that
aim to equip learners with the skills, knowledge, and values to be active
participants in the globalized society we are all now living in. However,
global citizenship needs to move beyond being a marketing ploy, a one-
off activity, or as repackaging existing courses to respond to changing
external agendas. Global citizenship should be seen as a distinctive peda-
gogical approach that is encouraged and promoted as an integral compo-
nent of students’ learning experience. This is where and why I have used
the term “global skills” because this brings in what and how students
learn, equipping them to respond to the challenges of globalization.
Within the discussions on global skills and its relationship to global
citizenship, there is a need to encourage learning that not only recognizes
the different ways skills can be interpreted but also to bring in themes of
global social justice and global responsibility. As I have suggested else-
where (Bourn, 2018), global skills need to be much more than skills for
employment in the global marketplace, but skills for life and skills to make
sense of the impact of globalization on our daily lives. Within this broader
interpretation of global skills, a connection to global citizenship debates
emerges particularly if the theme of global social justice is included.
Whilst there may have been some questions raised in this interview
and chapter concerning how the term “global citizenship” has been
used, particularly within higher education, there is no doubt that if there
is a connection made in its usage to achieving a more just and sustaina-
ble world, then it can be a potential force for transforming how higher
education is seen and implemented.
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7 Educating for Global Citizenship
in Diverse and Unequal Societies
Massimiliano Tarozzi
7.1 Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide from the beginning of 2020
has dramatically shown the disastrous, and, in some cases, catastrophic
effects that a health emergency can have not only on the sphere of public
health, but also on the economic, social, political, and even on the edu-
cational one. To make an example of the impact on educational systems,
policies, and practices, UNESCO reported that in early April 2020 to
contain the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 90% of the world’s
school population was experiencing serious disruptions due to the clo-
sure of schools (https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/).
The global interconnection of individuals, societies, and institu-
tions has been the ways for the spread of the virus. But some possible
responses have passed through the same ways, such as human solidarity,
political responsibility, and social justice – responses only partially given
by governments and decision-makers to contain and defeat the virus out-
break and face social and economic consequences in the medium and
long term. The coronavirus crisis tragically showed that global problems
require global responses.
GCE is one of the responses to global challenges and opportunities
that cannot be addressed and solved (only) at national or local level.
The case of the new coronavirus is emblematically evident for its devas-
tating pervasiveness, but it is not the only one. Other examples include
environmental emergencies, especially those related to climate change,
poverty, and the deep economic inequalities that generated it, local con-
flicts and wars involving global actors, international migrations, and the
forced culture encounters/clashes that derive from them. I have dealt
extensively with this last topic – intercultural encounters in educational
settings – by researching policies and practices especially in teacher edu-
cation. This is a global issue that perfectly falls within the responses that
GCE can offer to policymakers, practitioners, and students. The social,
political, and educational implications of the intercultural encounter
generated by global migration processes are emblematic themes – such
90 Massimiliano Tarozzi
as on a different plane the pandemics – to show the effects of global
interconnections. But GCE also highlights how educational responses
can only come from adopting a complex and holistic approach to them.
GCE stands out as a new educational perspective, an ethos, making
sense of and framing theoretically and methodologically different types
of knowledge, abilities, and values (UNESCO, 2014).
However, GCE is a contested concept, differently conceptualized in
the last decade, open to many different interpretations (Bourn, 2015;
Davies, 2006; Dower, 2003; Heater, 2002; Oxley & Morris, 2013; Pike
& Selby, 1988; Pashby et al., 2020), which can be placed along two
extreme poles – on the one hand, GCE is understood as an approach
enhancing global competition for global elites preparing them to a flexi-
ble and competitive global labor market, forming human capital for the
international competitive knowledge economy (Hartung, 2017; Schattle,
2009; Gardner-McTaggart, 2016); on the other hand, it can be under-
stood as a way to challenge global inequality, providing a pedagogy
for “global social justice” (Davies, 2006; Bourn, 2015; Jefferess, 2008;
Torres 2017), or advocate a postcolonial perspective (Andreotti 2006;
Andreotti 2010; Andreotti 2011; Abdi, Shultz, & Pillay, 2015).
As I have argued elsewhere, I embrace a non-neutral Global Social
Justice Framework (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016) (Figure 7.1) which consid-
ers GCE not only a new educational content, as a mere extension of the
citizenship’s concept from the national to the global level, but a new per-
spective that allows policymakers and practitioners to reconceptualize
old issues within a new educational stance. This framework encompasses
the individual global mindedness, subjective responsibility, and behavior
Figure 7.1 A Global Social Justice Framework.

Educating to Global Citizenship 91
toward the social and environmental sphere. As graphically illustrated in
Figure 7.1, it can be regarded as an ethos that should not only be rooted
in individual choices and responsibility for the social community and the
natural environment in the form of consciousness, attitude, and behav-
ior but also political commitment. In this framework, key educational
issues, such as interculturality, sustainability, and social justice make
new sense in a global holistic view.
If applied to the issue of diversity in unequal societies, this GCE map
offers a new angle to overcome the conundrums of limited educational
concepts – such as intermulticultural education, civic/citizenship edu-
cation, combining interculturality with social justice and sustainability
and providing new meanings to the problems of citizenship in global,
plural, and heterogenous societies.
GCE provides a value-based idea of citizenship as ecological belong-
ing to the world. While this idea does not have legal value, a new envi-
ronmental ethic is rooted in it, by closing the traditional gap between
citizenship and sustainability, human rights and environment, and
social sphere and biosphere. This chapter aims at distilling 20 years of
research in intercultural and social justice education resulting in system-
atically delineating the notion of GCE as a new educational perspective
providing an innovative angle to reframe old dilemmas of citizenship in
diverse societies.
7.2 Dialogue with Massimiliano Tarozzi

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? Specifically, how
MASSIMILIANO TAROZZI: I have been studying both empirically and theo-
retically the field of intercultural education for more than 20 years.
The synthesis of my research itinerary from intercultural educa-
tion to GCE has been published in the coauthored book Global
Citizenship Education and the Crises of Multiculturalism with
Carlos Alberto Torres (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016). Here GCE is pre-
sented as a new perspective, providing an innovative viewpoint to
reframe old dilemmas of citizenship and intercultural education in
diverse societies and in a globalized world, taking into account both
equality and human rights and the respect for difference.
This book represents the latest step of a long scientific itinerary
that started with my PhD thesis 25 years ago. The first decade of my
research on this field culminated in the 2005 book Cittadinanza inter-
culturale. Esperienza educativa come agire politico [Intercultural citi-
zenship. Educational experience as political agency], whose concluding
chapter is emblematically entitled “Education for a Global Citizenship”
(Tarozzi, 2005).
The second decade of my research in this field resulted in the 2015
book Dall’intercultura alla giustizia sociale. Per un progetto ped-
agogico e politico di cittadinanza globale [From Interculturalism
to Social Justice. For an educational and political project of Global
Citizenship] (Tarozzi, 2015). In the meantime, I have undertaken
my intellectual dialogue with Carlos Albert Torres since 2006 when
I first went to UCLA as a visiting scholar within the Education
Abroad Program and then as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009 for a full
semester. We began discussing our goal of comparing intercultur-
alism and multiculturalism as two pedagogical approaches devel-
oped in Europe and North America. Originally, we wanted to
map the “queries and contradictions – and also the possibilities
– of further dialogue between the modes, methods, theories, and
practice of intercultural education, as a dominant epistemological
paradigm in the European continent, with multicultural education
being the dominant epistemological paradigm in the USA, but also
with other connotations with a similar terminology in the rest of
Latin America” (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, p. viii). Then, from that
comparative dialogue between theories and education policies, an
indepth discussion emerged on the implications of globalization on
educational processes. Thus, our goal became the discussion on new
developments of GCE.
BOSIO: Your research work examines interculturalism and multicultur-
alism. How do these terms connect the book Global citizenship
education and the crises of multiculturalism (Tarozzi & Torres,
2016)?
TAROZZI: Both interculturalism and multiculturalism are umbrella
terms and while there are some differences among them, they can
be regarded as two sides of the same coin. One of the main ideas of
the book is that there are diverse crises of inter/multiculturalism and
there are many reasons for these crisis. Multiculturalism was being
criticized from the far-right, from the conservative, from the neolib-
eral, and even from some progressive educators, for the failure of its
practices. In our book, we endorse some of these criticisms and we
reject some others, but both agreed that there is a historical crisis of
multiculturalism in dealing with diversity in educational policy and
practice. Our argument ended up maintaining that what is needed
is a global perspective to address global issues and this is particu-
larly visible in the education policy. National models of integration,
including multiculturalism or interculturalism, are no longer appro-
priate to deal with diverse societies. Cultural conflicts, tensions, and
encounters between cultures are rooted in global perspectives, so
they require a global view and global responses to address them.
And we found this is the main idea to open up the way for including
GCE as a way out for this crisis.
To sum up, three main reasons for the crisis of culture-based mod-
els to deal with diversity in educational policy can be identified:
1 Populist, xenophobic, instrumental criticisms. Overall in the

western world, there is an emerging new public feeling of hostil-
ity to intercultural approaches, supported by explicit xenopho-
bic attitudes and a re-emergence of conservative assimilation.
2 Academic criticisms (Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2010; Joppke,
2004, 2010, 2017) aimed to overcome the excesses of cultural-
ism and stressing the need for including social dimension in the
educational debate about diversity.
3 The emergence of a civic integration model. This is a trend
toward social integration in a national culture, values, and
beliefs. A sort of new assimilation prevailing in most Nordic
countries. It prioritizes immigrant integration into mainstream
society, respect for liberal-democrat values (including human
rights) and full knowledge of national language and history. An
emblematic example of this approach is the introduction of the
school subject Fundamental British values in British schools.
However, the book argues that the very idea of a national model of
integration is in crisis and it should be overcome. The French model
of assimilation, the German exclusionary ethnic and the intercul-
tural European, the USA multiculturalism or the new emerging civic
integration are perhaps all outdated. Following Wieviorka, “The
so-called ‘models of integration’ are all failing” (Wieviorka, 2014,
p. 633), and not only multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism cannot solve the conundrums of superdiversity
(Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2010) in education policy and practice, not
even other more traditional education policy models. Such models
are now unable to provide adequate normative responses in facing
the challenge of diverse and equal societies, by perpetuating divi-
sions between “majority” and “minority” views. National models
of integration should be overcome (Joppke, 2007; Wieviorka, 2014)
because within this global complexity, solutions for education policy
in particular can only emerge from a global or at least supranational
perspective, going beyond the narrow national view mostly rooted
in self-perceived political culture and traditions.
BOSIO: Immigration is reshaping societies around the globe. Barriers
erected by wealthier nations have been unable to keep out those
from the global South – typically poor, and often desperate – who
come searching for work and a better life. How can GCE address
this issue in your opinion?
TAROZZI: Migration is an emblematic condition of today’s global econ-
omy and culture (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016) and globalization creates
the economic, technical, and cultural conditions for migration. In
spite of the political discourse dominant in Western societies that
tends to portray immigration as a negative but stoppable byproduct
of globalization, cultural diversity and multiple identities are constitu-
tive elements of our societies. Educational institutions are structurally
plural and diversity cannot be seen as an emergency but as a struc-
tural sign of heterogeneity with which educators, policymakers and
scholars have to deal with (Zoletto, 2012). In this scenario of post-
migrations, new educational challenges take shape – a relativization
of the western-centered way to represent the world; the emergence
of social inequality, discrimination, and racism within nationalistic
societies; the need to rethink education for postnational citizenship.
Cultural diversity, especially the one generated by global migrations,
is a key issue for GCE because it poses the question in terms of global
mobility and inequalities between and within nations. However,
to address challenges that migration poses to educational systems,
not every approach to GCE seems suitable. To address some of the
unsolved questions posed by multicultural/intercultural education, a
Social Justice Global Citizenship Education (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016;
Shultz, 2007), rooted in a postcolonial critical perspective (Abdi et al.,
2105; Andreotti and de Souza, 2012), is needed because it is able to
capture and respond to the new emerging educational needs.
BOSIO: The question of (national) citizenship is nowadays playing a key
role in governing the current migration crisis. How does global citi-
zenship relate to national citizenship?
TAROZZI: In terms of its possibility to reconceptualize educational chal-
lenges of cultural diversity, the idea of Global Citizenship can be seen
as a response to globalized societies and postnational or multiplex
citizenship. In modern times and in postnational societies, Marshall’s
classical conception of national citizenship might be “obsolete”
(Soysal, 1994; Cohen, 1999; Tambini, 2001) because it does not take
into account the transnational dimension of today’s ways to belong
to a worldwide “community of destiny” (Morin, 1999). Therefore,
acknowledging a global perspective on citizenship is crucial to
address global social, political, and environmental challenges.
Obviously, a call for global citizenship does not imply the exten-
sion of the citizenship’s legal status from the national to the global
level. However, the sense of belonging to a global sphere certainly
has an ethical and political value and, by implication, a substantial
educational significance. Even if it cannot be seen from a legal point
of view, yet global citizenship has a great educational power, is an
ethos that embodies new meanings for education, and a paideia that
provide a sense of belonging to a common humanity, embodying new
meaning for education and its role in developing knowledge, values,
behaviors for securing tolerance, diversity recognition, inclusion, jus-
tice, and sustainability across the world (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016).
This view echoes the UNESCO’s definition of global citizenship:
Global citizenship refers to a sense of belonging to a broader

community and common humanity. It emphasizes political, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural interdependency and interconnected-
ness between the local, the national and the global (UNESCO,
2015, p. 14).
However, in recent times, the success of right-wing populism and

radical nationalism in many countries across the globe seems to run
counter to the values of GCE. Moderate forms of nationalism – such
as the “America first” motto in the USA or the Brexit accomplish-
ment in the UK – and exclusionary and virulent forms of nationalism
or ethnonationalism, share similar anti-immigrant and xenophobic
feelings. These antiglobalist feelings gained electoral consensus by
simplifying complex social, political as well as educational issues
within a rigid tension between patriots and globalists.
BOSIO: Your idea of GCE as an umbrella term, encompassing a number
of different educational fields has certainly many positive aspects in
combining perspectives too often taken as separate, but are there
also some negative points?
TAROZZI: My conceptualization is very holistic and inclusive. It tries to
embrace different educational traditions which have addressed cul-
tural diversity, environment, social justice, and human rights issues
by following parallel and separate approaches, in a form that in the
UK was once termed “adjectival”.
In Europe, in particular, GCE has been used as an umbrella term
trying to be as much inclusive as possible to encompass different
issues and different political agendas (GENE, 2018). This approach
can be tacked back in 1997 under the still prevailing name of “Global
education”, with the Global Education Charter, adopted by the
Council of Europe (CoE 1997), and especially with the Maastricht
Declaration embraced in 2002 by the CoE, which represents a frame-
work for a European strategy on Global education (Forghani-Arani,
et al., 2013). From the Maastricht declaration follows the definition
of Global Education, then broadly spread by GENE:
“Global Education is education that opens people’s eyes and

minds to the realities of the world and awakens them to bring
about a world of greater justice, equity, and human rights for all.
GE is understood to encompass Development Education, Human
Rights Education, Education for Sustainability, Education for
Peace and Conflict Prevention, and Intercultural Education
being the global dimensions of Education for Citizenship.”
While such manifold and inclusive definition has had the merit
of merging several themes under the same notion, and it can be
regarded as a single educational response able to interconnect diverse
global issues and current challenges, however, the lack of clear con-
ceptual boundaries and the continuous semantic widening of estab-
lished concepts (such as development education, global education,
sustainable development education) risk to make GCE an indefinite
and sterile concept, especially for practitioners (Goren and Yemini,
2017), being unable to produce consistent and coherent practice.
BOSIO: In describing your approach to global citizenship education in
the context of higher education, you refer to “a non-neutral Global
Social Justice Framework”. Can you discuss how this framework
may be translated into pedagogical practices in higher education, for
example, in the classes that you teach currently or taught in the past?
TAROZZI: There are several and competing approaches to GCE. I men-
tioned earlier that they can be located in a continuum between two
poles – market oriented vs. global social justice. But there are more
nuanced positions in between. Diverse views in framing GCE show
that it is open to many different conceptual, political, and educa-
tional interpretations (Pashby et al., 2020; Blee, Britton, & Peters,
2008; Tawil, 2013; Gaudelli, 2016; Torres 2017, Reimes et al., 2016)
addressing different goals, rooted in contrasting visions and politi-
cal assumptions. GCE could be regarded as “neoliberal” (Gaudelli,
2009; Shultz, 2007), open (Veugelers, 2011), soft (Andreotti, 2006),
economic (Oxley & Morris, 2013; Mannion et al., 2011), and entre-
preneurial (Stein, 2015). Moreover, since GCE is undertaken within
specific national and cultural contexts, it inevitably reflects broader
social and cultural aspects of the state (Andreotti, 2011; Goren &
Yemini, 2017; Wang & Hoffman, 2016; Cho & Mosselson, 2017).
All these diverging standpoints reveal that the overall assump-
tions of a global view in citizenship education cannot be thought as
ethically or politically neutral not only because every educational
practice is political per se (Freire, 1985), but also because some key
concepts, such as citizenship and globalization, can be viewed from
different angles, including a nationalist or neoliberal or critically
radical, postcolonial and counterhegemonic.
In my postgraduate courses on GCE, I am currently carrying out
both in Italy and in the UK, my main goal is to stimulate and some-
times to provoke students’ critical attitude toward global issues. For
example, by asking them to reflect on the peculiarities of GCE in
Europe and North America; or if they are aware of GCE interpreta-
tions in other regions of the world, especially where they live or work;
or to discuss the various ideologies underpinning GCE. To facilitate
indepth knowledge and independent and critical thinking, it is also
important to apply GCE understandings to educational practice in a
range of settings. I work from the proposition that an understanding
of the diverse range of current GCE policies in formal and nonformal
education around the world is only possible in combination with
understanding of current practices of GCE around the world.
BOSIO: How can GCE be made suitable for or attractive to students
studying in European universities, particularly in Italy?
TAROZZI: I have been teaching GCE courses for three years both in Italy
and in the UK at Master programs. It is a relatively new topic in aca-
demia and in Italy, I have taught the first course addressing this issue.
I must say, however, that the University of Bologna in 2017 hosted
an international conference entitled “Global Citizenship Education:
the role of Education in a Globalised World”, focusing on the con-
tribution of higher education to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development through the promotion of Global Citizenship. A final
document drawn from the conference and the work of a crossdisci-
plinary team within the University was developed and submitted to
the G7 meeting, hosted by Italy in the same period.
However, apart from these important political positions, GCE in
higher education research, with few exceptions (Stein, 2015; Torres,
2015), has received less research attention, and it is still a largely
neglected policy area compared to other levels of formal education.
While higher education institutions are in the best position to support
both a rigorous research agenda and relationships among several actors
involved in the promotion of GCE (Tarozzi & Mallon, 2019), too little
attention has been paid thus far to the contribution to GCE by tertiary
educational institutions compared to other educational levels.
Yet, internationalization is widely considered a priority across
market-driven universities and GCE is frequently invoked as central to
universities’ internationalization efforts (Stein, 2015). Employability
and performativity are worldwide valued in international compara-
tive university rankings where the number of international students
is one of the key indicators. In contemporary universities, competing
in the global market to recruit the best students and to prepare a
workforce to navigate in a global labor market, international stu-
dents are regarded as commodities and clients (Burbules & Torres,
2000). But as you know, because this is the subject of your personal
research, commodification, competition, and internationalization of
universities are different from GCE (Nixon, 2011).
Otherwise, higher education can play a pivotal role in providing
teaching, research, and capacity building on GCE. I am convinced
that to make GCE suitable and attractive for students, especially
undergraduate ones, GCE should be taught as a transversal global
skill. Global skills are nowadays central for the professional profile
of students from every field of study. Therefore, I suggest organizing
courses on GCE at university level as it is being experimented in some
universities. GCE can be regarded as key skills for everyone, but in
a different way to the idea of key competencies widely promoted by
supranational agencies, such as OECD, to promote a sort of techno-
cratic competitive efficacy. On the contrary, I endorse the need for
transversal courses on GCE based on a new interpretation of global
skills as conceptualized by Bourn (2018) influenced by critical peda-
gogy, development education, transformative learning and thinking.
BOSIO: Based on your research work and teaching experience, what are
three themes a higher education curriculum for GCE should include?
TAROZZI: If you look at the figure that represents the theoretical model
of social justice GCE that I presented in this chapter, the three funda-
mental themes are – interculturality, social justice, and sustainability.
They are located at the intersection of the three spheres that shape
the global dimension of education – individual, social, and biosphere.
I have already extensively discussed above the centrality of the theme
of interculturality. On several occasions, I have maintained that the
cultural diversity dimension cannot be dissociated from equality and
more broadly from social justice. In each of my courses on GCE,
there is a module focusing on GCE in diverse societies where the
GCE’s responses to cultural diversity and social justice are addressed.
As mentioned before, cultural diversity in a global dimension is
nowadays closely related to global migrations and the refugee crisis.
Therefore, in my courses, I critically address with my students migra-
tion impact on education and the understanding that GCE can provide
to frame this phenomenon in a broader perspective. It is a crucial issue
for GCE especially if the question of cultural diversity is linked to global
mobility and inequalities. It is also useful to turn the migration dis-
course upside down by introducing voices from the South that critically
reveal the postcolonial dynamics underlying the migration processes.
Migration is also linked to sustainability. Migration is not only
an emblematic condition of today’s global economy and culture, but
it also reveals the impact of environmental issues, such as climate
change, pollution, resource depletion, and desertification. One of
the expected outcomes in my courses is that students understand
the connections between migration and global phenomena, such as
conflicts, poverty, inequalities, and climate emergencies. This brings
me to another key theme in my courses on GCE – a critical analysis
of sustainable development goals.
In my courses, I address SDGs as an overall global agenda where
GCE provides an essential contribution for all the SDGs and not only
for the specific target 4.7 where it is explicitly mentioned. I always seek
to make students aware of the extent to which these goals are related to
people’s everyday life around the world. By looking for evidence of the
SDGs in their “local” context or workplace, students are invited to fill
the gap between the individual, and the social and biosphere.
In teaching GCE at any level, a deep gap is inevitably created
between the abstract dimension of the values with which the GCE is
represented and conceptualized and the concrete and contextualized
dimension of the body. However, research demonstrates (Francesconi
& Tarozzi, 2012) that learning is valuable and effective when they
are embodied. Therefore, teachers constantly need to propose an
embodied GCE in which students can recognize the global dimen-
sion within their subjective lived experiences and their relationships
with others.
7.3 Conclusion
The dynamic relation between cultural identity and diversity is one of the
key dimensions of my GCE conceptualization. It is not the only theme under
the GCE umbrella, of course, nor the most important, but one on which
GCE has provided effective educational responses. In fact, my approach
to GCE seeks to address unsolved questions posed by multicultural/
intercultural education as well as by (national) citizenship education.
Multiculturalism and multicultural (or intercultural) education have been
political and educational responses to the challenges that diversity has
posed to education policy and practices for decades. However, in the last
ten years, multiculturalism as a national model of integration has suf-
fered a backlash for both theoretical and political reasons.
I engage my work with students assuming that policy and education
policy dealing with cultural diversity and migration in particular can
only emerge from a global perspective, going beyond narrow national
views. Also, I am grounding my teaching and research on a holistic defi-
nition of GCE, trying to be as much inclusive as possible to encompass
different national policies and supporting a transformational agenda and
the pursuit of global social justice. However, such an all-encompassing
holistic definition lacks clear conceptual boundaries that makes GCE an
obscure concept, especially for practitioners.
Therefore, many policymakers and practitioners are constantly ask-
ing scholars to provide a univocal definition of GCE. Yet, providing
such a definition of GCE is not only impossible, but in my opinion, it is
also useless trying to properly define it in a unique and unequivocal way.
It is absolutely necessary to conceptualize GCE, but not for the purpose
of providing a single clear-cut definition. The reason why it is so difficult
to conceptualize it in an unequivocal way is probably due to the fact that
in the last decade, it has been endorsed from global international insti-
tutions, trying to encompass several issues, to include several perspec-
tives, several national or international agendas, and to embrace several
discourses under one unique label. But one of the side effects of using an
all-encompassing concept is that it is hard to provide a unique definition.
Nevertheless, I work from the proposition that this is acceptable. Not
having a definitive, objective definition, it is also extremely important to
consider differences in the ideologies, cultural or theoretical perspectives
undermining the various ideas of GCE. For example, the profound dif-
ferences between the social justice transformative GCE, that I endorse
– and the neoliberal one, which also has its peculiar definition, would dis-
appear under a unique, neutral, and comprehensive definition. A Global
Social Justice Framework addresses particular goals and it is based on
a precise theoretical and political perspective. We do not expect that
everyone will agree on the position we endorse, but we are ready to dis-
cuss and negotiate our standpoint.
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as Critical Global Semiotics
Maureen Ellis
8.1 Introduction
The Critical Global Educator: Global Citizenship Education as
Sustainable Development (Ellis, 2016) made the following abbreviated
recommendations:
1 Teacher educators and regulatory bodies in every discipline should

implement and assess critical discourse studies – theory, analysis,
and application – as methodology that coherently embodies Global
Citizenship Education (GCE) as Sustainable Development (GCESD)
in teacher education;
2 Curriculum developers and teacher educators should unequivocally
direct personal passions and professional understanding to the polit-
ical economy and cultural politics of their disciplines;
3 Policymakers, at all levels, should infuse policy discourse with
explicit references that generate politically oriented GCESD;
4 Theorizing modality, distinguishing material, sensorial, spatio-
temporal, and symbolic modes and applying Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL) analysis to multimediated genre, educators should
integrate critical action research;
5 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) assessment frameworks should
implement and evaluate critical GCESD, coordinating interdiscipli-
nary school–community–university partnerships;
6 HEIs should establish long-term, stable, and mutually beneficial
teacher–education– research alliances that draw on international
nongovernmental development organizations (INGDOs) for polit-
ical-economic and legal expertise;
7 University educators assessing systemic risk in global discourses
should speak truth to power, building research capacity through
transnational partnerships; and
8 Funding criteria should stipulate transdisciplinary, international,
and multistakeholder research that supports thematic global
networks.
104 Maureen Ellis
This chapter will extend these recommendations, justifying Critical
Realism (CR) philosophy for methodology and Systemic Functional
Semiotics (SFS) for practical methods toward GCE, as elaborated in the
more recent publication of Critical Global Semiotics: Understanding
sustainable transformational citizenship (Ellis, 2019).
8.2 Five Critical Realism Concepts as Foundational

to Global Citizenship Education: Systemic, Dialectic,
Holistic, Heteroglossic, and Transformational
This section explains five CR concepts which I consider foundational to
GCE, highlighting its essential systemic, dialectic, holistic, heteroglos-
sic, and transformational nature and links to Semiotic studies.
8.2.1 Systemic
A systemic approach, a layered or laminated ontology, is in keeping
with Chaos theory and Capra’s Systems Theory. Multiple, overlapping,
contradictory systems of global governance today constitute systemic
risk, as political–economic, security–military and cultural–media net-
works unaccountable to representative authority (Capella, in Burbules
& Torres, 2009; Weber & Duderstadt, 2012), manipulate, downsize,
and disregard normative legal institutions of modern citizenship.
Rather than focus on individuals and events, CR analysis treats all
data as “texts” in “context”, extending inquiry into the causes, circum-
stances, conditions, implications, and repercussions within which they
occur. Investigations relate family, food, finance to climate, conflict,
commerce and trade in drugs, arms, even human beings. Scientists for
Global Responsibility (Langley et al., 2008), “soldiers in the labora-
tory”, track commercial, corporate, and military funding that prevents
university research, particularly in business, engineering, science, and
technology. UNESCO (2014) stipulates that ESD requires methods, such
as critical thinking, imagining future scenarios, clarifying one’s own val-
ues, systemic thinking, and applied learning, which explore the dialectic
between tradition and innovation.
Semiotics, firmly rooted in Philosophy, Logic and Science, the life-work
of founding father Charles Sanders Peirce, provides firm bases for a truly
transdisciplinary cosmic project. Semiotics is the science of signs, insight
into how signs emerge, and develop into symbols, in short how meaning
is made. CR’s systemic ontology aligns sustainability as semiotic domains
(cyto-, bio-, zoo-, …) and subdomains (proto-, necro-, and endo-) as
linguists might layer genres and subgenres. Sebeok (2001, xiv) demon-
strates that “nonverbal signing is more fundamental to survival, both
phylogenetically and ontogenetically, than is verbal signing”, that “semi-
osis is life”, “the basic survival strategy in all life forms”. With origins in
medicine, semiotics supports a search for coherent ontology as endosem-
iotic systems, such as the genetic, immune, metabolic, and neural codes
are unified, tethered, integrated, and then transmitted and expressed in
the external world. Semiotics tracks a chthonic man, scrutinizing Jacob’s
ladder of domains and disciplines from earthly, physical materiality to
metaphoric, metaphysical, and intangible truths.
Systemic functional semiotics (SFS) is an extensive emergent field which
covers the entire range of signs, codes, and modes across cultures, geography,
professions, and disciplines. SFS takes as its basis Wittgenstein’s assertion,
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein,
1922/2010). Initially conceived by Michael Halliday at University College
London as systemic functional linguistics, today SFS encompasses myriad
communications, multilingual multimodal texts, in context, i.e. mani-
fold discourses, languages in action, everyday drama, and daily dharma.
Semiotics provides methods for analysis which can be happily taught
and progressively applied from Kindergarten to “Universe-city”. Critical
Realism, rooted in Vedic, Taoist, and Buddhist beliefs, is frequently encoun-
tered as Critical Theory or in more accessible terms as Critical Thinking.
However, it is unfortunate if these varying depths of engagement are not
aligned, so that they nest (w)holly in meaningful wholeness.
8.2.2 Dialectic
Dialectic confrontation yields the transcendent psyche, as representations
engender cultural variants from ancient religious existential semiotic
trinities (Buber, 1958); Vedanta’s Brahma (Creator), Vishnu (Preserver),
and Shiva (Destroyer); Taoism’s yin/yang dialectic; Greek fates Clotho,
Lachesis, and Atropos; Christianity’s thought, word, deed; the scientists’
solids, liquids, gases; the grammarian’s past, present, future; to recent
accessible metaphors framing body, mind, spirit; head, heart, and hands.
Moving beyond dialogic relations to dialectics, Critical Realism inserts
the third emergent factor, insisting like Peirce on triads, semantic trian-
gles and semiotic trinity. Charles Sanders Peirce’s iconic, indexical, and
symbolic signification submerges pedestrian human antics in semantic
triangles revealing thought as semiotic, manmade manifest through sign.
Although it may be easier to distinguish finance and power from
cultural globalization, it is “the interplay between the economic and
political contexts of globalization that has driven most discussions of
the need for educational reform” (Burbules and Torres, 2009: p. 29).
Using word association exercises to unravel bundles of trapped psychic
energy and to dissolve neurotic structures, talk therapy, and Jungian
psychotherapy helped psychotic patients beyond a medical-based psychi-
atry. Critical realists examine this interaction, the sociocultural risks, the
cultural politics arising within and emerging from a global political econ-
omy (Klein, 1999, 2008; Shaxson, 2012; Chang, 2010). Vedic dharma,
106 Maureen Ellis
Greek drama, forgotten wisdom from the East, gives contemporary reso-
nance to Teilhard de Chardin’s (1965) iconic imagery of body and blood,
(w)holesome “internetted”, holy communion.
“Only this East is not a Tibetan monastery full of Mahatmas, but

in a sense lies within us. It is from the depths of our own psychic
life that new spiritual forms will arise; they will be expression of
psychic forces which may help to subdue the boundless lust for prey
of Aryan man”.
(Jung, 1933, p. 221)
8.2.3 Holistic
Applying CR’s systemic view to individual development means that we
see human identities as discourse competences (Greimas, 1976). Jung’s
Buddhist references brought to Western psychology Vedic understand-
ing of the stratified embodied self, seven wheels or chakras, from root,
sacrum, solar plexus, heart, throat, mind’s eye to crown. Kine-ikonically
binding word to image and icon, “individuation” signifies transitive,
symbolic movement toward indivisible unity, (w)hole, holy or holis-
tic spiritual completion, “the process of integrating the contents of the
unconscious and achieving awareness of the self” (Jaffe, 1979, p. 125),
and not to be confused with individualism. Jung insists, “the self-
comprises infinitely more than a mere ego. Individuation does not shut
one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself” (Jaffe, 1979,
p. 228). Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul diagnosed that: The
ego is ill for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has
lost its connection with mankind and with the spirit. The ego is indeed
the “place of fears” but only if it has not returned to the “father” and
“mother”, i.e. translated spirit and nature (Jung, 1933, p. 125).
Explaining the essentially metaphoric nature of thought, language, and
development, cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson (1980, p. 196–197)
link surface frames to deeper conceptual root metaphors, demonstrating
that “most of the conceptual structure of a natural language is meta-
phorical”, around 90% in some datasets. Like sacred Greek amphora,
metaphors store precious defining aphorisms. Symbolically represented
in Sanskrit ritual by potentially lethal camphor, a decongestant that
burns without residue ash, metaphor intuitively eases absorption. Magi
see metaphors magically absorbed, potent as at Hindu funerals, sub-
liminally affecting noumenal conversion. Similarly, Peirce’s metaphors
iconically, immediately, and dynamically usher human cognition from
sensation to perception and conception.
Kant (1781, p. 182) explains “the schematism of pure understand-
ing. … The schema is in itself always a product of pure imagination”.
Concepts and experience always stand in immediate relation to the
schema of imagination, as a rule for the determination of our intuition,
in accordance with some specific universal concept. Cognitive metaphor
theory, developing work on Metaphors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson,
1980) traces patterns of conventional metaphoric use which reflect con-
ventional conceptual metaphors. Schemata synthesizes perceptions,
establishing abstract universal concepts. Individual imagination is
“in-formed”, synthetically processing prior memories with actual stim-
uli. Imaginations depend on Reason while borrowing images, imagery,
from the senses in a “figurative” art – a deep hidden transfiguration of
the human soul. From genesis to genetics, genres (Bakhtin, 1991) emerge,
variously combining form, function, and purpose; narrowed “confirma-
tions” of genre, disciplinary fragmentation fractures conscientization,
tethering vision, and mission.
8.2.4 Heteroglossic
In contrast with Habermas’ (1984) structural, procedural role for lan-
guage, the Russian philosopher, semiotician and literary critic Mikhail
Bakhtin’s (1991, pp. 271–331) poststructural theory treats metalan-
guage as “relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness” (1991, p. 327)
inextricably binding language to human development. Polysemic meta-
phors signal potency, potential, empty signifiers distinct from full pop-
ulated signs, powerfully deployed in open-ended heteroglossic range of
genres, sub-, and hybrid-genres for varied human purposes. The icon
does not represent unequivocally an existent thing – icon depicts while
index denotes and symbol connotes. Both CR and Semiotics identify
emergence, signs evolving into symbols, Om or revealed and yet to be
revealed omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent knowledge. Both
frameworks question the process of meaning-making; cultural shifts,
power differentials and authority which allow dominant meanings,
impositions, manipulation of meanings. Like the Critical Realist phi-
losophy of Roy Bhaskar which reaches back to ancient Vedic, Taoist,
Buddhist principles and enlightenment, Semiotics values Tyche (Greek)
or Tai Chi (Taoist), spontaneity, intuition, chance as well as Continuity
or Syneche, and consequent Pragmaticism.
Like CR’s stratified differentiated ontology, Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia”
entails “putting the voices back into the dialectical consciousness, thereby
recovering the dialogical vitality of the utterance”. Bakhtin’s claim that
The symbol has a “warmth of fused mystery” (ibid. p. 433) incarnates
metaphoric “Word made flesh” (John, 1:14) that dwells amongst us.
Word as Voice, the phonetician’s schwa roots breath, being, essence,
in Sanskrit hava (wind), Hebrew YHWH. Our dreams, memories,
and reflections offer consciousness a “window” into the unconscious
shadow. Jung’s collective social psyche confirms sociopsychologist
Erving Goffman’s (1969, p. 243) belief that “As performers, we are
108 Maureen Ellis
merchants of morality”. The “Wind which bloweth where it listeth”
(John, 3:8) is not shaken by surface choices of bridesmaids, virgins, or
milkmaids. Word as sacramental magma, universal semiotic material
of inner life means “we repeat, when discourse is torn from reality, it is
fatal for the word itself as well; words grow sickly, lose semantic depth
and flexibility, the capacity to expand and renew their meanings in new
living contexts” (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 353).
8.2.5 Transformational
Complex global issues of social justice, human rights, conflict resolu-
tion, environmental sustainability, and diversity do not fall neatly into
disciplines. Globalization means citizens daily encounter composite
“texts”, multimodal combinations of logos – written/spoken word, pic-
ture, moving image, number, color, sound, music, gesture, dance, and
performance. Social- and multimedia newspaper articles, websites, radio
commercials, TV advertisements, photojournalism, and films convey
an overwhelming host of genres and subgenres – politics, law, finance,
and medicine, via manifesto, contract, bank accounts, and prescription,
alongside mission statements, statistics, pop lyrics, and the rest. The myr-
iad ways in which the senses are conjugated in different cultures suggest
crossmodal plasticity or synesthesia as a “more productive model for
conceptualizing perceptual processes” (Howes, in Jewitt, 2009, p. 226).
Synesthetic literacies sequence experience, conceptualization, analysis,
and application. Just-in-time disciplinary naming weaves theory and
critique, social fabric, and moral fibre in formal, informal, nonformal
subjectivity. CR’s expansive Transformational Model of Social Activity
(TMSA) acknowledges hybrid genre, multiple intelligences, multimodal
literacies as citizens deploy positions and practices toward Eudaimonia,
good spirits, flourishing.
Critical Global Semiotics (CGS): understanding sustainable transfor-
mational citizenship (Ellis, 2019, henceforth CGS), sought to combine
these two frameworks – Critical Realism (CR) for methodology, philos-
ophy and theory, with Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS) for analyti-
cal methods, practical application, or praxis. CGS incorporates powerful
integral concepts which make explicit a developing global consciousness.
It explores transdisciplinary “commonwealth” through focus on multimo-
dality, media, and metaphor. Every day, global citizens embodying philos-
ophy encounter an overwhelming host of genres and subgenres, emergent
semantic triangles, evolving semiotic trinity. Challenging daily drama and
performative dharma, applying elements of CR and SFS, incorporating
active engagement, scrutinizing the political economy and cultural pol-
itics of their professional faculties and personal lives, these 24 analysts
from 13 countries present current issues in Anthropology, Architecture,
Dance, Feminism, Film, Health, Law, Management, Medicine, Music,
Politics, Pharmaceuticals, Sociology, Sustainability Education, and Urban
Development. The book’s integrative, unifying foundations will be of
interest to researchers, educators, and postgraduate students in the fields
of linguistics, semiotics, and critical realist philosophy, as well as to poli-
cymakers, curriculum developers, and civil society.
8.3 Dialogue with Maureen Ellis

EMILIANO BOSIO: What are in your opinion three key elements of GCE
in the modern higher education institution? How do these link to
your journey as an educator and scholar?
MAUREEN ELLIS: To take these in turn – first, the need to theorize pas-
sion, the vital role of theory in translating personal interest into
investment; intuition and opinion into knowledge as justified true
belief; passionate en-theos-iasm into coherent, articulated, sustain-
ing dialectics. Unless sustained by philosophical foundations and
theoretical justifications, research revealed that conviction alone
proved unequal to politically just societal transformation. CR’s
laminated ontology distinguishes, “the value-impregnating charac-
ter of factual discourse” (Bhaskar, in Archer et al., 1998, p. 412),
discriminating criteria unconsciously ingested. To value passion is
to understand logogenesis, discourse, dharma, faith in action, the
dialectic absent/present Tao Way in which meaning unfolds through
the semantic trio. Discursive social psychology elucidates genuine
dialectic as history, data and warrant (Toulmin, 1969) for beliefs
and attitudes, seeing each human being as i) Text in ii) Context, sus-
taining iii) Critique. Sanskrit’s duo (two), Buber’s interactive “I and
Thou” duality generates this third Way, convincingly elaborated by
Speech-act theory (Austin, 1975) and Searle’s (1995) construction of
social reality.
Theorized passion spells integrity – aligning thought, word and
deed as personal transformative experience expands into profes-
sional transactions, i.e. professed disciplinary faith, institutional
affiliation, association and engagement in the political-economy
and cultural-politics of one’s discipline, domain or theatre of opera-
tion. The Critical Global Educator (Ellis, 2016) identified logogene-
sis, vital existence, Bakhtin’s internally persuasive device, sustained
internal dialectic, an etymological conversion process with/in CR’s
realist ontology and relativist epistemology which leads to confi-
dent moral judgmental axiology. GCE (Ellis, 2016, p. 202) demon-
strated that “attitudes, beliefs and opinions, theoretically reinforced
by critical content, analysis, and application, correlate with degrees
of transformational purpose”. Notwithstanding meta-real “hooks”
and “crooks”, constrained, embarrassed, and apologetic teacher
educators reported inadequate resources to weave critical zeal into
110 Maureen Ellis
transformational goals” (ibid, 211). Without history, critical theory,
or regulatory provision to manage normative power, intellectual
impoverishment delayed development from personal transformative
experience to collaborative professional transaction and eventually
collective political transformation.
For me, key elements at an individual level have implications
and repercussions for institutions as well. GCE as Critical Global
Semiotics probing metaphoric, “ether-real”, transformational learn-
ing, relates Genesis to genetics, bibles to bibliographies, personal
search to public research. Development dedicated to lifelong learn-
ing must incorporate the zest of youth and the wisdom of age, ben-
efiting disciples across disciplines, professions, and cultures. The
most recent neuroscience investigation into quantum conscious-
ness, CRISPR technology, and tardigrades supports and justifies
such personal agency and institutional agenda. Transformational
power, able to relate individual vision, mission, and (com)passion to
Semiotics’ most comprehensible canvas possible, must not be sneezed
at; Global Citizenship educators must refrain from settling for ama-
teurish practice when we can choose transdisciplinary praxis; GCE
as trajectory from kindergarten multimodality to globally unifying
linguistic anthropology; from personal to professional and political
transformation.
Conversion from individual transformative experience to trans-
actional and transformational efficacy is only possible through
association, collaboration, involvement in collective, shared agenda.
International NGOs currently have legal, political, financial exper-
tise which constitute a valuable, pertinent, and critical resource,
frequently just desks away from their education departments. My
research revealed the potential for further exploitation of this highly
relevant and vital energy, unfortunately constrained by regulations
which separate campaigning from education, fracturing NGO and
union procedure and practice, preventing the flow of funds and right-
eous indignation. Focused efforts to align GCE with international
NGO priorities can be achieved without loss of critical perspective,
and should be treated as acknowledged, justified objectives.
A third theme or consideration is the need to relate GCE to a global
programme, a goal possibly made more difficult as Britain leaves the
EU, an admittedly imperfect union, but currently a working “labo-
ratory” of idealized global citizenship. The European Development
Education Monitoring Report: DE Watch (Krause, 2010, p. 73), on
behalf of the Multi-Stakeholder Steering Group, stated – “The UK
is not so active at the EU level”. A leading GCE teacher-educator
described the dysfunction between national GCE in the UK and
European projects with unconventional force. Insufficient resources
and “the failure of the whole UK movement to engage with what’s
going on in Europe” left this farsighted professional “feeling that
we’re rather up our own arses here”. Consistent policy and strin-
gently applied research funding criteria at national and regional
levels would demand representational legitimacy, interdisciplinary
expertise, and stable cross-sectoral engagement in equitable global
partnerships based on thematic research networks.
For an example of how these connect with my own journey, … for
many years promoting English Language and Literature in develop-
ing countries, I was unaware of the politics and economics beneath
this linguistic imperialism until I witnessed a child in Africa, and a
plaintiff in a South American law court still run on colonial routines,
struggle with English as fourth or fifth language. Seeing Western
teacher-trainers exploit the hospitality of foreign universities pro-
vided a rude awakening to the ease, folly, and irresponsibility with
which Western rationale and teaching methods were being inappro-
priately foisted on developing systems while serious Indigenous needs
were studiously and callously ignored. Consultancy assignments for
international organizations and foreign Ministries of Education
made me aware of transdisciplinary ramifications, corporate policy,
and global consequences.
BOSIO: Can you discuss how the notions of critical global semiotics
(Ellis, 2019) and critical global educator (2016) may be translated
into pedagogical practices in higher education, for example, in the
classes that you teach currently or taught in the past?
ELLIS: The semiotic stance undermines cavalier claims to objectivity;
its relativist epistemology is substantiated by the conviction that all
thought and knowledge is acquired through signs (CP 8, p. 338); that
every thought is a sign and in signs (CP 5, p. 265, 1868); that the
purpose of the sign is “to communicate ideas” (CP MS 283, p. 101)
from one state of mind to another future state of mind, evolving
across time and space. String theory, Maxwell’s Demon, atoms,
cells, force fields, bull and bear markets, rising and falling prices,
affirm imagery, imagination, metaphor across disciplinary borders.
Transdisciplinary scientists expressing ultimate concerns choose
metaphors with care. “Critical Global Semiotics” (2019) highlights
the combined strength of CR and Systemic Functional Semiotics as
vehicles for global transdisciplinary projects from kindergarten to
adult activism, moving the agenda purposefully beyond educational
walls, from curriculum and campus to community and glo/cal com-
munication. Fortifying CR concepts of emergence and eudaimonia,
lending such notions renewed cosmic depth, and evolutionary purpose
reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision, Peirce’s (1958) agapeistic
evolution (CP, v. 6. para 302) exposes Science’s reliance on metaphor,
its feigned objectivity and predictive power, and the most regrettable
race for other disciplines, such as Economics, to pose as “scientific”.
112 Maureen Ellis
Attention to metaphor means a renewed interest in the individual
developing consciousness, the sources of a learner’s beliefs and opin-
ions, the power of conver(t)sation, the internal processing of what
is presented to learners, the incremental absorption process. Most
importantly, it means a deliberate move from the what and how to
the why in all our analyses, constantly bringing the learner back
to the foundations of his/her reasons and reasoning, the need for
explanation and justification, for personal conviction and developing
passion. It means unearthing the ethics beneath each choice, each
decision, each affirmation of value, making these values explicit, and
encouraging learners to sustain argument, seeing arg (Sanskrit aag)
as the fire within. The curriculum is rich in ethical issues, and as sci-
ence and engineering make life more complex, citizens tread a mine-
field, frequently unaware of the implications and consequences of
purchases. Ingrained loyalty and faithfulness to one’s own discipline,
causing a blind-spot, can, in fact, delay progress as global citizens.
The combination of Critical Realism and Semiotics means that
learning and teaching transcend disciplinary, cultural, geographic
and professional borders. It means a focus on the learner’s conscious-
ness, on the development of the learner’s imagination as an active
site of being, having, doing. Learner autonomy means self-esteem
as a constant star in all pedagogical practice, at every stage within
and beyond education’s walls. Carved on the lintel of Jung’s home,
the Delphic Oracle summarizes political efficacy – “Vocatus atque
non vocatus, deus aderit” – “Invoked or not invoked, the god will be
present”. Uncovering gods, goods, and goodness as proper, common,
collective, and abstract enunciations/annunciation of the Divine,
requires coherence between formal and informal learning, internal
and external, curricular and extracurricular activity. “When the
god is not acknowledged, egomania develops, and out of this mania
comes sickness” (Jung, cited in Read et al, 1973).
I encourage my Open University students to apply all insights to
their own developing self-consciousness. Critical reading involves
the reader as (re)searcher, examining the sources being used to
persuade, aware of the necessity yet limitations of ethnographic
research. Understanding the ubiquitous nature of metaphor ena-
bles students to resist the narrowing colonization of metaphor, and
through understanding of entailment, presupposition, and implica-
ture, yields potential for overcoming such barriers. Semiotic analysis
encourages the scrutiny of harmful metaphor, blended metaphors,
and schema manipulation as in the portrayal of chemical giants like
Monsanto as savior despite suicides and deaths of farmers in devel-
oping world contexts (Shiva, 2014). Semiotics distinguishes iconic
signs from indexical reference and symbolic interpretation, immedi-
ate from dynamic objects and interpretants.
Thus, students see themselves as “texts” in “contexts”, recontex-
tualizing third way “critique”; as products, actively engaged in or
passively subject to processes, with varying power to determine the
purposes which they serve. This means they are constantly aware of
what processes are at work, whose purposes are being served, and
their response-ability. As sacred “texts”, raised Lazarus-fashion to life
and re-“levance” (French lever = to rise), Bakhtin’s hermeneutics val-
ues internal dialogue, personal evaluation, reasoning and, above all,
the evidence for evolving individual interpretations. French anthro-
pologist Dan Sperber and pragmatic linguist Dierdre Wilson (1986)
reduce Paul Grice’s maxims of Quality, Quantity, Manner, and
Relevance to just Relevance. For instance, Corpus linguistics, reliant
on technology, a quantitative method at the more objective end of the
spectrum of sociological fact-checking, encourages the more scientifi-
cally inclined students to undertake mixed methods research.
Without analytical frameworks, teachers and teacher educators
reliant on implicit agendas, shared ideological convictions and sin-
cere commitment still lack critical transformational purchase. In an
age plagued by mental disorder Alzheimer’s, commemoration and
celebrity or what one might term “celiberation”, a genuine search for
meaning and value beneath superficial trends and passing fashions
will satisfy humanity’s yearnings the way a plant’s leaves search for
sunlight while strengthening re(search) roots which seek water.
BOSIO: Your critical global semiotics (Ellis, 2019) framework aims at
“moving the agenda purposefully beyond educational walls from
curriculum and campus to community and glo/cal communication”.
Can you describe how you would design a curriculum for GCE that
would engage students with the glo/cal community? Why is “glo/
cal” an important element in your framework?
ELLIS: A systemic view allows for trans- and crossdisciplinary research,
identifying the spatiotemporal, symbolic, sensorial, and material as
four major modes and codes in the vast diversity of humanity’s ways
of being, having, and doing. As students move constantly between the
individual and the collective, the personal and the public, the long- and
short-term, seeing the systems at work beneath surface developments,
they should be encouraged to report and record on events in the wider
community. Wise curriculum and pedagogy relate personal physics,
chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, and ethics to available infor-
mation. accessible knowledge in these domains, making education a
healthy interaction of educere and educare as in ancient Greece. As
family and familiar (mis)fortunes center “investigative journalism”,
project work integrates concerns related to social injustice, environ-
mental damage, conflict, media (mis)management. Motivated interest
in national and international NGOs, civil action, governance, and
Government policy means global and local merge glocally.
114 Maureen Ellis
Semioticians like Greimas offer us anthropologically sound tools
of analysis which are simultaneously generative and can keep pace
with change and development. Frameworks, such as Greimas’ semi-
otic square, his actant analysis grid, modality and multimodality
frames are capable of application across the disciplines and await
exploratory application. Semiotic frameworks can be introduced
early in education, and developed gradually through primary,
secondary, and tertiary (st)ages of study. They offer comprehen-
sive, coherent unified foundations of a transdisciplinary curricu-
lum, understanding cultural similarity and difference, whether at
the level of disciplines, cultures, geographies or professions. The
advantage of a semiotic approach would be the focus on citizens
systematically acquiring disciplinary knowledge from kindergarten
to Universe-city, sharing a critical multimodal base of fundamental
linguistic concepts, such as narrator positioning, deixis, personifica-
tion, tense, and aspect (Kirtchuk, 2008).
For Greimas (1976), the process of enunciation, expression of a
general communication predicament emerges from the deep psy-
chosociological context, relating individuals to communicative and
cultural memory. His logical model, the semiotic square, articulates
the depth semantic structure of cultural artefacts, visually represent-
ing logicosemantic relations of complex terms. “Enonce”, annuncia-
tion, is the end result of a textualization process, moving from deep,
latent noumena to manifest phenomena; from competence to perfor-
mance, from being to doing (Greimas, 1976, p. 67). His canonical
narrative process or generative trajectory traces Aristotelian logic
from i) deep semiotic virtualities, abstract values, axiology, semes,
or elementary significations of plot; through ii) intermediate semion-
arrative; to iii) surface discursive concrete and particular structure
with distinct syntactic and semantic components. Greimas’ actantial
analysis enlarges two-stage subject/object interactions of desire and
power, assisted or opposed. A third relationship of sender, object,
receiver, as the line of communication, encompasses mandate,
action, and evaluation.
Cognitive Linguistic theories of politeness, default mental net-
works, particularly Cognitive Metaphor theory, schema and schema
blending can be graduated to learner capacity. Practical tools such
as the semiotic square, actantial analysis, modality, transitivity,
and discourse representation of speech and action, currently being
developed in the enlarged, expanding field of Stylistics, together
constitute rich bases for unified global curricula. Working at this
metalinguistic level would also correct imbalances in the value
societies place on verbal, visual, audio- and performative develop-
ment. For examples of such attempts, see CGS where these tools
are used in Literature, Art, Music, and Environmental Studies.
BOSIO: You suggest that “Global Citizenship educators must refrain
from settling for amateurish practice”, what do you mean exactly?
In connection to this, what knowledge, skills, values, dispositions,
and experiences are teachers expected to nourish in order to foster
the “global citizen”?
ELLIS: I use the term “amateurish” in contrast to “mature”. It’s easy
for pupils and students who have worked well in school projects to
be disillusioned when they leave educational institutions. Indepth
research discloses the complexity beneath global issues and prepares
students to cross artificial disciplinary boundaries of current cur-
ricula. Degree inflation, overinvestment in education and “rather
tenuous and complicated links” with “productivity” (Chang, 2010:
189) require serious redefinition or engender sore disappointment.
Polite questions to guest speakers in educational contexts reveal
gaps between political correctness, micropolicy and macropolitics.
By “amateur practice”, I mean a warm, loving desire to improve the
world which denies, dismisses, or overrides the powerful knowledge
of one’s own discipline. One’s discipline and developing disciplinary
expertise must serve constantly as the lens through which greater
efficacy is achieved, turning theory into praxis. The educator of
global citizens must enable students to use their disciplinary dispo-
sitions, knowledge, skills, values, and experiences in transdiscipli-
nary collaboration. They must scour current affairs, news, media
for content, and issues related to their discipline, enabling them to
take “response-ability”. This demands a curriculum focused on real
complex global situational learning, not relatively safe but innocu-
ous hypothetical simulations. As early as possible, students can be
involved in the research being conducted by their teachers, lecturers,
professors, sharing passions, practicing the skills of fact-checking.
Today’s technology allows for extensive collaboration, linking cam-
pus, and community with INGO agenda.
A good example of “safe”, “innocuous” curriculum is curricular
attention to personal finance even at senior school, rather than the
skills required to understand banking, commercial, and financial
practice in society, the role of insurance companies, government
policy, tax legislation, and international exchange. Recent crises,
dramatically featured in national news, reveal how inadequate
our “experts”, even educators in maths faculties, are in explaining
global disasters, let alone anticipating them, and the inevitable igno-
rance of the consumer-driven public. The fact that the fashion world
is more environmentally destructive than all shipping and airline
activity combined is a shameful indictment of society today in a
world still riven with inadequate health and education provision.
BOSIO: Ultimately, what are three themes a higher education curriculum
for GCE should include in your opinion?
116 Maureen Ellis
ELLIS: First, a close interest and understanding of politics, seeing that
all human endeavor is a matter of “power”, whether seen as innate,
man-made, or God-given, a question of how we choose to direct
and deploy our powers for a fair and just world. Early political
literacy, an informed engaged polis, is vital to vigilant democratic
monitoring of public service; everyday investigative journalists
realize there is no logical way to be apolitical or nonpolitical.
A semiotic curriculum which magnifies Word, i.e. one based on
Linguistic anthropology, takes as focus Critical Discourse analy-
sis within each discipline (medical, legal, political, social, religious,
economic). It does NOT impose another subject, another agenda,
another layer on the current curriculum. Global semioticians sys-
tematically unpick nominalizations (CP 6.452–521) – development,
intellectual property, poverty, trade remedies – opaque mystifi-
cations which conceal agency; absent spatiotemporal specificity;
inarticulate opposition; ambiguous modality; alienable posses-
sives; generalizations selectively particularized by English articles;
unmarked norms versus marked deviations; tabulated classification
(itself an instrument of “technical” control). Clines, componential
analysis, gradable antonyms, and semiotic squares dis-/uncover
alternative governance.
Secondly, respect for Word made flesh as breath, being, essence,
expression, Einstein’s energy, multimodality performed, which
spells accountability! Ability to decipher metaphor gifts humanity
with supervision, vital physical and metaphysical integrity in critical
discourse – semantic triangle or semiotic trinity of gold as authen-
ticity; frankincense as genuine communication; and myrrh which
addresses global pain. Logocentric love of language liberates meta-
phoric word-power relating token to type, source to target, figure to
ground, material to ethereal, or mother care to father’s “busyness”.
Understanding multimodality means reading the world beyond the
word, seeing verbal, visual, performative metaphor, metaphysics,
metareality at work. Literal rather than liberal reading indicates
autism rather than authorship, authority, authenticity. Treated lit-
erally, words merely represent empty signs, text devoid of context,
prison rather than prism.
Time was when metaphysics was considered the queen of all the
sciences, tying evidence, argument and justification whether through
induction, deduction or abduction (Toulmin, 1969). Ancient,
revered texts reveal successive renamings, fresh “baptisms” – meta-
phoric messages in time’s shifting sands, dirt, in-dust-ry – yet today
there are those manipulated to take literally 2,000-year-old mes-
sages, spatiotemporally modified “passion of the cross”, a-“cross”
several foreign “languages”. Citizens “catching the bus” or “tak-
ing the last train home”, enthusiastically agreeing “I see what you
mean”, should not be left to “figure” out this metaphoric power.
Linguistic anthropologists, familiar with source ~ target, vehicle ~
tenor, figure ~ ground, recognizing multi- ~ trans-disciplinary cul-
tural entextualization, actively trans-languaging, must enlighten
global citizens. Suffused in metaphor, vital to expression, absorp-
tion, and abstract thought, “consumers” need to “drive” carefully,
motor nerves as vital to mental health as material “vehicles”.
GCE seeks as crucial the direction and purposes which drive the
present system and ensures a deeper challenge; we need to move
from the what and how to the why of education! “Critical” means
a significant shift in assessment criteria, and funding, not only at
the level of individual student work, but also in our assessment of
institutions, and consequently funding, and explicit defining of what
we value as impact. Multimodal intelligence challenges the domi-
nance of the written word. Prior learning, social work, performa-
tive arts, innovative ICT, vlogging or podcasts, critique of policy,
curriculum or practice, all constitute technologies for community
outreach. Formative and summative self- and peer-evaluation, iport-
folios, personal networks, collaborative teamwork, and public exhi-
bition identify frequency, occasional, topical, peripheral, integrated,
or embedded approaches. Evolving spatiotemporal criteria include
spontaneity, online availability, interactivity, potential for global
dissemination, transfer value, and transactional ‘use’ rather than
‘usage’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007).
Global, transdisciplinary semiotics leads us to note how mean-
ing itself emerges, evolves, is multimodally managed, and involves
powerful maneuvering, whether by advertising, commerce, finance,
or powerful sociopolitics. Semiotics encourages citizens to identify
shareholders from stakeholders, to monitor controlling factors, to
discern shifts in meaning, which meanings are being advantaged,
to whose benefit, and to note which voices are being ignored, sup-
pressed, repressed, silenced. It invites us to challenge hegemony,
“virgin assumptions”, presuppositions, unquestioned beliefs, taken-
for-granted value systems, schema and scheming! What’s more,
Semiotics offers analytical frameworks and practical tools which
enable us to separate Psychology from Science and Sociolinguistics,
yet see them working together in human development. In Hallidayan
terms, this linkage of the Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual mac-
rofunctions of language offer a holistic framework for understand-
ing human communication, (w)hole community, holy communion.
Thirdly, and related to this multimodality, an understanding of
Soul as Spirit of Unconditional Loving, an appreciation that the
greatest minds of our time, from Teilhard de Chardin, Einstein and
Maxwell to Peirce, Bakhtin, and Jung have all pointed to spiritual
power, the collective consciousness, the zeit geist. Psychotherapist
118 Maureen Ellis
Jung, linguistic philosopher Bakhtin, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss
(1972, p. 21) demonstrate that “If, as we believe to be the case,
the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing form
upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for
all minds – ancient and modern, primitive and civilized (as the
study of the symbolic function, expressed in language, so strikingly
indicates) – it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious
structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to
obtain a principle of interpretation valid for other institutions and
other customs, provided, of course, that the analysis is carried far
enough”. Identifying salient properties of the mythical skate that
captured the South Wind, Lévi -Strauss (1978, p. 7) finds, “So, there
is really not a kind of divorce between mythology and science. …
we are witnessing more and more that science is becoming able to
explain not only its own validity but also what was to some extent
valid in mythological thinking”. As commercial interests continue
to exploit natural and epistemic Indigenous treasure, Universe-cities
which claim to harvest universal truths, valuing the integrity of
knowledge, promise respect in contrast to today’s biopiracy.
Teilhard wrote of body and blood “internetted” as the Mass
(scientific? religious? social?) on the World; Einstein writing to his
daughter explained how Energy in his formula (baby food?) stands in
lieu of the ultimate power of Love which the world was not ready to
acknowledge, Maxwell’s used a “demon”, a thought experiment
derived from sociology to demonstrate thermodynamics and electro-
magnetism. Peirce spoke of Agapeistic Evolution (CP, v.6. para 302),
Bakhtin of the internally persuasive dialogue and, together with
Jung’s collective consciousness, confirmed E.O. Wilson’s (1998)
Consilience, the integrating of the Sciences in relation to individual
“con-science”. More recently we have Rom Harre’s (2002) Positioning
theory which should help us distinguish positioning from posturing,
and Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist road to Eudaimonia. Peircean prag-
maticist answers to today’s ills would empower global citizens and,
like the best truths, can be adapted for delivery to any (st)age in life,
enabling citizens to name (baptize) and seek verification, evidence,
confirmation, or otherwise of their own experiences of Go(o)dness.
BOSIO: In closing, Maureen, you have a significant experience in teach-
ing at university level in the UK. Why is or is not GCE necessary
in the modern university, particularly in the UK? How can GCE
be made suitable for or attractive to students studying in British
universities?
ELLIS: I believe GCE is sacred in its humanist vision, but currently intel-
lectually impoverished in its capacity to provide essential philosoph-
ical and theoretical justification. As long as these are absent, it will
remain marginal, peripheral, uncoordinated, low in prestige, with
limited appeal, and predominantly a school-based project which
does not threaten the status quo. GCE rests on the principle of each
human being as a unit of moral worth, capable of active participation
in reflective, deliberative democracies working toward global peace
and harmony. Capacity-building would mean educators themselves
need a deeper philosophical and theoretically sound base if they are
to appeal across geography, cultures, professions, disciplines, modes
and codes; that students are introduced early to motivating research
projects which lecturers and faculty advertize, as “secret”, “sacred”
academic, and professional truths generously shared with our disci-
ples. This entails an honest acknowledgement that “neutrality” can
mean “neutered”, that passion and compassion demand expression
and justification, that bias can only be countered by practical ana-
lytical tools energetically exercised.
It is important that research bodies like the ESRC only allocate
funds to transdisciplinary problem-solving; that sufficient time is
allowed for a thorough search prior to the funding stage, so that
smaller projects are coherently related to larger and more compre-
hensive plans, avoiding duplication, fragmentation, and frenetic,
futile research which devalues the “currency”; that international
NGOs are involved in identifying needs and that global academic
networks are strengthened.
Research will electrify if it is seen to be directed to current
affairs, real issues, complex yet urgent conflicts and contradic-
tions. Protests like Extinction Rebellion are signs of youth politics,
engagement which can be channeled into fueling arguments, edu-
cating media, supporting research, pressuring governments, chal-
lenging private enterprise. Universities need to collaborate with
fire-fighting International NGOs identifying and locating criti-
cal research, and universities must be obliged to collaborate with
NGOs according to their specialisms. Funding must be closely tied
to long-term plans and accountable for impact. Good examples are
available.
8.4 Conclusion
This chapter has sought to highlight the essential need for theory in
GCE; the importance of passion as power – in Greimasian terms, vir-
tual potential actualized, then nurtured, realized, directed so as to
unify product, process, and purpose; the vital role of disciplines as root
and route to political efficacy; critical focus on political economy and
cultural politics; and collaboration with international NGOs toward
transformational goals. Describing Semiotic study as a comprehensive,
coherent global approach to understanding cultural similarity and dif-
ference, across spatiotemporal borders, it has pointed to the advantage
120 Maureen Ellis
of methodology and methods which can be systematically addressed
across disciplines from kindergarten to Universe-city.
Systemic Functional Semiotics, adopting fundamental trans-lingual
concepts such as personification, tense, aspect and deixis can cross-
linguistic barriers. Cognitive Linguistic theories of politeness, schema,
and schema blending, default mental networks, particularly Cognitive
Metaphor theory, and features of modality, transitivity, discourse rep-
resentation of speech and action are supported by practical tools, such
as the semiotic square, actantial analysis. Anthropological semiotic
frameworks, currently being developed in the inclusive field of Stylistics,
enable analysis across diverse global modes, media and modality.
Truly vocational education crystallizes Vedic harmony, Sanskrit Rta,
Greek Arête or excellence. Critical global education as Art. Evolving
articles of faith, artists evidence emergent ecological post-cosmopol-
itanism, sustaining personal, professional, and political, individual
and institutional integrity. Uniting locution, illocution and perlocution
(Austin, 1975), “quaking” with awe, wonder and epistemic humility,
constructing allegiances, and alliances, GCE asks each Friend to explore
and enunciate “that of Go(o)d in YOU”. Extended arms passionately
linking disciples to discipline in dharmic performance, acknowledging
fresh doorways, whirling dervishes approach Mysterium Tremendum/
Mysterium Fascinans, Lord of the Dance.
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Ogden–Ramsey, and Pears–McGuinness English translations).
9 Intersections of Neoliberalism,
Internationalization, and Global
Miri Yemini
9.1 Introduction
This chapter aims to highlight several important links between the con-
cepts of internationalization, GCE, and neoliberalism in the context of
higher education. I draw here on my previous research on each of these
three topics and the intersections between them to offer some practical
implications for scholars working and teaching in this area. First, I will
set the scene for the discussion by briefly defining each of the concepts,
then I will explore the possible links between each of them and the oth-
ers, and list the possible implications of these connections for higher
education system, and, finally, I will draw on several examples from
Israel to suggest future directions for research and teaching.
Internationalization is a widely debated and controversial concept,
with prominent presence in strategies, policies, and declarations in the
field of higher education, both within the institutions and at higher lev-
els of governance at local, national, and global levels. While most of
the scholarship in the field is using Jane Knight’s definition1 (Knight,
2004), which is rather narrow and pragmatically oriented, some of the
critical scholarship problematizes the concerted direction of the process,
and its decontextualized assertion, while offering spatial and humanistic
definitions of the term (Larsen, 2016; Yemini, 2015). While internation-
alization is generally described and operationalized as a phenomenon at
institutional or national levels which aimed to get the institutions the
global outreach, GCE is depicted more as a process with implications for
individual learners. I would argue that global citizenship can be concep-
tualized as an outcome of internationalization, or, in other words, GCE
is the road to be taken by the learner to access a certain state of mind
that can imply globally oriented disposition (acknowledgeable, proac-
tive, and reflective).
Similarly, to the internationalization discourse, the definition and the
contents of GCE are highly contested. Various typologies were developed
(some examples: Andreotti, 2011; Oxley & Morris, 2013; Veugelers, 2011)
124 Miri Yemini
to exactitude the skills, contents, and activities expected from GCE, but
no widespread agreement was achieved and scholarship in the area pro-
vides a rather dispersed understanding of the concept. GCE is sometimes
perceived as an extension to national citizenship (Pashby, 2011), and a
normalized notion of good-doing of the Global North for Global South
(Andreotti, 2011). Most of the critiques of these two terms (internation-
alization and GCE) are embedded in the notion of the third concept
that is in the focus of this chapter. Neoliberalism complies a general and
all-encompassing term, which, broadly speaking, describes the belief in
power relations that are sustained and developed through the unstruc-
tured and undirected self-balancing function of the market, where
demand and supply of services, resources, and knowledge are managed
according to the market forces. In general, neoliberalism can be referred
to as a mode of governance, which prioritizes minimum state’s regula-
tion and funding, allowing individuals to fulfil their wishes and wants
based on the economic models of efficiency and individualism (Gerrard,
Hursh, Lubienski, Rowe, & Skourdoumbis, 2019).
In education, neoliberal approach claimed to be associated with
privatization, commercialization, and commodification of education
(Yemini & Gordon, 2017), which usually lead to less equal systems,
where the universal right for education is harmed and even emptied
from its original meaning. Internationalization and GCE are thus being
critiqued for acting mainly according to the financial rationales, not
being sensitive to less vulnerable parts of the local and global societies,
and for preserving and reinforcing the global hegemonic power rela-
tions between the west and the rest, both globally and within the nation
states (Pashby, 2011).
Thus, within discussions of internationalization and GCE and their
effects on society, much of the scholarship in the past decade has
addressed its potential for widening social and economic gaps both on a
global level and within countries and regions (Myers, 2016). Indeed, the
research shows that internationalization (and GCE) can deepen social
inequality through its impact on wages and opportunities for mobility
(Bamberger, Morris, & Yemini, 2019).
One way in which these ideas could potentially be coupled with
neoliberal notions and expand social inequality within nation states
is through the changes in the modern workplace and the expansion of
the global labor market acting within the notion of neoliberalism. The
modern, globalized workplace requires certain competencies and skills
that only some institutions provide their students, either since these
institutions possess more appropriate awareness and resources or due
to the perceptions of educators that GCE is suitable for only certain
kinds of students.
These developments have led to a growing trend of policies and curric-
ula seeking to advance internationalization of education so as to educate
Intersections of Neoliberalism 125
in compliance with GCE (which might be treated as an outcome of inter-
nationalization at the individual level). Education for Global Citizenship
has emerged both in the literature and in practice under the assumption
that education systems should be preparing students to be able to com-
pete in the global workforce. However, this acceptance of the need to
internationalize is not uniform within nations or even within schools and
higher education institutions; differences in this regard could lead to fur-
ther widening the gaps between students from different backgrounds in
their ability to compete in this globalized, highly individualized society.
Moreover, the skills-oriented approach of GCE is potentially harmful
to the essence of GCE, which ideally would suggest moral dispositions
and proactive desire to change the hegemonic power relations at various
levels and not only to prepare graduates who would compete over the
chance to participate in the existing hierarchies.
Internationalization – or in other words, purposeful attempts to link
with the broader world mainly through connections with other countries,
languages, cultures, religions, and traditions – has become a norm in higher
education institutions. Institutions of higher education are pressured by the
neoliberal governance (at institutional and national levels) to prepare glo-
balized graduates who are ready to engage with the globalized workplaces.
In recent decades, institutions, and countries engage in internationalization
due to financial and political reasons on top of academic and social ones.
Moreover, the increasing levels of migration and certain counter-responses
to globalization also create impetus for change; Universities (and schools to
an increasing extent) thus must find a way to serve a heterogenous popula-
tion while also seeking to develop empathy and mutual understanding as a
sense of global citizenship or cosmopolitanism.
Nowadays, the outcomes of internationalization at the individual level
are mainly understood and practiced as an additional marker of privi-
lege or as part of the broader transformations of education systems in
light of the hegemonic neoliberal mindset that includes privatization,
commodification, and marketization of education. Recent attempts by
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
to measure the outcomes of internationalization in the form of global
competencies or similar terms (e.g. global citizenship, cosmopolitanism)
may cause further curricular changes and system-level adjustments to
conform to demands for internationalization, thus causing more ine-
quality (Auld & Morris, 2019).
In the discussion below, and based on my recent study of GCE in
Israel (Goren & Yemini, 2016, 2017a; 2017b, 2018; Yemini, Tibbitts,
& Goren, 2019), I would argue that while we must acknowledge the
neoliberal spirit as a dominating force in Higher Education (HE), there
are certain pedagogical and curricular steps that we as scholars and edu-
cators can take to ensure that GCE is given a true chance to be delivered
as a transformative process, equally important for students and scholars.
126 Miri Yemini
9.2 Dialogue with Miri Yemini
EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? How has your
academic and life’s “journey” shaped the understanding of GCE?
MIRI YEMINI: This is a great question to start with. I guess my interest in
GCE emerged through two parallel trajectories. First, it is my personal
experience of exclusion that accompanies me from my childhood as
the only Jewish girl in the class in a small provincial town in Ukraine,
where experiences of antisemitism were common both from teachers
and from fellow pupils. This experience was replicated in a way, when
I was bullied for being Russian (as opposed to Jewish Israeli), in the
Israeli classroom, again the only Russian origin student in a class full
of Israeli kids, in the nineties, when my family escaped from the col-
lapsing SSSR and found what it was seen to be a safe place in Israel.
I guess this feeling is still prominent in times when I am struggling
with English in my academic writing or trying to fit into the new envi-
ronment while living in London and now in Berlin. This sense of per-
manent and prominent exclusion, which is experienced by so many
people around the world, ignited my thought of a way to ease such
experiences by developing a framework that will allow unconditional
affiliation and I would argue that GCE might play this role in certain
reality. Second, as an educator and a person who frequently travels
internationally, not necessarily within the western world, I came to
be aware of various meanings of agencies, expressed and experienced
by young people, agencies of a potentially transformative nature that
can change one’s own immediate environment but also foster wider
transformations at global levels. I believe GCE can act as a facilitator
for such agentic actions and thus make the change leading to more
equal and just society possible. GCE for me means continuous self-
reflection, knowledge of the past and present anchored through vari-
ous narratives and contexts and proactiveness, enabling one’s agency.
BOSIO: The notion of global competence emerges in your description of
GCE in ever-increasing globalized societies. What is global compe-
tence and how do you foster global competence in your students in
the classes that you teach currently and taught in the past?
YEMINI: Global competence is a term that used by OECD, addressing
the “the capacity to examine local, global, and intercultural issues,
to understand and appreciate the perspectives and worldviews of
others, to engage in open, appropriate, and effective interactions
with people from different cultures, and to act for collective well-
being and sustainable development” (OECD, 2018). I would argue
that global competence might encompass the practical skills that
are related to GCE, but it should be used with great caution, since
these proposed skills may be culturally biased and contextually
complex. In my graduate module taught at Tel Aviv University and
called “Global dimensions in education”, I aim to engage with stu-
dents in a way that will provide them an adequate toolbox enriched
with deep theoretical understanding of the field, supplemented with
insightful examples and with capabilities to understand various sit-
uations and critically reflect on that understanding. For example,
some of the sessions in my class are designed and led by students
themselves and the students are required to explain and provide an
actual experience of various situations that these future education
leaders might encounter in their classrooms.
BOSIO: Do you see links between how GCE is being taught in schools
and in higher education?
YEMINI: I will argue for a rather optimistic view to the possible future of
internationalization and its outcome (e.g. GCE) using the example
of compulsory education. Perhaps, this can constitute a first attempt
to import several insights developed in this field in the school sec-
tor, to higher education, while, till now, most of the imports have
been processed in the opposite direction (from higher education to
schools).
I argue that the trickling down of internationalization into local
schools might actually offer some practical means to tackle inequal-
ity. Moreover, I suggest that in addition to the mounting critiques
of the structural injustice that might be apparent when schools
engage in internationalization, some attention should be devoted
to the school agency (i.e. that of teacher-heads, teachers, parents,
community members, and students) that might be enacted explic-
itly or implicitly, thus allowing some room for outcomes other than
those often expected. Therefore, research into such agentic practices
and telling the story of resilience within internationalized schooling
might forge a path toward a more nuanced understanding and prac-
tice of internationalization in various contexts.
Correspondingly, I would like to point out some contradictions in
the common assumptions and starting points of this field of research.
I argue that in practice, internationalization appears more commonly
than usually acknowledged in schools and communities serving com-
munities of lower socioeconomic status, due to the higher cultural,
ethnic, and political heterogeneity of the population in these locali-
ties. At such schools, pupils more often encounter “the other” than in
more privileged and sometimes more isolated settings. If internation-
alization is about interactions with “the other,” then such encounters
most likely happen spontaneously in less privileged school settings.
I suggest that efforts to better understand and conceptualize these
processes of “internationalization from below” might bring into the
field the much-needed fresh theoretical base and, consequently, poli-
cies informed by the need for more equal grounds.
128 Miri Yemini
Moreover, it seems that measures of surging nationalism (e.g.
Fundamental British Values in the UK, the new citizenship cur-
riculum in Israel) are coupled with the even more urgent desire of
countries to lead internationally, which, in turn, contributes to the
curriculum globally oriented contents. Future research may address
these two trends less as contradictory or sovereign, but rather as inter-
woven and even synergic, as governments pursue both of these goals.
This conceptualization adds more complexities to the field of interna-
tionalization research (e.g. regarding internationalization at Russian
schools, see Pevzner, Rakhkochkine, Shirin, & Shaydorova, 2019).
The internationalization discourse usually involves market-based
notions stemming from the higher education industry, including
university rankings, students’ levels of mobility, and the race for
dominance within the field. Internationalization in higher education
seems to be driven by economic considerations, alongside several
local interpretations on the role of the state (as in Israel, Cuba, or
China; see Bamberger et al., 2019). If schools are imitating universi-
ties and exclusive elite international schools when aiming to interna-
tionalize, then accordingly the latter may look for other positional
advantages to differentiate them, perhaps becoming more nationally
oriented. Indeed, Rachel Brooks and Waters (2015) documented
such a development at elite British schools, which advertise their
facilities to international pupils by stressing the local English space
they offer. In another study, we showed that globally mobile profes-
sionals succeed in cultivation strategies through parenting oriented
to certain forms of nationalism (Maxwell & Yemini, 2019).
Having said that, we do see the sincere attempts of some schools,
educational leaders, teachers, and parents to address this new land-
scape with agency, challenging the existing schemes of internationali-
zation. For example, a school serving mainly refugee families in Israel
developed pedagogies of care to address the needs and life circum-
stances of these children, leading to some real successes (Dvir, Aloni,
& Harari, 2015). GCE can take postcolonial and critical means,
despite the urging machinery of neoliberalism. As such processes are
taking place in schools, we might anticipate seeing, documenting, and
investigating similar processes in the higher education system.
BOSIO: Can GCE represent an educational approach that positively
addresses issues related to refugee families, for example, in Israel?
YEMINI: Migration is no longer an exceptional condition but rather
a reality in many classrooms around the world. Forced migra-
tion, brought hundreds of thousands of young people, potentially
inspired to attend higher education institutions in reception coun-
tries and programmes for successful integration in higher education
have been developed by European Commission, individual EU coun-
tries like Germany and in other regions as well (Turkey, Canada).
The experience of refuge-seeking individuals, families, and commu-
nities is affecting every sphere of life, including that of education.
Successful integration is challenging and within the efforts made
by institutions, I argue that GCE might serve as a useful tool for
the incoming students and for the local students as well. The aim
to educate toward common (global) identity, which is fully aware of
and taking the responsibility for and acting proactively to tackle the
reasons behind the forced migration (climate changes, colonial past,
current wars) may potentially positively contribute to the absorption
process. In Israel, most of the attempts have been made at school level,
with some successful examples for integration (see Dvir, Aloni, &
Harari, 2015). Such experience can potentially be transferred to HE.
I argue that GCE can be used not only as a means for better
assimilation, but also as a way for local students to benefit from
knowledge and experiences brought up by the students with refugee
backgrounds. GCE potentially can facilitate effective two-way com-
munication, while decreasing the differences between individuals
and groups.
BOSIO: Miri, you have significant experience in teaching global citizen-
ship-related subjects and researching on the topic of GCE at the
university level in Israel and beyond. Why is or is not GCE necessary
in the modern university, particularly in Israel?
YEMINI: It seems that universities in Israel and all over the world are work-
ing in an increasingly competitive environment, heavily influenced by
continuous financial cuts and the pressures to perform well on inter-
national rankings. While the research-oriented traditional faculty is
pressured to mainly perform well on research-related measures, most
of the teaching in higher education is left to adjunct faculty, who
usually work in precarious conditions, on several jobs, without any
prospective for secure and fair employment contracts. These adjunct
faculty in practice are mainly responsible for teaching toward GCE
and in many programmes, the conditions are just impossible to
perform this task. I believe that universities cannot wash off their
responsibilities for developing society in a broader sense and thus
GCE should indeed be thoroughly incorporated into the curricula,
all over the campus. In addition, appropriate conditions should be
assured to the teaching staff, so that proactivity, independent think-
ing, commitment to long processes instead of short-term results, etc.,
to ensure that GCE is applied in the best possible way. Then GCE
would become one of the tools that make our society better.
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly in Israeli
universities?
YEMINI: The vagueness of the term contributes to the array of mixed
attitudes toward GCE in HE. Mainly the dissonance exists between
130 Miri Yemini
the functionalist and the ideological approaches, where functionalist
approaches are focused on the skills to cope in a globalized work-
place, while ideological approaches focus on a more comprehensive
worldview, including education for proactiveness. I reckon that in
Israel, the functionalist approach is dominant, especially in first-tier
research-intensive universities. Sometimes ideological approaches can
be witnessed in second-tier institutions, where the demands for aca-
demic excellence are buffered by the social missions of the institutions
and where students many times are nontraditional (first-generation,
immigrants, geographical periphery, adult students) (Yemini, 2017).
BOSIO: How can education for global citizenship be made suitable
for or attractive to students studying in Israeli universities? What
knowledge, skills, values, dispositions and experiences are graduates
expected to acquire in order to become global citizens?
YEMINI: GCE can bring aboard some real benefits to the Israeli stu-
dents. Countries engaged in intractable conflict may be especially
concerned about the possible perils of global citizenship, and they
may forego GCE for fear that it may threaten their sovereignty. As
a country located in the midst of intractable conflict, GCE can, in
fact, function as a bridge toward the “other” situated in a similar
conflict and, thus, prompt peace-oriented approaches, especially
amongst students who will implement and further disseminate these
approaches in their future careers.
BOSIO: You are suggesting that “the modern, globalized workplace
requires certain competencies and skills that only some educational
institutions provide their students”. What do you mean by “only
some educational institutions”? Is GCE in the modern university,
particularly in Israeli universities, more about knowledge, skills, val-
ues, dispositions, or some combination of all four in your opinion?
YEMINI: I think that the expansion of higher education, which brought
a much more diverse student body to the academia, placed the uni-
versities in a problematic position, where they need to cope with stu-
dents that are not sharing anymore the tacit knowledge of the basics
of academia, which was obvious for the student cohort thirty years
ago. With the rise in the demand for higher education, second-tier
institutions experienced significant development, and the older and
more established institutions had to struggle with financial cuts
and increasing all against all competition, over students, staff, and
resources. Such transformation of the system, and in parallel, the
changes in students’ composition, forced the higher education insti-
tutions into struggles over their identities and their visions of their
prospective students.
Furthermore, institutions that are mainly serving first-generation
students, located away from the main cities might decide to focus
on more practical issues, especially related to academic outcomes,
to testing regimes in professions where national exams are required
(law, teaching, etc.). In such cases, GCE might be labelled as irrele-
vant, abstract and nonuseful for such students, when I would reckon
that the opposite is true. This is especially the case for heterogenous
classrooms both in schools and higher education. There students
meet “the other” and engage with each other on a daily basis, thus
allowing a great opportunity for change to happen.
YEMINI: I think we should stay away from the obsessive need of meas-
uring and ranking everything that became so common in the field of
education in recent decades. GCE is a process that aims to interfere
with the students’ disposition and their future behaviors. I would
base most of the assessment on the self-reporting and self-reflecting
practices when the pedagogical approach is based on students’ pro-
activeness and continuous processes of learning incorporated and
implemented through the whole programme.
YEMINI: To choose three themes is not an easy task, but I would suggest
that these would be (1) in terms of curricula – at least one language
class on top of English should be taught in each programme, issues
related to environment-related education should be incorporated
in each programme and issues related to hierarchies of power and
knowledge should be addressed; (2) in terms of pedagogy – I believe
that GCE can be effective if proactive, students’-led initiatives would
be incorporated in the curricula, followed by strong staff commit-
ment to students’ support; (3) finally, in terms of the role of GCE in
HE teaching, I believe that to be meaningful, it must be supported
by the institutions’ missions and visions.
9.3 Conclusion
To conclude, in this chapter, I tried to highlight the connections between
three themes that are dominating the HE discourses in recent years.
While neoliberalism, internationalization, and GCE are distinct and
quite different concepts, their implementation, and implications in higher
education is interwoven and blended. Through the introduction and the
discussion above, I argue that while internationalization and GCE have
been accused and sometimes used within the neoliberal point of view,
the educators may develop agency to interact with these processes, by
creating a sound alternative for their learners. Such an alternative has
to be developed jointly by the faculty and students, in a fully knowl-
edgeable system, where theoretical underpinning of GCE is anchored in
the contemporary discourse over the means and implications of GCE.
132 Miri Yemini
In an open and continuous process, where all the participating actors are
actively involved, the higher education system can offer a real transfor-
mation. GCE can be part of this process which will develop graduates
who will fight for more equality and just society locally and globally. In
addition, I would argue that students should be treated as full partners
in this process, when questions about subjectivity and action are posited.
Writing as a scholar teaching in a conflict-ridden country (Israel), I must
be critical about my own assumptions and standpoints. It happens often
when teaching about internationalization in mixed classes with Jewish
and Muslim students, who represent competing narratives regarding cit-
izenship and its possible global extensions.
Note
1 The process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimen-
sion into the purpose, functions, or delivery of postsecondary education
(Knight, 2004:11).
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Part III
Flourishing, Awareness,
Responsibility,
Participation, and
Humanism as the
Underpinning for Global
10 Flourishing and Global
William Gaudelli
10.1 Introduction
Globalization, or the compression of time and space in many aspects
of daily life, has contributed to any number of existing problems, from
exacerbating global warming to increasing income inequality to the pro-
liferation of weapons technology to increasing insecurity of being online,
to name just a few. Globalization has also created distinctive advances,
including the ability to move and communicate more easily, the intersec-
tions of discourse and engagement in ways that were previously limited
along with the ability to understand how actions in one part of the world
have consequences in myriad elsewheres. There is no easy way to broadly
reconcile the balance sheet of what globalization has wrought, for ill and
for good, and this calculus is certainly beyond any simple description.
But a plus/minus analysis of globalization does suggest an underlying
belief that society can and should improve, both for individuals and in
aggregate. This may seem to be a matter-of-fact statement about the
world today, though in historical contrast, it is noteworthy. In feudal
systems, there was not a shared sense that social conditions could or
ought to improve; rather, one’s station in life – say as a lord, peasant,
or knight – was just that. The idea that an individual or group could
improve that position was not part of feudal discourse. Life was some-
thing to be endured rather than improved, which explains the omnipres-
ence of churches and ecclesiastical artwork, since life after death offered
the only hope of betterment, assuming one’s life was pious and obedient.
Modernity, an epoch closely associated with the 20th and 21st cen-
turies, dramatically altered these outlooks, giving preference to novelty
over tradition and the present/future over the past. Today, the idea that an
individual can improve their situation and promote development among
others is widely, if not universally, shared as a norm. Most would not find
the claim that “more people can and ought to live a fulfilling and mean-
ingful life” controversial; indeed, most view it as affirming something
inherently human. Thomas Pogge, taking up this broad criterion of social
life, arguing for the utility of human flourishing in development and
138 William Gaudelli
justice on a global scale (Pogge, 2012). Human flourishing has accrued
meaning over the last seven decades and arguably since the ancients as
its antecedent, eudaimonia, was theorized by Aristotle. When a person
flourishes, s/he is fully realizing her/his talents and capacities in ways
that are beneficial to themselves and to society.
Flourishing is a challenging criterion by which to judge development
and societies, especially in the context of globalization. Flourishing is
necessarily broad so as not to be readily translatable into benchmarks
and standards for how people and societies live and develop. Pogge
(2012) argues that the criterion of human flourishing has meaning for
ourselves, for the judgment of others, as well as for the social institutions
that operate socially. In the case of our own lives and the lives of those
around us, he points to four dimensions of flourishing, including expe-
rience, success, character, and achievements as suggestive, though not
comprehensive, for what it entails.
Experience refers to activities that are “enjoyable, intense, interesting,
rich, and diverse,” offering a thin interpretive layer upon which myriad
activities can occur, from snow-boarding to book reading to academic
conference-going (p. 35). The experience dimension demonstrates the
inherently perspectival nature of flourishing, such that a person might
find fulfilment in snowboarding while another would view this activity
as torturous, so no ready standard of “doing that” would ever be suffi-
cient. Too, since desirable experiences are as varied as the people having
them, agency and autonomy undergird the concept or the choice-making
that inherits within what divergently constitute fulfilling experiences.
Success has strong social norms associated with it, such as having
financial wellbeing and living well in a community of others. These
attributes are highly dependent on context since one person’s economic
fulfilment might be viewed by another as barely tenable. Pogge (2012)
addresses this incongruous situation in arguing that all people should
have access to a baseline of economic wellbeing, or what he refers to as a
“minimally adequate share” of food, drink, clothing, shelter, and basic
health care along with education, freedom of movement, and access to
economic participation (p. 44, 55). Here again, the concept of flourish-
ing represents a thin baseline that equips all people with the ability to
grow and develop, rather than a prescriptive one that exceeds minimum
standards. Success, like the dimension of experience, has both internal
and external qualities. A person may be viewed as a success by others
but have an inner experience that is one of desperation and want, such
that external markers of success alone cannot constitute what it means
to flourish.
Character, according to Pogge (2012), is constituted by “a person hav-
ing admirable aims and ambitions, virtuous maxims and dispositions,
noble feelings and emotions” (p. 35). These characteristics are closely
associated with intentions, or from what basis one acts in the world
Flourishing and Global Citizenship 139
and toward what ends. Care for others, concern about the community,
acting for development of social good, all of these illustrate flourishing
in the domain of character. This aspect of flourishing underscores the
importance of ethics within people and in society, such that a condition
of our flourishing is bound up by the interdependency of other people’s
flourishing.
Achievements are the outcomes associated with having strong char-
acter, or what one is recognized for as ethical and important contribu-
tions to one’s society, to the world. Here again Pogge (2012) contends
that character and achievement cannot be separated from each other,
since one can achieve for doing good in the world, but having done so
with treachery and larceny in one’s heart rather than with “virtuous
maxims”. Flourishing requires, then, goodness of intentions as well as
outcomes.
Each of these dimensions—experiences, success, character and
achievement— is sufficiently contextual, perspectival and ambiguous
as to create uncertainty that shades the whole of human flourishing.
Pogge (2012) acknowledges this problem and points to the importance
of autonomy as a guide to balancing the relative importance of these
four dimensions. “To accept the autonomy of another, however, means
to accept her measure of human flourishing” (p. 36; italics in original).
Thus, from the perspective of any one individual, it is a respect for auton-
omy that generates a sense of purpose of one’s own making. Temporally,
then, flourishing would also need to be examined in light of prospective
and retrospective domains. The prospective, or what should be front-
loaded to support flourishing among youth, would be oriented by expe-
riences and character since these are generative and ethical dimensions
that help one to act meaningfully and virtuously in the world. The retro-
spective, or what can be used to evaluate one’s life and impact at a later
age, would fall more to the realm of success and achievement, as it would
be unrealistic to hold these up for assessing the life of a young person.
Flourishing, as described above, focuses mainly on our own lives
and those of people around us, yet it also has bearing on social insti-
tutions and policies. Pogge (2012) examines the social aspect as part
of his thinking about justice, or what could be simplified as equitable
treatment, or giving to each to what they are due. In the realm of social
institutions and policies, again, the aim is to articulate a thin, or mini-
mal standard, by which social institutions operate to create conditions
for flourishing, or what he calls “a measure of low specificity” (p. 56).
He raises concerns about paternalism or the belief that allowing govern-
ment or some governing entity to articulate standards, even of a minimal
type, might lapse into paternalistic overreach about how people ought
to live their lives.
Pogge (2012) defaults toward a thin conception or a modest universal
threshold of justice that allows for myriad justice systems now operating
in the world, to create alternative processes toward equitable treatment
yet still grounded in a conception of flourishing. Human rights discourse
is the closest equivalent to what Pogge (2012) offers as a conception of
justice that enacts human flourishing as its core value. In the various
traditions of human rights, from the civic and political participation
dimensions typical of Western countries, or first-order human rights,
to the social and economic rights, or second-order human rights, mov-
ing toward tertiary conceptions such as those related to ecological pres-
ervation, cultural heritage, and sustainability, all of these in aggregate
represent a thin conception of rights that all people everywhere ought
to enjoy.
Pogge (2012) shifts his attention in examining flourishing to the preva-
lence of poverty in the world since its effects do enormous harm to those
affected by poverty. The presence of severe poverty, currently identified as
those having a proportional spending power of less than 1.90 USD a day,
affects over 9% of the world’s population or just under 689 million people,
indicates that millions of people are not able to live full and satisfactory lives
that allows them to thrive (World Bank 2020). Eradicating extreme poverty,
which is Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, 2015-30, is nec-
essary to set baseline conditions of human flourishing and while progress
has been made on this benchmark since 1990, backsliding due to the
COVID-19 pandemic will be significant (World Bank, 2020). In light
of the full conception of flourishing examined above, however, even the
Herculean task of eliminating poverty would fall short since attaining a
minimum of material standards alone would be insufficient grounds for
flourishing (Zetter, 2015).
The remainder of this chapter focuses on my efforts and thinking
about practicing this conception of flourishing in GCE. Two questions
focus my thinking – What does it mean to be a flourishing person in the
world? Relatedly, how does one educate for a flourishing world?
10.2 Dialogue with William Gaudelli

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? Particularly, how
WILLIAM GAUDELLI: Education for global citizenship, if followed to its
logical extension, is coequal to education. The concept of “being
educated” inheres within it a knowledge of one’s social conditions
as a social being. And too, the idea that one is educated also pre-
sumes that one belongs to that social system, and, therefore, has
the capacity to act to address problems with others. Both of these
concepts – social belonging and engagement – sit at the core of what
it means to be educated for global citizenship, and generally, what it
means to be educated at all. Being educated in a narrow and overly
technical sense is akin to knowing just what is in front of you or
the immediate situation that confronts a person. But in the broader
social sense of education, knowing is a connected and interdepend-
ent way of being. John Dewey described the notion of interest in
this way, beyond the narrow and toward the broadly social, when
he writes about education as the “inter-esse” (inter-being, or -esse
as the Latin form of “being”) of oneself to the world (Dewey, 1913).
I came to understand this not so much from reading Dewey as much
as through my own experience as a teacher. I began teaching a high
school course called Comparative World Studies in 1990. The course
focused on contemporary global issues around four themes – cultural
diversity, human rights, geopolitics, and environmental issues. A guid-
ing precept of the course was to illuminate how seemingly distant
events and issues were linked to the lives of students. This theme was
developed consistently throughout all of the focus topics – whether it
was our study of the War in Kuwait, the Bosnian War, the HIV-AIDS
pandemic, climate change, deforestation or the tactics of torture and
extrajudicial killings by authoritarian regimes. All of these issues were
drawn back to and connected with the lives of students so they could
see the linkages that made them inter-beings. The course also included
a civic dimension in that once knowing these points of connectivity,
students were expected to act to address the issues that most resonated
with them – from letter-writing campaigns on behalf of political pris-
oners to stream cleanups to calling for legislative action to address
global warming. Looking back on that experience, it helped me solid-
ify what it means to be educated – to know one’s place in and connec-
tivity to the world and to act to address the issues encountered therein.
Human flourishing was not a concept I had encountered at that
point in my teaching, though I think it latently informed the way that
I came to understand Deweyan thinking in practice. Understanding
one’s presence in the world, how wider events and issues are shaping
our times and how we could engage on those same concerns made this
clearer. An important part of what it means to be human is to grasp the
interdependence of our lives, to be educated not in a merely technical
or functional sense, or learning for a test, credit or credential, toward
a socially grounded learning or learning for life. The former way of
thinking, one I encountered in many instances, was off-putting to me
and I eventually came to understand why that is; as it inheres, among
other qualities, a de-agented position that denies agency of the learner.
My journey toward GCE is also connected to many travel experiences,
ones in which I led students or those for my own research and scholar-
ship. These afforded myriad learnings in the moments of contrast and
similarity in diverse places. I often point to my exchange program with
a school in St. Petersburg, Russia that I organized in 1992 with a col-
league as a pinnacle event in my learning. The one-month visit in Russia
that included an extended three-week homestay with a Russian family
during a very challenging period of political and economic upheaval
was instrumental in forming my outlook of what it means to be in the
world. The most vivid aspect of this exchange program was my stay
with a Russian couple, secondary teachers in St. Petersburg. They lived
a very challenging existence in terms of material wellbeing, often lack-
ing food while experiencing hopelessness about the future. We were
approaching Easter weekend toward the end of my time there. My hosts
asked me what I missed most from home and I made a colossal error
of saying I missed citrus fruits. By the weekend, they delivered on their
promise with four oranges, though I soon learned that it took them a
day of shopping throughout the city and a month’s wages to deliver
these gifts. I felt great shame in asking and apologized profusely but I
also gained an important insight into the precariousness of economic
life and how I took for granted the material abundance I had access to
at home. I tried going to the grocery store on my return, confronted by
vast amounts of fruit and left the store in disgust.
cation institution?
GAUDELLI: Higher education has increasingly taken on the responsi-
bility, at least in the context of the US, to engage young people in
GCE. This is due in part to the relative scarcity of the discourse
in P-12 US education since curriculum there is much more focused
on US history, citizenship, and other discipline-based subject areas.
Universities have worked to fill this gap, though they have pur-
poses above and beyond simply creating globally oriented students,
namely attracting non-US students to study and inviting donors
from a wider geographic region.
The legacy of internationalizing higher education dates back to
Erasmus of Rotterdam, the 16th Century scholar who travelled
Europe and whose legacy is marked by an inter-European mobility
program founded in 1987 (Dolby and Rahman 2008). Academic
mobility, for scholars and students, turned in the 20th Century to a
geopolitical angle as states like the US, USSR, and Australia sought
to bring countries into their spheres of influence through this mech-
anism (Dolby and Rahman 2008). The contemporary scene is some-
what different in that many US universities see themselves less as
agents of the nation and more in light of their humanistic mission
on campus coupled with an aim to maintain or grow an economic
foundation. More recently, there has been a deterioration among US
universities of global engagement as an institutional priority, with a
drop from 60% of universities including it in their strategic plan in
2006 to 47% by 2017 (Fischer, 2019). The aftermath of COVID-19
will surely underscore this inward-turning trend.
Three key elements of education in the context of higher educa-
tion include educators, experiential learning, and a diverse student
body. The focus of each area is somewhat different in that academic
coursework is most likely to contribute to knowledge formation of
students whereas the presence of a diverse student body contributes
more directly to the skills and dispositions of what it means to be
a global citizen in an experiential sense. The formal curriculum,
or what is offered in courses, presents the most obvious place to
introduce a wider spectrum of knowledge and perspectives to stu-
dents. Undergraduate students in our global citizenship program at
Lehigh University, for example, take a variety of identified courses
in a wide-range of disciplines intended to broaden and deepen their
knowledge about different places, people, and events in the world.
These academic courses serve as a foundation for their learning
while also providing opportunities to extend into experiences, ide-
ally while being experiential themselves. The knowledge gained here
ideally resonates in the field experiences that become part of their
learning as well.
Experiences constitute the second key component to global citi-
zenship as students participate in a range of activities, from extended
study-abroad periods to intensive offsite fieldwork to global confer-
ences and excursions. These points of exposure are significant as
they illuminate the everyday circumstances in being elsewhere in
the world and provide glimpses of conditions in the wider world.
While travel alone does not create global citizens, it is integral to
broadening one’s perspective through interactions that challenge
assumptions about daily life. Moving in the world requires students
to become more facile with regard to their skills of interactions and
reading a physical space as they will often be working outside of
their home language context. This hopefully contributes to a sense
of humility as they begin to see that their outlook is not universally
shared while their challenges in navigating an unfamiliar space may
spark empathy for others similarly situated.
Lastly, diversity of the student body oncampus is vital to devel-
oping global citizens. Studying alongside a diverse peer-group is
perhaps the most critical of all of these aspects since when people
learn together they are in fact growing together while becoming
more interdependent. A discursive context of give-and-take, be it in
classrooms, over meals or in other conversations, creates unplanned
learning that can inform all who participate. This interpersonal
dimension of learning on university campus also helps build the
confidence of university students to converse in different languages,
developing work-arounds for times when they are not being under-
stood and exploring the life worlds of their peers. A diverse stu-
dent body also contributes to student knowledge as they learn about
others through direct experience. This generates insights into places
where visiting students are from along with the places they find
themselves in as mobility students. And it also grows a disposition of
openness to others and their experiences in a way that a nondiverse
student body is unlikely to achieve.
These conditions also create the grounds for human flourishing
(Pogge, 2012). I draw on this principle in my thinking about GCE
since it speaks to a deep need among people to live fulfilling lives.
Education is the means by which people flourish as they come into
fuller knowledge of themselves and their social situation. Through
education, people can realize their fullest potential while witnessing
conditions where others are denied access to education, and thus the
right to flourish. An empathic reaction to this awareness can also
lead to a commitment to act in the world in solidarity with others,
to expand the conditions that help people flourish, education among
those attributes.
BOSIO: What does the “right to move” suggest in the context of flourish-
ing? How does flourishing relate to GCE?
GAUDELLI: I became interested in movement as an issue primarily
through travel and experiences outside of one’s immediate sur-
roundings. I recall when I first started moving in the world the
sense of alienation that I initially experienced, a feeling of otherness
about the differences in daily life that I witnessed. But with increas-
ing exposure to living outside one’s norm diminished this reaction
greatly to a point now where I experience very little culture shock.
Where earlier I felt a keen sense of not belonging, due to the ini-
tial strangeness of language, symbols, and activities, I increasingly
felt more at home wherever I happened to be. The ease of seeing
myself elsewhere led me to wonder more about what it means to
belong and how this is commingled with physical places. In ear-
lier centuries – and still in some places – the right to move freely
was highly restricted so as to limit who moved beyond and where
they could go. This created, perhaps unintentionally, a sense that
those who were of a place both belonged to it and had a subsequent
right to the place, wardens in a sense over those coming and going.
While I respect that broad understanding and recognize the imperi-
alist overhang of a past where those from the West trampled upon
the rights of others to live peacefully on their land, I also imagine
a time where the place one occupies moves away from exclusion and
toward inclusion. This is particularly poignant when thinking about
the current border conflicts related to economic migrants, like the
situation playing out on the US southern border with immigrants
from Central America.
In light of the principle of human flourishing, afforded to all
people regardless of the randomness of their birth, then the right
to move suggests some form of world where borders are permea-
ble and perhaps eventually nonexistent. This seems like a radical
suggestion in the current context and given the political rhetoric of
today, yet the same could be said of early 20th Century Europe,
which has now become in effect a borderless continent. This state
would be unimaginable in the context of Medieval Europe, or even
early 20th Century Europe, and yet it has indeed happened. I think
this points to both the deterioration of the singularity of sovereign
states, tightly bound, and a more fluid sense of borders that eventu-
ally, hundreds of years hence, disintegrates in any meaningful sense.
Could a global polity be far behind?
I recently read an article in the New York Times about the emer-
gence of an European identity (Bennhold, 2019). In the article, a
variety of people were interviewed and the contested nature of what
“Europe” means was well illustrated, with a German professor say-
ing Europe represented freedom, an Italian grandmother saying it
was slavery and a French electrician indicating that it meant noth-
ing. The idea of a polity having uncertain adherents is not altogether
different from what early nations experienced in regard to making
people believe they were part of something larger than themselves or
part of a state. Eugen Weber’s classic work Peasants into Frenchmen
(Weber 1976) illustrates this process poignantly and curiously the
same themes of freedom, slavery, and nothingness are present in the
making of the 19th Century French state.
But what was most striking about the New York Times pieces was
a picture taken on the streets of Naples with a demonstration by the
Prima L’Italia, a far-right party. In the image, there are three peo-
ple standing on a platform looking down on passersby, in the fore-
ground, a young, black man passing the demonstration. The look of
disdain on the face of the women on the platform is unmistakable
as she literally and figuratively looks down on the young man as
his face evokes uncertainty and anxiety. The image caused me to
think – What right does this person have to believe that this other
person does not have a right to live in this place? That seems to me
the crux of the issue of movement and I believe that these concepts
will increasingly be reconstructed as the 21st Century will be one
of even greater migration than the previous centuries, particularly
due to the loss of land due to climate change and the inundation and
subsequent dislocation of many of the most economically vulnerable
people on the planet, precisely what just happened in the Bahamas
with Hurricane Dorian (Newburger 2019).
There is another great irony with regard to movement in a global
age, specifically related to the US It is a remarkable case of what I call
“state amnesia” on the part of the US to deny how its actions—on
climate change and undermining governments of other countries—
have come home to deliver a poetic justice, if one generally unknown
by those in the US. The collapse of farming in Central America due
to climate change is forcing many farmers to give up their farms
and head north in a desperate search for work. That the US holds
the lion’s share of humanity’s annual carbon consumption, which
links directly to the loss of farms in Honduras and Guatemala
is critically important to this issue, and yet virtually unknown
by those in the US. Similarly, the US government actively under-
mined socialist governments and political movements in Central
America throughout the 1980s and 90s, rather successfully.
In turn, the US helped create failed states where gangs organize
society in the place of legitimately elected governments. That these
failed states are no longer able to sustain a decent social life, sending
people north in search of stability for their families, is unsurprising
and one might say karmic as well, as the US is reaping what it once
sowed (Bacon, 2015; Nevins, 2018).
But the suffering, exacerbated by the creation of inhumane hold-
ing tanks on the southern border for those claiming asylum, is felt
by those in transit. Immigrants from Central America are powerless,
both in the wider historical antecedents that forced them to move
(e.g. global warming and US foreign policy) as well as in their ina-
bility to create conditions for their flourishing to progress. They are
victimized by the situation in their places of origin as well as at the
hands of the regional, hegemonic power that will not allow them
entry, despite contributing to the conditions that forced them from
their homes.
BOSIO: Your conceptualization of GCE mentions the notion of “human
flourishing”? How “human flourishing” is related to students’ global
learning?
GAUDELLI: Human flourishing is a criterion that I borrow from the
work of the human rights theorist Thomas Pogge (Pogge, 2012) who
invokes Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, or a life well-lived. The
idea is very attractive as it gives us something to strive toward, an
aspiration for human development, for the opportunity for all peo-
ple to have a life well-lived while at the same time offering a clear
sense that we are not close to where we need to be as a global society.
I also appreciate the perspectival and temporal dimensions as noted
in the introduction. Part of flourishing is to fully use one’s mind and
capacities. So, to your question, the value of flourishing as an aim
is that it unites the personal desire for attainment and achievement
while helping to build the social capacity of all people as we encour-
age the growth of each other. This is fundamental to being human
and developing one’s ability to think, to know, to reason, and to feel
points always outward and beyond.
As for students’ global learning, I emphasize in my teaching
building the capacity of students to assess their own development
and guide their inquiries. Agency in learning, as I noted above, is
crucially important as it provides the learner with the ability and
motivation to go on learning ad infinitum. The breadth of “global
learning” as a repository of aims and contents for learning can be
daunting, but when viewed in the context of continuous growth and
development, the notion of learners developing their own learning
in collaboration with others is realizable. Too, the expectation that
“global learning” will not be prepared and delivered to students
readymade but developed over the course of a lifetime also contrib-
utes to a view of agented learning.
BOSIO: How would you incorporate the notion of “human flourishing”
in curricular programmes for GCE?
GAUDELLI: I see this ethic as a broad aim of GCE programs, one that can
unite disparate elements. Take the typical university office for global
outreach. These offices entail many dimensions, including developing
programs on campus, providing opportunities for mobility, inviting
visiting scholars, and sustaining long-term collaborations with global
partners. But these programs often lack a central ethic or concern and
I think that focusing on a broad, foundational goal, such as promot-
ing human flourishing would help unite these efforts in joint activities
with a shared mission. It would also give a sustaining rationale for the
question that often foils global programs on campus, namely Why are
we doing this? Employing flourishing as a desirable state not only for
our students but for all those whom they encounter, indeed univer-
sally for all people, avoids the overly constrained versions of “doing
good” in the world that can lead to paternalistic interactions and sim-
ply ask the question, “What can be done to support flourishing in this
community?” The breadth of the concept, though necessarily vague,
place-based and perspectival, gives it a plasticity that allows it to be
molded into many different contexts while providing something to
ground the work and orient thinking.
BOSIO: William, you have significant experience in teaching GCE and
researching on this topic at the university level in the USA and
beyond. Why is or is not education for global citizenship necessary
in the modern university, particularly in the USA?
GAUDELLI: GCE teaching and research is positively necessary at uni-
versities, foremost because it fits the broad educational mission of
universities building knowledge development and engaging in the
broad society. More specifically to this moment, GCE is a vital
task of universities because increasingly states see universities as
part of their narrative and identity, as serving the interests of the
state first and foremost. This is mistaken rationale as universities
were established and maintained not in the service of a state but
to the service of knowledge development, to all people. We have
seen horrific versions of states being overly involved in the work of
universities, among the most egregious when the Third Reich used
the monumentally important higher education system in Germany
for its own purposes, expelling Jewish students and faculty in 1933,
funding “racially pure science” and otherwise aligning the Nazi
party agenda to that of the universities. This was a gross perver-
sion of free thought and inquiry and yet some resisted by resign-
ing or fleeing the country (thankfully, Albert Einstein among them)
while others went along. Indeed, some, such as Martin Heidegger,
the renowned philosopher, joined the Nazi cause willingly and with
broad affirmation of their beliefs. This was a catastrophic moment
and while most contemporary versions are thankfully not as severe,
the lesson is certainly the same; that universities require and deserve
substantial independence from the state in which they happen to
be so that they can serve the broader purposes of knowledge in the
service of people and the biosphere.
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly in American
universities?
GAUDELLI: I see a great deal of support and affirmation for this GCE at
my current university and with those I have recently been affiliated.
I periodically experienced resistance to global learning as a broad
initiative while in Florida, though I think that had as much to do
with the post 9-11 moment that we were in as it did with the social
and political scene of the state. Where I witness some pushback or
mild disagreement is either by those who believe that global engage-
ment diminishes the local needs/service of a university, and that is,
of course, possible and problematic, or from those who see GCE
as something nice to have, but not necessary. There is a kind of
benign neglect among those not directly and deeply engaged in the
discourse not due to any ill will but more of a result of their focus on
the immediate circumstances of their discipline, which also tend to
be somewhat state-bound in discourse.
BOSIO: How can GCE be made suitable for or attractive to students
studying in American universities? What knowledge, skills, values,
dispositions, and experiences are graduates expected to acquire in
order to become global citizens?
GAUDELLI: GCE has to begin with broadening students’ self-awareness
and engagement with the world. University students, like most peo-
ple, live as though they are unaffected by people and events around
them coupled with a belief that they do not affect the same. Both
sides of this dualism are false and helping students to determine the
how, what, and why of being affected will begin (or continue, for
some) developing an awareness of human interdependency as a foun-
dational condition to our being. This awareness can lead to tracing
out those points of connectivity, from the social sphere through
interpersonal connections to the biosphere through environmental
connection to the ideosphere through dialogical/thought connec-
tions to the cultural sphere through ways of living connections
(Appadurai, 1996). This process necessarily entails using knowledge
of the connections themselves but can also promote an empathic
understanding of how people affect one another.
Migration, a form of global movement, is a rich venue for think-
ing about how GCE can become part of university curriculum.
Student mobility is an obvious beginning, recognizing the various
ways people enroll in a university, the requirements of studying
abroad by home and host countries and the various systems that
make such interactions possible, along with recent threats to stu-
dent mobility in places like the US due to denials of student visas
since 2017. If approached thoughtfully, these learning spaces can
be mutually informative and help develop empathy, particularly
toward the challenges found by those choosing to study in another
country. Focusing on student temporary migration patterns can
also lead to a more robust conversation about how others, such as
unskilled labor or political refugees, are often compelled to relocate
as a result of conditions beyond their control. Widening the focus
will help students draw connections between and among instances
of global interdependence in ways that may not occur if students are
drawn solely into one issue while also teaching the skills of connect-
ing issues, identifying perspective, and comparison/contrast. As to
values, the engagement with otherness is likely to create an empathic
sense of wondering what it must be like to relocate, often in a vul-
nerable situation and not by choice, as well as helping students see
and value the complexity of global situations like these (Gaudelli,
2016). While it may be useful to plan with knowledge, skills and val-
ues in mind heuristically, learning from the perspective of a student
is a more whole-cloth experience not readily parceled into these ped-
agogical terms. The idea of learning globally through experience, or
situation, is an issue that I have taken up elsewhere with a colleague
in philosophy but the gist of it is, a meaningful, educative experience
is one that does not present itself in readymade categories, but as a
total experience from which insights can be drawn out and carried
forward into future situation (Gaudelli & Laverty, 2015).
GAUDELLI: Assessing global awareness and a disposition to act is tricky
in that setting a baseline is difficult to do. I have tried validated
instruments, such as Corbitt’s Global Awareness Profile (Nathan
Corbitt, 1998), now dated, but even when it was a contemporary
instrument, it had real limitations. The reason is related to the con-
nectivity piece or the ability to see connectedness and consequence.
Returning to the point about today’s migration at the US southern
border and Honduras, one can certainly test knowledge of both
of these items discreetly with some certainty, though the ability to
connect and develop an argument about how poor foreign policy
can have long-term, disastrous consequences takes a level of sophis-
tication. This is precisely what we need to aim for – the ability to
theorize what’s going on in the world, why it’s happening, and what
can be done about it – but knowledge nuggets will not get us there.
Increasingly, I am drawn toward performance assessments, or the
activity of doing and explaining an action in light of what is known
and believed, as more sophisticated means of determining what stu-
dents know, believe and can do. These have to be designed in real
situations but the qualities of such assessments can be offered. First,
they need to draw from multiple and diverse sources of informa-
tion to construct a “case” or “issue” that is their focus. I developed
something along these lines for educators in our global competence
certificate program some years ago with colleagues wherein partic-
ipants researched the collapse of the clothing factory at Rana Plaza
in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2012. Second, students need to examine
the event/issue through the lens of interconnection and interdepend-
ence. So, what are the sources of this event? What normal, everyday
conditions were in place that created this situation. In the case of
the horror of Rana Plaza, the T-shirt economy of rapid, replacement
clothing consumption in Western countries creates the massive tex-
tile demand that is then subcontracted down to the lowest bidder
and outsourced to those working for fractions of pennies on the
dollar compared to their final sale price. Third, students need to
engage in chaining analysis where causes and effects are outlined, as
noted in the example above. Lastly, they move to consider what sys-
temic changes would be necessary to implement such policies, how
those can be enacted and what barriers exist to the same. Activities
like these mirror more closely the knowledge, skills, and values that
one is attempting to uncover in assessment activities that are more
discrete and categorical, though the ultimate test of value is the
degree to which students, as Mahatma Gandhi once said, become
the change in the world that they wish to see.
10.3 Conclusion
GCE is a means of operationalizing flourishing within educational con-
texts. The notion of human flourishing, including the attributes of ethics,
experience, character, and achievement as outlined by Pogge (2012) pro-
vides a useful and universal way of engaging development with a focus on
justice. The outline of flourishing is just that – a broad conception about
which policies, institutions, and plans can be organized – while recog-
nizing the way in which perspective, time, and place shape this minimal
standard. Too, that flourishing is common ground is a baseline rather
than a ceiling, so it avoids the heavy-handed type of limitations that have
previously undermined utopic projects. Flourishing is certainly not new
in the world, predated by its antecedent eudaimonia of ancient Greece,
but it has only recently entered into the dialogue about by what measure
and toward what ends do we collectively view development and justice.
Education has much to gain from human flourishing. The notion
that one can be considered educated while being essentially ignorant
of much of the world beyond one’s country’s borders is increasingly an
unsustainable idea. Education when viewed as a process of perpetual
growth and development across a person’s lifespan, however, necessarily
reaches beyond those borders. The points of convergence between this
type of education and flourishing are obvious, as both are focused on
development, agency on the part of the learner/being as well as robust
recognition of the particularities of one’s place and time shaping what
constitutes flourishing and what education ought to look like for those
purposes.
GCE is an expansive way to think about education as it encompasses
the totality of being in its curriculum, though with pointed reference to
pressing global issues and what it means to engage in addressing those
issues. GCE is not a cure-all, however, as it entails occlusions and lim-
itations in terms of whose voices are heard and ignored, which texts
are read and missed and which foci are present and absent. In this way,
the Sustainable Development Goals 2015-30 are symmetrical to GCE as
they are imperfect iterations of what it means to work toward a common
future. The importance of education, then, is twofold – to be integral to
the work of what constitutes world-making in the contemporary global
era and to serve as an aspirational process by which the global society
develops itself through learning across all points of experience.
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nothing at all. New York Times.
Dewey, J. (1913). Interest and effort in education. https://doi.org/10.1037/
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sheen. The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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migration-and-protection-global-era
as Awareness, Responsibility,
and Participation
Hans Schattle
11.1 Introduction
It is not unusual to encounter scepticism about the idea of global citizen-
ship in the political arena, even as the planet has become more intercon-
nected than ever. The first two decades of the 21st century have brought
so many stunning advances in digital media communication and technol-
ogy, alongside dramatic increases in international travel and a thoroughly
integrated world economy. State sovereignty, however, continues to reign
supreme in international relations and elections on almost every conti-
nent have been determined by nationalist rhetoric narrowly defined – and
often crudely framed in ethnic or racial terms.
Yet, amid all the background noise of populism and nativism, count-
less schools, colleges, and universities are striving to inspire the next gen-
eration to think and live as global citizens, regardless of the constraints
of today’s political arrangements. While current political circumstances
in national capitals might seem less than auspicious for any endeavour
that aims to address the world’s biggest problems from a global point
of view, more and more everyday people around the world are choosing
to see themselves as global citizens. Consider that in 2016 – the very
same year that voters in Britain opted with a narrow majority to leave
the European Union and Donald J. Trump was elected president of
the United States – a majority of respondents to a yearly survey across
14 countries commissioned by the BBC World Service stated that they
see themselves more as global citizens than as citizens of their respective
nations (Grimley, 2016).
It is remarkable that in the face of all the pressure to the contrary
in national political contexts, growing numbers of people continue to
see the idea of global citizenship as meaningful. This suggests that edu-
cational initiatives with the aim of helping young people see the “big
picture” of a global community have been achieving at least a limited
measure of success and that the public, for the most part, is ready and
willing to see further efforts in education to instil in the next generation
the habits and mindsets of global citizens.
154 Hans Schattle
Throughout my two decades studying how the specific concept of
global citizenship is, in fact, communicated and interpreted around the
world – also teaching university courses in political science focused on
global citizenship – three main elements have remained central in my
mind to the idea – awareness, responsibility, and participation (Schattle,
2008). These three elements serve to remind us that global citizenship
ultimately amounts to ways of thinking and living in multiple, overlap-
ping communities; it is a concept centered on activity, it is not a passive
legal status in the same way in which national citizenship functions as
a mechanism of formal membership separating insiders from outsiders.
People who take up the identity of a global citizen do so entirely out
of their own free will, not by going through any kind of transfer of
citizenship status or by being assigned in some other way as a global
citizen (though in very basic terms, every human being can be regarded a
global citizen with fundamental human dignity and human rights). Nor
do most self-described global citizens see themselves as any less attached
to their respective countries, even if on balance people are now giving
greater weight than in generations past to the idea of being connected to
a formative global community.
11.1.1 Global Citizenship as Awareness

For each human being, global citizenship as awareness entails cultivating
a meaningful sense of self-awareness as well as some careful reflection
on how one fits into the world around them – reaching a clear under-
standing of one’s interests, capabilities, aspirations, and potential to do
good, within the limits of time, resources, and the demands of everyday
lives. Echoing the “concentric circles” view of the ancient Stoics, global
citizenship as awareness involves thinking about how individual persons
might contribute to their local communities, their respective countries,
and the wider world as a whole (Heater, 2004; Nussbaum, 1997; Fischer,
2007). It combines a sense of calling to make a difference in the world
with a healthy dose of humility, as all of us must always keep in mind
how our words and actions, even in the most immediate of settings, can
end up being perceived negatively or misconstrued by others.
It is easy to say that global citizenship as awareness involves a will-
ingness to see life through the perspectives of others; actually, making
this kind of sincere attempt on a regular basis can, in fact, be quite a
challenge for most of us. Yet the proverbial act of “walking in someone
else’s shoes” is in itself an important personal quality for anyone who
seeks to join in “service learning” programs at home or abroad (such
as short-term educational immersion programs) or become involved in
political campaigns on global issues. Greater international understand-
ing and greater cross-cultural understanding are both important goals
that are commonly linked with global citizenship as awareness and
Global Citizenship as Awareness 155
relate with the vision of transcending the boundaries of one’s immediate
communities.
11.1.2 Global Citizenship as Senses of Responsibility

Greater awareness leads naturally into heightened senses of responsibility –
for the sake of lessening, if not fully preventing harm, and also for doing
outright good. Reminders of the urgency in addressing global problems
are all around us on a daily basis and across a wide range of issues.
Global climate disruption is the most pressing problem, as an existential
threat to our one and only liveable habitat, and many other key issues
that transcend national borders underscore the need for greater global
responsibility, such as other kinds of threats to the natural environment
(species extinction, air pollution, plastic pollution); the proliferation of
nuclear weapons; enduring poverty and deprivation across many coun-
tries and regions; continuing violations of human rights, especially when
it comes to women and children; and the inability of the current interna-
tional system to figure out how to accommodate the increasing number
of migrants and refugees.
Political theory pays much attention to the principle of remedial
responsibility – with the idea that individuals and collectivities that
inflict harm bear the obligation of correcting that harm through subse-
quent positive actions (Miller, 2008; Brooks, 2011). Simply put, a coun-
try that initiates or abets a military conflict holds a responsibility to take
in refugees who were displaced in that conflict; likewise, a country that
has damaged the natural environment carries the obligation not only to
clean up the damage but also to change its own trajectory to reverse the
cumulative damage; this is one central responsibility that most heavily
industrialized countries still need to address today with regard to the
global climate crisis. However, global citizenship as responsibility is not
limited to preventing or remediating harm, nor is it limited to collec-
tive actors. In contrast, global citizenship emerges whenever individuals
become inspired to make responsible choices in their daily routines and
to understand how small-scale actions or changes in one’s daily life can
help humanity and the planet one step at a time, while also generating
the kind of political will that will lead to more sweeping and systemic
changes.
11.1.3 Global Citizenship as Participation

Taking action to bring about systemic change leads to global citizen-
ship as participation, and many self-identifying global citizens join cam-
paigns and causes that project their voices across borders, either through
small steps, such as signing online petitions or donating to advocacy
groups, or much larger steps, such as seeking direct influence over how
156 Hans Schattle
national governments, international organizations, and multinational
corporations manage their affairs and set policies with massive global
ramifications. The most memorable images of an active and vocal global
citizenry often emerge from massive street protests coordinated across
multiple cities on the same day – such as the rallies in early 2003 protest-
ing the impending United States’ invasion of Iraq as well as the global
climate strikes led by Greta Thunberg that peaked in the fall of 2019.
Yet, global citizenship as participation need not be far-reaching or
monumental; it also emerges through the most modest of individual
gestures in one’s immediate neighbourhoods – picking up litter on the
beach, confronting bullying in the school playground, reaching out to
welcome a new family in town from a country or cultural background.
Thinking in more collective terms, resilient venues of local social capi-
tal – church groups, music and theatre programs, soccer leagues, swim
teams, and yes, political campaign organizations and interest groups –
should never be underestimated as vehicles that simultaneously foster
global citizenship as well as domestic citizenship. For all the justifiable
concern about the drawbacks of online communication in comparison
with face-to-face interaction (Turkle, 2015), there is no denying that
many social networks in which people are connected mainly through
digital media platforms provide human beings with indispensable out-
lets for solidarity and friendship that stretch well beyond the borders of
their respective countries.
11.2 Dialogue with Hans Schattle

EMILIANO BOSIO: How has your academic and life’s “journey” shaped
the understanding of global citizenship?
HANS SCHATTLE: Much of my academic career in political science
extends from my earlier career in journalism. My first job out of uni-
versity was at a daily newspaper in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and
this is where I really began to focus on globalization and its impli-
cations for citizenship. New Bedford rose and fell across different
phases of economic globalization. In the 19th century, it prospered
as the world’s premier whaling port at a time when whale oil was in
high demand (at great cost to the whale population, which became
severely endangered as a result of this demand). In the mid-1800s,
New Bedford even became the wealthiest city for its size in the world
and Herman Melville, in his classic novel Moby Dick, immortalized
New Bedford as the “dearest place to live in, in all of New England…
Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses,
parks, and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford”.
The city’s historic homes and landmarks now serve mainly as a
reminder of past glory days. By the time I started reporting news in
New Bedford, the city had fallen on hard times as successive changes
in the global economy brought disruption and adversity. As whale
oil was replaced by other energy sources, textiles became as the city’s
mainstay, but textile jobs in New Bedford peaked very early in the
20th century, with the big textile manufacturers abandoning New
Bedford (and several other New England cities) for cheaper labour
and warmer climates in states, such as North Carolina. In 1928,
with the overall American economy still roaring one year before
the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression, New
Bedford’s textile economy ground to a halt when approximately
30,000 workers went on strike. The city never quite recovered –
even though it later attracted a smattering of old-line manufacturers
making everything from automobile tires to clothing and footwear,
the city went into a heavy manufacturing decline.
In the decade before I arrived in New Bedford in 1991 as a news-
paper reporter, the city lost 20% of its workforce as many of these
remaining factories left town for much cheaper places to operate.
It became my task to write a special report on the city’s economic
crisis, and very quickly I came to realize that New Bedford, as a
declining industrial city with busts and bygone employers by the end
of the 20th century outweighing the erstwhile boom years, was posi-
tioned squarely on the losing side of the global economy. The kinds
of jobs that had first brought wealth and then a mediocre yet bear-
able status quo for the city’s working classes would not be coming
back anytime soon. In the course of reporting and writing about the
city’s predicament, I realized the key challenge facing New Bedford
and so many other fading industrial centers across North America
was not only economic but also political.
The old hand-assembly jobs were gone; the challenge would be to
generate the political will to launch strategies to find new sources
of employment and to find new and creative ways to regenerate the
city. Alongside this, I also watched the backdrop of global politics
shifting toward neoliberalism in the 1990s – deregulation, privati-
zation, and free trade – with Bill Clinton in the United States and
Tony Blair in the United Kingdom. As much as I worried about the
circumstances in cities, such as New Bedford, I also realized that
an even bigger problem revolved around the poor conditions faced
by workers in historically poorer “developing” countries that were
inheriting the old-line manufacturing jobs formerly in the declining
industrial centers of the “developed” world.
I remember juxtaposing in my mind the mass displacement of jobs
from New Bedford with the growing number of alarming reports
in the 1990s about factory workers in southeast Asia and Latin
America being paid 10 cents an hour for their labour, toiling for
workdays lasting 12 hours or more in unhealthful conditions, denied
even the most minimal bathroom breaks. The interconnectedness
158 Hans Schattle
between the depleted opportunities in places, such as New Bedford
and the poor working conditions in “emerging market” economies,
became painfully clear to me and so did the results of this juxtaposi-
tion – relatively low retail prices for many consumer goods, thanks to
low production costs, yet also record-breaking profit margins for the
companies involved and executive salaries rising more sharply than
ever in proportion to the ever-more depressed salaries of workers. I
could see the new global capitalism was making a small number of
people rich, and maybe benefiting segments of consumers in affluent
countries, but coming at great cost to other segments of the popu-
lation and also compromising the basic human rights and human
dignity for many others.
Here, too, the root of the problem was and still is political – a
radically unleashed global capitalism all too evasive of the kinds
of national institutions and regulations that protect human beings
and support public goods in more “tamed” approaches to capital-
ism. So, my enduring interest in reconfiguring democratic citizen-
ship in response to our global, high-tech economy traces back to
the way that I observed global capitalism springing forward during
my years working in New Bedford. Along these lines, in my sec-
ond year of graduate school, while working on a master’s degree
in political science at Boston College, I wrote a paper for a human
rights seminar on the need to combine principles of justice and sol-
idarity in the quest to shift working conditions away from sweat-
shops. It was a thoroughly idealistic paper – prone to objections that
the evils of sweatshops serve as an inevitable first step toward eco-
nomic development – yet I believed then and still believe now that a
more human and sustainable approach to global capitalism would
tie human rights standards, workplace health and safety standards,
and environmental standards into the global trading rules of the
World Trade Organization – thereby moving the global economy a
step closer to the kind of oversight that protects workers across the
world’s constitutional democracies.
With all this in mind, when I was applying for doctoral pro-
grams, referencing this problem in my application essays, I noted
that I wanted to help clarify standards of global citizenship to catch
up with the global market and this is what launched my work into
the specific term “global citizenship”. At Oxford, I initially thought
about focusing my dissertation more narrowly on European Union
citizenship – an institution that in some ways functions as a proto-
type of global citizenship – but then I realized that the legal aspects
of EU citizenship, which are tied to having nationality in one of the
member states, didn’t really get at what I wanted to study most –
how people actually think and live as citizens in overlapping political
communities, from their immediate neighbourhoods to the world at
large. At the same time, I was well aware of the emerging academic
debates in political philosophy and sociology on the desirability and
feasibility of global citizenship, and I wondered if people outside
the contours of these debates – “everyday people”, compared, at
least, with scholars – were also thinking in meaningful ways about
global citizenship. This led me to search online media archives to
get a handle on the extent the concept was out there in the “real”
world – and then to realize, with the help of my research supervisor,
David Marquand, and my college adviser, Michael Freeden – that
this “actually existing” discourse of global citizenship awaited the
kind of empirical study that also applies to the study of ideology and
political belief systems. From here, my research was on its way.
BOSIO: Awareness, responsibility and participation seem to emerge as
the three key elements of GCE according to your conceptualization.
How do you foster awareness, responsibility and participation in
your students in the classes that you teach currently and taught in
the past?
SCHATTLE: I teach mainly political science courses, so I approach the
idea of global citizenship by helping students develop the capacities
to soak in key intellectual debates in our field, as well as a sense
of understanding ongoing developments in our political world and
thinking about their implications for the nature of the political com-
munities we inhabit. With regard to awareness, it’s learning how to
learn, for starters – how to absorb the key lines of argument pre-
sented in the literature, how to figure out what exactly scholars and
practitioners are analyzing and why perspectives from philosophy
really do matter in practice. Close readings and detailed knowledge
of history are also very important; in my courses on United States
foreign policy and European politics, we look in detail at how events
throughout the 20th century shaped the order and disorder of the
world today. While my generation in the United States did not expe-
rience the two world wars and came of age in the aftermath of the
war in Vietnam, the students I have taught for most of my career
were born following the end of the “Cold War” and the collapse
of Soviet Communism – and my most recent batch of entering stu-
dents entered the world after the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Like many instructors, I compress my historical material as
the years go by, but our world is changing so fast that it is important
to understand how we got here.
Especially, in the present moment, when a motley crew of political
“strongmen” led by the Trump administration seem to be overriding
the rules-based liberal international order that was crafted by the
United States and its allies following the Second World War, it is very
important for students to understand how and why that order came
about – and how the world was a far more dangerous place in the
160 Hans Schattle
absence of that order. It is essential, for instance, for students learn-
ing about European politics to understand that the European Union,
in its initial evolutionary phase as a “coal and steel community”,
was intended to build a “solidarity of production” that would render
war between France and Germany unthinkable; this is why, Brexit
was so heart-breaking, at least from my vantage point. Likewise, the
ways in which not only the liberal international order but the entire
American experiment in constitutional democracy across a large ter-
ritorial scale is fraying today amid the most sharply divisive polari-
zation since the Civil War and a rogue president who disrespects the
most basic norms of constitutional democracy; students cannot fully
understand why a figure such as Trump is indeed rogue and damag-
ing without understanding the legal, political, and ethical norms to
which all American presidents should be held accountable.
When it comes to fostering senses of responsibility, I think it is
critical to help our students connect their own lives with the global
issues we study. I love Pietra Rivoli’s book, The Travels of a T-Shirt in
the World Economy (2005), since looking at globalization through
typical consumer goods is one basic way young people can begin
to think about what responsible global citizenship entails. While
T-shirts are a salient example, there are many other entry points
into thinking about how everyone is morally implicated in the global
economy. For instance, where did your laptop computer or mobile
phone come from – the individual components as well as the final
product you own? What are the current air pollution levels in the city
where your laptop computer or mobile phone was made? How much
were the workers there paid? What kinds of natural resources were
depleted (i.e. “rare earths”) to make this product, and is the cost of
this depletion reflected in the price you paid? And if the answers to
these questions leave you worried, then what can and should be done
to address the problem – i.e. push the relevant corporations and gov-
ernments, as I suggested earlier, to raise their standards?
It is also helpful for students to think about what kinds of stand-
ards they want to hold their national governments accountable to
when looking across a range of issues, especially environmental
issues, given the formidable problems we face in the present day. In
my hometown, for example, the problem of rampant plastic pollu-
tion came to the forefront when the town passed a local ordinance,
at the urging of local citizens, banning the distribution of plastic
grocery bags. Lately, I have also seen a growing concern among citi-
zens as to whether the items placed into recycling bins end up getting
recycled – and how this, too, connects with larger global problems of
garbage disposal and incineration. At the same time, as we press for
sweeping forms of global responsibility, it is also important that we
take action to strengthen our local communities along these lines.
As for participation, one simple way to inculcate the habits of
active citizens in our classrooms is to run interactive discussions as
often as possible. I set up my courses in ways that make the active
involvement of students inevitable – namely by requiring each stu-
dent to bring to class each week a written journal entry in response
to reading assignments. It is important for our students to discover
their capacities to speak their minds and articulate their thoughts
in different kinds of public settings. In my courses on global citi-
zenship and United States foreign policy, I have worked for several
years with a colleague in the United States using videoconferencing
technology to bring together my students in Seoul and his students
in Los Angeles for a series of shared conversations about the same
sets of readings, and this exercise, always brings class participation
to an entirely new level – communicating and exchanging ideas not
only with one’s fellow students in the room but also with the group
of students sitting across the Pacific Ocean. It is these kinds of expe-
riences that can help students see the world from broader perspec-
tives and encourage them to go beyond the classroom into the wider
world (Schattle & Plate, 2019). This, after all, is one of the main
points of education – to give our students the tools and the mental-
ity to make a difference in whatever lines of work and community
involvement they pursue. Once we give them the capacities to par-
ticipate in the classroom, they can carry this aptitude with them
into the world beyond academia. Of course, it is also wonderful
when educational programs on global citizenship also work actively
to partner students with community organizations.
BOSIO: How would you incorporate the dimensions of awareness,
responsibility, and participation in GCE university programmes?
SCHATTLE: One way to bring awareness, responsibility, and participation
to life – and each in tandem with the other – is by offering courses
that look at the world as truly interconnected, as a single interde-
pendent unit, and across a wide range of issues – economic develop-
ment, food and agriculture, environmental degradation and global
warming, poverty, public health, immigration, security risks, such
as nuclear proliferation and suicide terrorism, and so forth. Such
courses can emerge from just about any academic discipline, and my
own course on global citizenship devotes time on a weekly basis to
the kinds of issues mentioned above and seeks to address these issues
from a global point of view. While I think it is fine to offer a dedicated
course to the idea of global citizenship – I have taught one myself for
nearly 20 years – more coordinated and encompassing strategies to
promote GCE across the campus of an entire college or university
should operate across a wide range of courses and departments.
Courses that emphasize connections across disciplines are great
vehicles to bring forward elements of awareness, responsibility, and
162 Hans Schattle
participation in tandem. After all, the endeavour of GCE is inter-
disciplinary – and the study of citizenship and global citizenship cut
across a range of academic disciplines – among them, educational
studies, English literature, global studies, cultural anthropology,
social psychology, political philosophy, international relations, soci-
ology, and business ethics. The idea of global citizenship can easily
find its way as an organizing principle into any course that straddles
these kinds of subject areas. My own course in global citizenship,
while situated in a political science department, includes a mixture
of readings in political theory, international relations, the sociology
of migration and global studies.
What is more, any course that places weight on community inter-
action and engagement will have great promise at incorporating the
elements of awareness, responsibility, and participation. Studying
global citizenship lends itself to interactive learning experiences – it
is an excellent overarching theme to engage guest speakers across
many different fields of interest, and course content focused on citi-
zenship of any kind can lead naturally to local volunteer opportuni-
ties. Working at the local neighbourhood library or food pantry or
the local refugee assistance center or community recreation center
can bring real-life insights into the minds of our students about what
is involved in becoming an actively participating citizen within any
kind of community.
In addition, growing concern about the treatment of migrants
and refugees at present opens the door to political activism for those
inclined. In my home state of Rhode Island, for example, the onset
of the Trump presidency had the effect of bringing a great deal
of critical scrutiny on a detention center run by the United States
government, as hundreds of people took to protesting the facili-
ty’s practice of holding detainees picked up by the US Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency awaiting trial and possible
deportation. How local communities respond to immigration can
serve as an excellent focal point for students to better grasp the con-
flict between national citizenship as a bounded legalistic institution
and moral visions of global citizenship that are not tied to any spe-
cific territory. Regardless of how one views the primacy of national
borders or regardless of whether one chooses to define global cit-
izenship in literal terms that directly confront closed borders or
in figurative terms that can elide the question of borders, study-
ing immigration helps further one’s sense of awareness on a key
global issue and also can prompt critical reflection on what kinds of
responsibilities political communities owe to immigrants as well as
the extent that participation – in the above instance, calling in pub-
lic for the closure of the detention center – can make a meaningful
difference. The same holds true for other kinds of issues as well.
BOSIO: As you suggest, “it is remarkable that in the face of all the pressure
to the contrary in national political contexts, growing numbers of
people continue to see the idea of global citizenship as meaningful”.
How can this be interpreted in your opinion and how does it con-
nect to GCE?
SCHATTLE: Global citizenship is not going away, nor is globalization – even
today’s right-wing populism, with its rallying cries against immi-
gration and trade, is most accurately cast as a backlash against
the onward march of globalization in recent decades – it cannot
be viewed in isolation from debates about globalization (Steger &
James, 2019). We can only understand the populist movement of
today if we see it as a pushback against the dominant economic
model of neoliberalism – deregulation, privatization, unrestricted
trade, basically a radically untamed form of capitalism – that for the
past 30 years that has imperilled the middle classes worldwide while
disproportionately enriching the wealthiest slices of the population.
As I noted more than 20 years ago in my graduate school admission
essay, we still need standards of global citizenship to catch up with
the global market. In today’s global economy, standards regarding
essential components of the public good – among them – the rights of
workers, workplace health and safety, air quality, food safety – are
determined by national bureaucracies, yet globalization, at least in
some areas of the manufacturing economy, disrupts these standards
by sparking a “race to the bottom” as corporations relocate opera-
tions in countries where the costs of doing business are low – in no
small measure because the standards are low. Fighting to improve
standards setting in developing countries is one of the most impor-
tant ways the idea of global citizenship can be brought to political
life in the present day.
While populism is one alternative to neoliberalism, cosmopolitan-
ism and social democracy are other alternatives, and global citizen-
ship and social democracy can be pursued in conjunction with one
another to render a fairer marketplace. In many respects, the dual
emphasis in the 2020 United States presidential election placed in
the Democratic primaries by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
on strengthening social equality helped point the way for a 21st- cen-
tury vision of social democracy that could also be harnessed to a
global citizen-minded outlook, especially with regard to the urgency
of the climate crisis.
On the other hand, global citizenship can be a value-neutral term,
even vacuous at times. Just because a particular college or university
adopts the term “global citizen” into its motto or strategic plan, it
doesn’t mean that the school will then incorporate in a meaningful
way the elements of awareness, responsibility, and participation into
its educational programs. Nor does it mean the school will strive to
164 Hans Schattle
encourage its students improving the state of the planet or improv-
ing conditions for all humanity. Indeed, my earlier research found
that many educational programs revolving around the idea of global
citizenship – particularly at high schools – are geared mainly toward
competence and competitiveness in the world economy. What’s
more, many well-intended overseas initiatives – such as short-term
service trips to developing countries sponsored by universities based
in wealthier countries – end up yielding far more benefits for the
participating students, in terms of building resumes and creating the
impression that these students have acquired significant cross-
cultural exposure, rather than benefiting the residents of relatively
impoverished communities who extended their hospitality as hosts
for the service trips. It is important to see the idea of global citizen-
ship as meaningful, but this, in turn, requires careful thinking about
what kinds of educational initiatives will most readily seek out and
live up to the stated vision.
BOSIO: Hans, you have a significant experience in teaching global
citizenship-related subjects and researching on the topic of global
citizenship at the university level in South Korea and beyond. Why
is GCE necessary in the modern university, particularly in South
Korea?
SCHATTLE: It is necessary as this is the kind of world we live in – like it
or not – and in South Korea, it is maximally necessary as the coun-
try is thoroughly exposed to international forces, with its reliance
on exports for its economic lifeblood as well as its dependence on
oil and natural gas imports for its ever-increasing energy demands.
If there is one country in which the people really need to clearly
understand how global issues will impact them at home, it is South
Korea. More widely, in the field of international relations, conflict
is back – and we have shifted from the “democratic peace” of the
1990s and early 2000s to a phase of strongman politics, with the
likes of Trump, Putin, Xi, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Orban. At times,
it can seem like a throwback to an earlier century, and we need
GCE as a corrective to this dynamic, to emphasize, even more than
in recent years past, that “another world is possible”. A world in
which we focus on global collaboration over conflict – and shared
responsibility to address problems that simply cannot be solved by
any individual country acting on its own.
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly in South
Korean universities?
SCHATTLE: Looking at the growth of transdisciplinary global studies
programs worldwide, one positive trend is the strong student demand
for courses that get outside the boundaries of our conventional aca-
demic disciplines. Since GCE fits very nicely as a key organizing
principle of global studies programs, this engenders support among
university faculty members and administrators.
In contrast, I suppose one negative development that stands out,
from my perspective, is that global citizenship can be easily used
in the educational arena for marketing purposes without being
deployed into anything substantive. Not every school or university
that has enlisted the term “global citizenship” has really thought
out what the idea means, let alone tailored or modified its programs
and course offerings to live up to a robust account of what global
citizenship entails. This can leave the concept vulnerable to critique;
sceptics in education can argue that global citizenship is too woolly
to be worth using as an ethical or strategic cornerstone. However,
I would argue that thinking about how to foster global citizenship
by means of awareness, responsibility, and participation – alongside
cross-cultural empathy – is a good way to bring the concept into the
curriculum.
Another negative dynamic – not necessarily specific to global cit-
izenship as a concept but associated with global education – is that
overseas immersion programs can cause problems of their own.
For starters, there is the problem of the heavy carbon footprint left
behind by the sharply increased study abroad travel in the most
recent generation, compared with their elder Boomers or Gen Xers.
More fundamentally, there is the problem that goes with placing
students inside local communities that do not necessarily benefit
from their presence. Students on overseas exchange or immersion
programs can end up benefiting from the outreach of local com-
munity people far more than the people in the communities being
visited are helped by the visiting students. In the worst cases, the
presence of visiting students can even impose costs on local com-
munities. This is not to argue that overseas immersion programs
should be curtailed, all the more so when considering the meaning
of global citizenship. In any case, the impact that global outreach
programs have on local communities that are involved needs some
real attention.
In South Korea, there is great interest in the idea of global citizen-
ship; the term has evolved considerably from the early 1990s when
it was often used by national political and business leaders as a way
of exhorting the public to work harder to compete in the global
marketplace. While in many countries, including the United States,
the idea of global citizenship is often prone to attacks by sceptic’s
arguing (often disingenuously) that somehow global citizenship
must override national patriotism, in South Korea, the idea of global
citizenship is very much attached to visions of rising national stat-
ure (Schattle 2015). More recently, the term has gained ground in
South Korea’s civil society and educational arenas, especially as the
166 Hans Schattle
population of the country has become far more diverse in the past
decade, with non-Koreans now accounting for more than 2 millions
of South Korea’s 50 million population, compared with approxi-
mately 500,000 in the year 2000. Now the idea of global citizenship
in South Korea speaks to its ongoing efforts to become a more inclu-
sive and accommodating multiethnic polity and, in more collective
terms, the country’s rising influence as a middle power in the global
political arena, most notably its success in hosting a G-20 summit in
November 2010 and the Winter Olympics in 2018.
BOSIO: Is GCE in the modern university, particularly in South Korean
universities, more about knowledge, skills, values, dispositions, or
some combination of all four in your opinion?
SCHATTLE: All of the above, I’d say – for universities everywhere. I can-
not give you a complete breakdown here of how all four of these
components intersect, but for knowledge, I would emphasize learn-
ing languages, history, and geography, as well as civic education in
local, national, and global contexts. I would also emphasize inte-
grating mainstream academic subjects, including the ‘hard’ sciences,
with interdisciplinary themes related to global problems – such as
environmental education, human rights education, awareness of
poverty, and its causes and effects, knowledge of the global economy
and economic interdependence, knowledge of international organi-
zations, and knowledge of the geopolitical and cultural forces that
drive world politics. For skills, as a high school principal in New
Zealand once expressed it to me, I would emphasize technology, lit-
eracy, and numeracy – all essential for students to gain competence
as citizens at any level of political community. As for dispositions,
I would encourage teachers to seek out ways they can instil curi-
osity, empathy, and open-mindedness in their students – as well as
the willingness to listen to others and think carefully about what
one is perceiving from others. And for values, I would emphasize
cultivating a sense of responsibility and even ownership in the man-
agement of the world’s problems. Learning languages, by the way,
nicely cuts across all four of these components; when students pick
up another language, they gain not only linguistic capabilities but a
greater understanding of cultural norms that are baked straight into
the languages.
skills, values, dispositions) be identified?
SCHATTLE: With knowledge, one way is for teachers to devise compa-
rable pretests and post-tests – even if they are not necessarily com-
prehensive. In my European politics course, on the first day, I ask
the students a few basic questions about European history and pol-
itics that they generally do not know – and by the time the end
of the semester rolls around, and they are adeptly representing
specific countries as part of a simulated negotiation of the European
Council, I am amazed at how much they have learned and now
know. I think open-ended essay exams and papers, even reflection
papers rather than research papers, can also be useful in identifying
habits of mind in our students that tie into the elements of aware-
ness, responsibility, and participation. Another strategy, more appli-
cable across the four personal qualities you are focusing on here, is
to conduct exit interviews with a select group or random sampling
of students shortly before they are graduated – and then keep track
of these students over time, with an eye toward answering the fol-
lowing questions: How does their thinking about citizenship and
community progress? How do they put what they learned on cam-
pus into action? How did their education either directly or indirectly
influence their outlooks as well as their pathways, professional, or
otherwise, going forward? And I think we should also cherish the
anecdotal insights that we happen to receive from students who stay
in touch with us years after they have been graduated – sometimes
all it takes is testimony from one student to help us see how we help
shape the lives of the human persons we teach.
SCHATTLE: I would suggest five themes – the environment, poverty,
public health, human rights and conflict prevention, and resolution.
With the environment, the imperative to save our planet ties into
responsibilities to future generations, as well as responsibilities that
those (countries, corporations, and individuals) who have caused tre-
mendous environmental damage have to those who have not caused
the damage in nearly as large proportion but will bear the brunt
of the damage. It is also important to focus on how many ongoing
responsibilities to protect the environment remain largely unmet.
With poverty, it is important for students to understand the causes
of poverty as well as the complexities that go with endeavours of lift-
ing people out of poverty – what kinds of initiatives work and which
ones do not, as well as the relative success we have seen since the ini-
tiation of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and,
more recently, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
As for public health, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has reminded us
all how interconnected our fates and vulnerabilities really are across
the planet – and how much it matters that citizens across states and
localities put in place the right kind of political leadership to manage
these kinds of crises. Human rights education, meanwhile, should
take on board social and economic rights as well as civil and politi-
cal rights. It is also important for students to learn how campaigns
for human rights continue to be widely embraced in nonwestern
contexts across the “global south” – meaning that it is harder now
168 Hans Schattle
than before to dismiss human rights as particular constructs of the
“West” rather than as universal principles. The basics of conflict
prevention and resolution should be studied across nation-states as
well as within them; this includes the simmering domestic conflicts
and cultural divides in today’s democracies. Across all four of these
themes, the elements of awareness, responsibility, and participation
apply – students should gain an understanding sense of the contours
of each topic, what kinds of responsibilities are brought to bear,
and what steps they might take, even if only modest steps, to help
address the problems related to these themes.
11.3 Conclusion
When the idea of global citizenship is sincerely deployed in educational
programs, awareness, responsibility, and participation mutually rein-
force each other as primary elements of global citizenship, and the tra-
jectory across these elements need not be followed in any one particular
direction. Greater awareness of oneself and one’s potential contributions
leads to heightened senses of responsibility and keener interest in partici-
pation in politics and society. Likewise, active participation in any given
cause or campaign has the effect of sharpening senses of awareness of
the issues at hand and corresponding responsibilities to all stakehold-
ers. If programs that aim to instil in young people a sense of global
citizenship hope to yield a more humane and just world as a result, the
elements of awareness, responsibility, and participation offer one simple
yet encompassing way for this goal to be harnessed and brought down
to earth in ways that resonate with young people.
I approach the idea of global citizenship believing that you can be a
global citizen wherever you happen to be – even in your hometown – and
that today’s young people aspire to prosper while also improving our
world, doing well by doing good; that people on balance respect funda-
mental human dignity and human rights, that citizenship is ultimately
an action word rather than a fixed status – a verb, not a noun – and
that people are capable of thinking about citizenship in multiple, plural
contexts – that one can think and live simultaneously as a global citizen,
national citizen, and local citizen.
My approach to GCE seeks to create people who combine brilliance
and goodness, intelligence and humility; people who can think for
themselves while making good decisions – and formulate their own
pathways to these decisions through sound moral reasoning because
they have been well-taught in academics and well-formed in char-
acter. My hope is for students to build their respective capacities to
understand global problems from multiple points of view, and to
understand different walks of life – along lines of ethnicity, culture,
and religion – from the perspectives of the people they encounter, and
to allow what they’ve seen in their learning to transform their own
perspective-shaping.
Generating the political will to foster change in our governing insti-
tutions and economic arrangements is also a central element of global
citizenship, and educators at all levels face the never-ending endeavour
of creating citizens who will not accept the current circumstances uncrit-
ically as they are but will speak up, plain and simple, in today’s con-
tentious debates. In the present moment, this underscores the need for
citizens with the vision, assertiveness, and persistence to call for higher
standards in today’s global economy, with the recognition that decisions
and actions taken close to the hubs of global power and influence carry
massive impact on people all around the world. In all these respects,
GCE should be transformative.
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and Humanism
A Process of Becoming and Knowing
Maria Guajardo
12.1 Introduction
One aspect of global citizenship education (GCE) is the development
of human beings. This development may be viewed from various plat-
forms, i.e. sociological, psychological, evolutionary, and cultural (Seidl-
de-Moura & Fernandes Mendes, 2012); and from diverse philosophical
perspectives (Falkenberg, 2015). In this chapter, the platform of human-
ism will be employed to broaden the understanding of GCE and how it
contributes to the process of becoming more humanistic and knowing oth-
ers. How do we teach individuals to become aware of their own humanity
and become learners that embrace the humanity of the world? For it is in
the link to one’s humanity that one learns to become more fully human.
Fostering global citizens requires a humanistic education; an education
that reveals an individual’s capacity for peace (Noddings, 2005).
The lens of humanism was previously applied to the study of GCE
in a university context (Guajardo & Reiser, 2016) and the argument
was made for identifying the normative environment and ecology of the
educational setting. This chapter will shift, from the environment to
the individual, focusing on GCE as the process of becoming more self-
aware, and thus more human; developing a global mindset, and the role
of dialogue in the process of becoming and knowing. To this end, the
perspectives of Freire and Ikeda (Freire, 1985; Ikeda, 1996) serve to illu-
minate how education and the pedagogy of dialogue provide a context
for GCE and human development.
12.2 Becoming via Global Citizenship

Education and Humanism
First, GCE can be explored as a process of becoming more human through
individual transformation (Ikeda, 1996), self-development (Freire, 1992),
and its alignment with humanization (Freire, 1985; Torres, 2008). These
perspectives share the lens of bettering ourselves intentionally, through
compassion, connection, and curiosity. Thus, linking to one’s humanity
can be viewed as a process of connecting to one’s heart. As one becomes
more self-aware, one is able to name one’s priorities in life – values, beliefs,
norms, and cultural influences. This self-awareness is connected to one’s
exploration of purpose and the role one has in taking action to contrib-
ute to the greater good. Individual transformation and self-development
occur as one’s awareness increases and is connected to contributing to the
world, making a difference, and having an impact. Thus, the process of
being educated for global citizenship is a process of understanding and
transforming one’s social agency based on a process of becoming more
human (Torres, 2008).
Educational systems vary in their design and purpose. The role of
education as a humanizing task is in contrast to the role of education as a
banking system; a system that is dehumanizing (Freire, 1985). As Freire
eloquently stated, “To be human is to engage in relationships with oth-
ers and with the world” (1973, p. 3). Education can provide the forum
for becoming more human by supporting curiosity of oneself, others,
and the world. It is the teacher’s role to maintain curiosity in students
and for the educator themselves to be curious, respecting differences in
ethnicity, gender, religion, language, and culture (Araujo Freire, 2015;
McDowell, 2018). Curiosity is central to the development of individu-
als, and as Freire shared, there is no happiness without curiosity (1992).
Education can be seen as the foundation that serves to “guide all stu-
dents to a life of happiness” (Nanda & Ikeda, 2015, p. 123).
In response to the question posed by Yokota and Douglass (2019), the
American feminist, educator, and philosopher Nel Noddings was clear
that in an educational setting, a teacher’s role is not to tell students the
answer to this question, rather the teacher’s role is to support students to
explore, seeking out their own answers. If happiness is the aim of edu-
cation as touted by educators from the West or East, such as Noddings
and Makiguchi (Noddings, 2005; Gebert and Joffee, 2007), how can
one best approach the “development of character, spirit, intellect, and
personality” via education, in the pursuit of becoming more human, and
thus forging one’s happiness (Noddings, 2003, p. 3)? The response to this
question is linked to knowing others, as described in the next section.
12.3 Knowing via Global Citizenship

Education and Humanism
The aspect of knowing is explored as a process of knowing others and
connecting to the concept of community (Darder, 2002; Harding &
Ikeda, 2013). Learning communities, specifically, communities that
engage teachers and learners, are effective when shared values and
beliefs, as well as differences, are discovered (Darder, 2002). Learning is
relational and happens in community with others.
In the context of GCE, knowing others is the expansion of one’s per-
spective of self to a broader understanding of others, via global issues,
172 Maria Guajardo
global perspectives, and diverse people. Education becomes a learning
experience, with others, where one’s intention is conceptualized and
acted upon (Freire, 1985). GCE, then, is the active pursuit of knowl-
edge that gives rise to action as interpreted by Freire’s work in social
change movements (Freire & Macedo, 1995). The action is guided by
critical awareness. Rugut and Osman (2013) focused on the philosophi-
cal concepts of Paulo Freire on education and relayed Freire’s belief that
“conscientization is the key process by which students develop a critical
awareness of the world based on the concrete experience of their every-
day lives” (p. 27). The development of critical awareness thereby trans-
forms the learning experience.
Torres (2013) presents transformative social justice learning as a
process of understanding oneself and the world. This sets the stage for
exploring GCE as the pursuit of transforming oneself and contributing
to the world, or as transformative social justice learning, in the context
of humanism. In this pursuit of becoming and knowing, what process
can best facilitate this act of learning and transformation? The pedagogy
of dialogue will be presented as a viable strategy in the pursuit of GCE.
12.4 Dialogue and Global Citizenship Education

Dialogue is a way of knowing and a process of learning (Freire &
Macedo, 1995). It is a way to make sense of the world and the “means
by which we achieve significance as human beings…and a key element in
learning” (Rugut and Osman, 2013, p. 27). Thus, the process of know-
ing is relational and engaging in dialogue is a pathway for learning.
Dialogue is not solely a process of conversation and sharing of experi-
ences. Freire states that it needs to be connected to social praxis, which
involves reflection and political action. In a similar vein, Ikeda (2001)
expounds on the Buddhist approach to dialogue, sharing that, “Genuine
dialogue results in the transformation of opposing viewpoints, changing
them from wedges that drive people apart into bridges that link them
together” (p. 57). Dialogue results in change; change that leads to action.
Further, dialogue is not just technique. Freire states it is not an act
of verbal ping pong, an exchange of conversation, back and forth.
Similarly, Ikeda views dialogue as an experience that is transformative
for both parties, with the goal of bringing out the best in oneself and
others (Urbain, 2018). Through dialogue, students are seen as engaged
explorers in their learning process, a process that leads to inner trans-
formation (Goulah, 2018). Central to dialogue is the act of listening.
“To listen – to listen carefully to what the other person is saying – is the
basic starting point for building a relationship with another person. It is
essential.” (Harding & Ikeda, 2013, p. 178).
Thus, dialogue is a tool central to GCE. In the classroom, the process
of dialogue can be used to engage students to become curious about the
world, about issues, and to connect with themselves and others; to begin
to form the bridge that Ikeda describes above. Student classrooms are
learning communities that are every day more demographically complex
(McDowell, 2018). Thus, as an educator, my job is to create a space for a
transformative experience of engagement in this complex learning commu-
nity. My role is to create a learning experience for students who will inter-
act with issues that impact the local and global world and interface with
others that are from diverse perspectives, ethnicities, and social classes.
Education involves a global practice where students learn to read their
world, connecting technical knowledge and world knowledge (Freire
& Macedo, 1995). One cannot “seriously engage in a search for new
knowledge without using his or her point of view and historical loca-
tion as a point of departure” (p. 385). Therefore, an educator’s duty is
to challenge students to critically engage with their world, by connect-
ing to their own history, so they can act upon the present. As Harding
(Harding & Ikeda, 2013) has shared, echoing Hannah Arendt, “it is
when we are in dialogue that we are most human” (p. 177). Through a
dialogue process, students connect to their own humanity, explore the
world, and engage with others in meaningful ways.
12.5 Dialogue with Maria Guajardo

EMILIANO BOSIO: What is your understanding of GCE? Particularly, how
MARIA GUAJARDO: My own life journey has shaped my understanding
of GCE. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, I was born and raised
in the United States. Both of my parents were illiterate, yet developed
a global mindset. Learning to navigate in a foreign country, they
were my first role models of global citizens. As an immigrant child,
struggling to find my place in a country that reluctantly accepted
me, I learned to both read and read the world, as Paulo Freire so suc-
cinctly stated (Torres, 2008). Attending school, I learned about those
around me. Growing up, often feeling as an outsider, I struggled to
find my voice in academic settings, where I was often a minority. The
process of dialogue rarely occurred in my education experience. It
was later in life, in my leadership development experiences, that the
practice of dialogue came alive, and became a pathway of discovery
and self-transformation.
For over 25 years, my professional experiences included public
speaking, delivering keynote addresses at conferences, and facilitating
training for educators throughout the United States and abroad. My
area of expertise included cultural competency training and address-
ing educational leadership. In order to keep participants engaged, I
discovered that deeper learning occurred when I focused on connect-
ing head and heart; when participants were engaged in bringing their
174 Maria Guajardo
life histories into the learning experience and engaged in authentic
dialogue. To break down defenses, I worked to bring out curiosity
and engaged participants in critical thinking of problems and barri-
ers. My approach was not to provide the answers, rather to create an
experience for individuals so that answers could be revealed.
Then, in 2013, I was invited to join Soka University as Dean for the
Faculty of International Liberal Arts, in Tokyo, Japan. Serving as the
first female dean, and the first non-Japanese dean, presented the chal-
lenge of bringing a culturally diverse perspective to a Japanese univer-
sity. As Dean, I shared with students and their parents that my vision
was to raise the next generation of global leaders. This vision reflected
my perspective of GCE. As an educator in the 21st century, in Japan,
engaged with Japanese and international students, I saw the potential
before me. My intention was to foster global citizens. Students were
questioning and searching for a path that would allow them to con-
tribute to the world, to be engaged, and create value. To connect with
our students’ search for meaning, creating a learning environment
that supported them in becoming their best self, in knowing others,
and developing a global perspective of the world was my goal.
The founder of Soka University, Daisaku Ikeda, describes three
elements of a global citizen (Ikeda, 2001):
• The wisdom to perceive the interconnectedness of all life and

living.
• The courage not to fear or deny difference, but to respect and
strive to understand people of different cultures and to grow
from encounters with them.
• The compassion to maintain an imaginative empathy that
reaches beyond one’s immediate surroundings and extends to
those suffering in distant places. (pp. 444)
The qualities of wisdom, courage, and compassion became central

to fostering global citizens in my classroom. My approach imbues
these three qualities in the development of a global mindset. To
operationalize the praxis aspect of education, my goal was to cul-
tivate in students an understanding of leadership as action. Taking
action for oneself and others can be propelled by the practice of
leadership. Sharing the perspective that leaders can be nurtured and
trained to contribute to the greater good, exploring the practice of
leadership can be very empowering for students.
cation institution?
GUAJARDO: Three key elements of GCE at the university level are:
1. Becoming more human; 2. Knowing self and others; and 3. Praxis –
taking action. These elements are based on my approach to teaching;
that is, creating a learning environment that fosters individual trans-
formation. A university learning environment embedded with the cul-
tivation of these elements fosters GCE. This is achieved by connecting
to one’s humanity; connecting to others in community; and embrac-
ing a spirit of desiring to contribute to social change. In community,
we exist due to a relational experience of being with others. Creating
a culture that values relationships is a necessary first step and catalyst
for transformation. Through the process of becoming an individual
aware of self, embracing one’s diversity and the uniqueness of others,
allows one to begin to perceive the interconnectedness of individuals,
as well as how one might contribute to social change. This position is
summarized by Ikeda (Harding & Ikeda, 2013) who defined global
citizens as individuals “in a search for truths about human existence,
life, and the universe. They are eternal advocates for justice, bat-
tling to triumph over injustice. They are eternal activists whose goal
is to rid the world of human misery and enable all people to enjoy
their right to happiness” (p. 227). The concept of activism implies
that action will be taken based on the perspective of contributing to
society. GCE can thus contribute to the greater good, with students
engaged in individual and societal transformation. These three key
elements mirror my own process of learning about myself as an eth-
nic minority in the United States and Japan, striving to learn about
those around me, and then serving as a bridge builder, committed to
creating access and inclusion to higher education while embodying
the values of wisdom, courage, and compassion.
BOSIO: You suggest that the “purpose of pursuing GCE is to transform
oneself and contribute to the world”. Can you discuss how this may be
translated into pedagogical practices in higher education, for exam-
ple, in the classes that you teach currently and taught in the past?
GUAJARDO: When I was invited to join Soka University in Japan, I was
new to the task of teaching undergraduates and graduate students. As
an experienced facilitator, I brought a facilitative learning approach
to the classroom and proceeded to conduct each class as a training
session. Every 90-minute class period became an opportunity to cre-
ate an experience; to draw out my students’ curiosity and support
them in connecting head to heart. Connecting head to heart entails
connecting knowledge and personal experience. We come into the
learning context as individuals with an accumulation of experiences
that have shaped who we are, what we believe, and what matters to
us. We are not empty vessels. Therefore, making this connection of
knowledge to who we are is a process of making meaning of what
one is learning.
Implementing strategies for building trust, building community,
and developing agency through the engagement of students on issues
related to culture, power, and identity, was my goal for teaching
176 Maria Guajardo
and learning. Working with the experiences presented by students
and my own, the aforementioned issues were connected to being and
knowing, analyzed through the lens of becoming more human. GCE
was presented as an experience, an array of options for perceiving the
world, coupled with an intention for contributing to the greater good.
It was not tied to one nation or state, but rather, it encompassed the
interconnectedness of the individual to the whole. One cannot exist
without the other, and, in fact, only exists because of the other. The
complexity of being human, becoming, and knowing, is a narrative
of hope and transformation (Ikeda, 1996) and my goal as an educa-
tor is to create a learning environment imbued with this spirit.
Exercises and activities are introduced in the university classroom
setting designed to stimulate critical thinking about self and the
environment. To illustrate, in one exercise to expand on one’s
understanding of self and others, students walk into the classroom
and are asked to stand next to the person they believe is most dif-
ferent from them. Students hesitate to select someone, fearful of
pointing out differences in a society where different is often seen
negatively. Once students are in pairs, they engage in a structured
dialogue to share who they are and learn about the other person.
Students often remark that they had longed to speak to someone
“different” and this exercise provided them with their first mean-
ingful dialogue with someone perceived as different from them.
This exercise often prompts the discovery that they share many
things in common with the “different” person. Thus begins the
process of learning about self and others, building trust, and vul-
nerability, the initial building blocks of a learning community.
I work to engage students in small group work, and large class-
room activities, to get to know themselves relative to concepts, such
as democracy and leadership. For example, students are placed on a
team of ten and given instructions to complete a task. In one case,
the task was to hold a five-feet long rod, as a team, with each mem-
ber using only one finger and having the rod lay flat across all fin-
gers. Working together, the team’s goal was to lower the rod to the
ground. Each team struggled to balance the lightweight rod and after
15 minutes, the teams were not successful in completing the task.
The discussion that followed connected the team process to the real-
life experience of working with a group to accomplish a shared goal.
What role does each individual assume? Who stepped into a leader-
ship role? How did one deal with frustration? Upon reflection, partic-
ipants questioned their abilities in achieving team goals, challenging
themselves to move past frustration and despair. The transformative
experience occurs in the debriefing session where participants are
challenged to connect the activity to their own experiences outside
of the classroom. Students are asked, “How does this exercise mirror
the real world?” New realizations emerge as students discuss the
challenges in approaching real-world problems.
BOSIO: Your conceptualization of GCE seems to focus on the two
notions of becoming and the knowing leading to action. How do
these dimensions relate to students’ global learning?
GUAJARDO: Global learning is the practice of becoming aware of the
diversity and richness of multiple countries, cultures, and people on
this planet, while recognizing one’s own contribution to that diver-
sity. Through this awareness, students are challenged to understand
their place in the world, relative to others. In my university classes,
there are typically 50% international students and 50% domestic
Japanese students. Currently, in one class of 22 students, there
are 11 countries represented and a total of 14 languages are spo-
ken. Interestingly, students report that there are few opportunities
to connect across countries. International students often keep to
themselves, and domestic Japanese students do the same. Exposure
to others is necessary but not sufficient for engagement to occur
between students. Meaningful engagement in the classroom allows
students to begin to learn about themselves and others, in a commu-
nity and as individuals.
Students learn of the Ubuntu concept, a Zulu phrase that is often
translated as – I am because you are (Ifejika, 2006). This phrase,
representative of African humanist philosophy, reflects that we exist
because of the other, sharing a common humanity. My challenge in
the classroom is to get students to understand who they are, and then
to share this understanding with the other, while also learning about
the other. For example, I will ask students to search for an object that
represents their culture, an object that is currently in their possession.
Students dig through their pockets, pocketbooks, and backpacks,
struggling to select a cultural item. Oftentimes, the first comment is,
“I don’t have anything.” Encouraged to keep searching, every student
will inevitably find a cultural item. In small groups, they then share
how that object reflects their culture, the significance of this cultural
object, and how they view the world through a cultural frame of ref-
erence. These diverse cultural frames are then linked to the topics or
concepts of the course. For many students, this is the first time they
are examining how their cultural upbringing shapes their worldview.
The classroom becomes a safe community in which to share these
new learnings, linking the personal to the global.
BOSIO: You seem to suggest that GCE is transformative in its essence.
In this perspective, what is the role of the teacher? What is the role
of the learner?
GUAJARDO: Broadly speaking, the role of teachers is to challenge stu-
dents to search for new knowledge, new understanding, and new
awareness; then to challenge them to critically engage with the
178 Maria Guajardo
world based on this new knowledge. My role as an educator is to
hold the space for reflection, dialogue, ambivalence, and to raise
questions with no easy answers; all in the pursuit of nurturing the
development of global citizens, individuals striving to become bet-
ter human beings, connecting to the world, and contributing to the
greater good. The role of learners is to trust in the learning process,
while at the same time engaging and contributing, based on their
past experiences and unique perspectives.
Exercises, dialogue, and discussion are aimed at connecting head
and heart. Following a model of leadership education, knowledge,
praxis, and reflection are the three elements introduced in my
approach to GCE. Students are exposed to knowledge and encour-
aged to share their own. Praxis in leadership education is the oppor-
tunity to put theory into action. Reflection allows for the integration
of knowledge and praxis, leading to the creation of new knowledge
and new meaning.
Students are always encouraged to weigh in on the familiar
knowledge and experiences from their own cultural backgrounds.
This cultural perspective is viewed as a strength and asset and con-
tributes to the learning experience. For example, if the class topic
is the intersection of religion and politics, students are encouraged
to share in small groups their experience from their home country.
Beliefs and assumptions are opened to discussion and students are
often encouraged to imagine new perspectives and new possibilities.
BOSIO: You also emphasize dialogue as a crucial element in fostering the
global citizen. How would you incorporate dialogue into the GCE
curriculum?
GUAJARDO: Incorporating the practice of dialogue into the curriculum
reflects the teaching pedagogy one embraces, as opposed to curric-
ular content. My teaching philosophy is based on the perspective
of connecting head and heart, and thus, learning experiences that
facilitate this connection are important to what happens in the class-
room. Freire’s Dialogical Theory of Action is based on communica-
tion and cooperation, necessary for understanding and changing the
world (Rugut and Osman, 2013). Dialogue is central to cultivating
student agency (Bajaj & Vlad, 2018); and as such, is a creative act
that is communal and relational. Humanizing dialogues “empower
the individual and the group to shift from passive acceptance to
restorative action” (p. 74), thus contributing to the learning experi-
ence. In every class, students engage in structured dialogues, prac-
tice listening, reflection, and how to share.
Through this process, students learn how to dialogue, and prac-
tice being authentic. This authenticity leads to strengthened rela-
tionships. Key to effective dialogue is the act of listening with
intentionality (Siegel & Gaudelli, 2018; Yokota, 2007). In my work
with students, I teach a method of structured dialogue, where stu-
dents assume the role of a listener and are given specific instructions
to listen to understand, not to respond. Students are instructed to
give 100% of their undivided attention to their partner. The seat-
ing arrangement involves two chairs facing each other, with right
corners touching. This places students in close proximity to one
another, with no table or desk as an obstruction.
Humanizing dialogues are transformational and “they involve
learning to question, gaining awareness, accepting diversity,
strengthening democracy, and transforming individuals from object
into subject” (Bajaj and Vlad, p. 74). As Ikeda shared in his 2019
Peace Proposal, “The process of dialogue and the cultivation of
mutual understanding never fail to generate fresh energy and a more
ideal path toward a better future for the world” (p. 28). Therefore,
when GCE includes structured dialogue as a pedagogical tool, the
learning experience expands for students and the instructor.
BOSIO: Maria, you have significant experience teaching at the university
level in the context of Japan and beyond. Why is GCE necessary in
the modern university, particularly in Japan?
GUAJARDO: GCE will prove foundational for the mission of higher edu-
cation, both in Japan and in other countries. Living at a time when
the distinction between nationalism and globalization is negligi-
ble, how we learn to be in relationship with others is at the crux of
higher education. Furthermore, equity and inclusion of all is needed
now more than ever. Fostering the strength of both men and women,
cultivating the wisdom of young and old, harnessing innovation and
creativity, and leading with compassion and dignity will provide
hope for new possibilities.
Japan is a country striving for greatness. Similar to other nations,
this greatness can only emerge when the oppression of gender, national
origin, and age is diminished. While Japan is not unique in fueling dis-
parities at the intersection of race, gender, and age; it does lend itself
to unique challenges given its history of exclusion, domination, and
authoritarianism. Furthermore, international students are actively
being sought to attend universities in Japan. Many students are from
multiethnic backgrounds and are grappling with understanding their
own self-identity. The intersection of multiple nationalities exempli-
fies the complexity of their experiences. Two experiences capture
this complexity that weighs on student learning on a daily basis. One
female student shared that she just realized that she will always be a
minority. She is from Indonesia, of Chinese heritage. The Chinese
in Indonesia are an ethnic minority group. She struggles with the
idea of understanding her role in the world, given her new perspec-
tive of her minority status. Another student has three nationali-
ties. His father is Chinese, mother is Japanese, and he was born in
180 Maria Guajardo
Australia; and he is fluent in English and Japanese. He asked the
question – where do I belong to?
Teaching in Japan has allowed me to deeply appreciate the impor-
tance of understanding one’s identity, relative to history, culture,
and power. Higher education is the sector with the possibility of
bridging across differences, while also prioritizing the need to
deepen one’s understanding of self.
educators toward GCE in higher education, particularly in Japanese
universities?
GUAJARDO: The concept of globalization in higher education has
been actively promoted in Japanese universities by the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for
the past two decades. Grant-funded initiatives, such as Go Global
and Top Global University Project, are two initiatives designed to
increase the internationalization of universities, with one strategy
being the recruitment of international students and another the
preparation of students for an international workforce. Criticism of
these programs includes that the internationalization concept is lim-
ited to learning English, and not necessarily to learning competen-
cies and creating a more inclusive culture/environment, or a global
mindset for Japan’s workforce. The goal of becoming more global is
interpreted as producing more English speakers and providing more
students with an opportunity for study abroad, neither of which will
necessarily change the culture in Japanese work environments to be
more inclusive.
As universities strive to become more global, English Medium
Instruction (EMI) courses have become more popular. The deliv-
ery of content courses in English had proven to be a source of ten-
sion amongst faculty members who are now being asked to teach
content courses in English. While a Japanese faculty member may
speak English, the request to teach a content course in English is not
something they are prepared or equipped to do. Teaching students,
for whom English is a second language, requires additional training
and resources. Faculty members have been ill-equipped to meet the
demand, thus leading to a negative attitude about top-down man-
dates to become more global. Given this context, the comprehensive
nature of GCE is nuanced in a manner that is difficult to align with
MEXT goals or pronouncements.
BOSIO: How can GCE be made suitable for or attractive to students stud-
ying in Japanese universities? What knowledge, skills, values, dispo-
sitions, and experiences are graduates expected to acquire in order to
become “global citizens”? Is GCE in the modern university, particu-
larly in Japanese universities, more about knowledge, skills, values,
dispositions, or some combination of all four in your opinion?
GUAJARDO: International companies, along with futurists, are promot-
ing the need for competencies that Japanese higher education is
ill-prepared to deliver. At the Global Forum, 2019 conference held
in Tokyo in August (Global Forum, 2019), perspectives from CEOs
and top economists were offered on Japan’s preparedness for glo-
balization. Every speaker agreed that Japan and its education sys-
tem were lacking in preparing a new workforce. Corporate leaders
cited the need for critical thinking skills, along with the skill to offer
dissenting opinions, embrace diversity, expand global perspectives,
ability to articulate a vision, and a strategic mindset. Risk-taking
must be reconsidered. In a typical Japanese company, it is difficult
to take risks; being risk-averse is embedded in the culture of the
Japanese organization. Studies report that the incoming workforce,
whether recognized as millennials or Generation Z, are seeking to
have impact in the world, they want to have a purpose.
GCE, by definition, imbues value and purpose. The value of
becoming a global citizen is in becoming a “contributive” human
being. The knowledge, skills, values, and experiences gained in a
traditional educational experience become meaningful when they
are grounded in the act of contributing to a greater good. Developing
a specific skill set is insufficient. GCE is an act of transformation at
the individual and societal level.
skills, values, and disposition) be identified?
GUAJARDO: When GCE is understood as an act of transformation,
assessment serves to capture both the process of change and the out-
come of change. Assessment, therefore, is both iterative and form-
ative. In my courses, students write and speak on the change they
are experiencing. Exposure to new experiences, such as structured
dialogue, is examined during reflection exercises, both oral and
written. Students are taught how to reflect and are encouraged to
engage in reflection on a weekly basis. After 15 weeks, the length of
a semester at my university, students reflect on the semester experi-
ence, changes in themselves, their perspective, and are asked to iden-
tify takeaways, learning that has been embraced. In some courses, I
ask students to write a letter to themselves on the first day of class; a
letter that includes expectations, hopes, fears, and dreams. The letter
is placed in a sealed envelope and self-addressed. I collect the letters
and store them away. At the end of the semester, I return to students
their letters and ask them to read them silently in class and then
share reflections on what was read. What was the same or different?
What had transpired in 15 weeks? What had they learned about
themselves, from how they started the semester until now, the end
of the semester? Inevitably, there is shock and amazement, and often
tears. Students often share that they are not the same person from
182 Maria Guajardo
15 weeks ago and go on to reflect on their own learning and trans-
formation. I close with the question – What will you do differently
as a result of this class experience?
BOSIO: You are substantially advocating for a humanistic and transform-
ative approach to GCE. In this view, what are three themes a higher
education curriculum for GCE should include in your opinion?
GUAJARDO: GCE involves a way of becoming and knowing. Based on
the premise that I am because we are, and we are because I am, the
interconnectedness that exists between individuals locally and glob-
ally needs to be a driver in education. Therefore, GCE can provide
the pathway toward a more humanistic approach to education; an
approach that promotes individual and societal transformation. As
educators, our role is to create a learning environment that allows
students to learn how to heighten their level of comfort for dealing
with the complexity of the world. Our job is not to simplify the world
to a level that allows us to feel comfort. Freire and Ikeda share a
humanistic approach to education, both promoting the need to create
value in the world. Standing on their shoulders, my goal is to create
value in the classroom, with every student and in every interaction.
12.6 Conclusion
Raising the next generation of global leaders for a world that does
not yet exist is the task of educators; and it is a responsibility that I
take very seriously. Fostering and developing global citizens through a
humanistic approach is one pathway to this goal, thus contributing to
a more just and peaceful world. Through a process of becoming more
human and knowing oneself and others, one can take contributive
action. Humanistic thought leaders, such as Freire, Harding, Ikeda, and
Noddings were introduced as individuals who have widened the path
of humanism, presenting perspective, values, and priorities that guide
the process of becoming and knowing. As learners prepare for a new
world, GCE provides a direction for the educational experience in learn-
ing communities.
This transformational work is facilitated through a dialogic process,
a process of connecting and relating to others. Dialogue is a relational
experience that can be transformative; pushing one to be courageous and
compassionate with others; developing trust and revealing one’s vulnera-
bilities. In a world that is promoting connections via technology instead
of person-to-person, as educators and learners, we must be mindful of
not losing sight of continually connecting head and heart. Guided by the
values of courage, wisdom, and compassion, the purpose of becoming a
global citizen is in becoming a contributive human being, a goal worthy
of our work as educators.
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as a Metacritical Pedagogy
Concluding Reflections
Emiliano Bosio
13.1 Introduction
Global citizenship education (GCE) as described by the scholars in this
book could offer educators and students new knowledge, values, and
different future visions that do not adhere to straightforward narratives
of economic development (but still are critically engaged with its narra-
tive) (Bosio, 2020). I call this a metacritical GCE pedagogy. A metacriti-
cal position can be seen as a form of metacriticism of GCE: “A criticism
of criticism, the goal of which is to scrutinize systematically the termi-
nology, logic, and structure that undergird critical and theoretical dis-
course in general or any particular mode of such discourse” (Henderson
& Brown, 1997, p. 77).
The metacritical GCE I propose in the final chapter of this book is
oriented within a paradigm of value-pluralism. The notion of value-
pluralism (also known as ethical-pluralism) is that there are multiple
forms of knowledge and values that are both equally important for stu-
dent development yet conflicting in their shared space (Bosio, 2019). The
robust form of value-pluralism I envision in the metacritical framework
for GCE moves from compatibility as a possibility to the various types
of critical networks and diverse GCE ethical systems that are engaged
with each other.
Therefore, I propose the metacritical GCE (see Figure 13.1) as ingrained
into the following principles:
1 Conscientization and social justice rooted in critical pedagogy

2 Postcoloniality, conviviality, and planetary citizenship
3 Global skills, critical semiotics, and critical engagement with
neoliberalism
4 Flourishing, awareness, responsibility, participation, and humanism
As I illustrate in Figure 13.1, a metacritical GCE demands a political

“conscientization”, constantly reconstructing and engaging in a way that
educators have not always encouraged. As Henry Giroux and I discussed
186 Emiliano Bosio
Figure 13.1 Principles of Metacritical Global Citizenship Education.
in our chapter, this means supporting students to understand that collec-

tive responsibility matters, democracy matters, social justice matters, and
the social contact and the welfare state matter. In this view, metacritical
GCE has a social justice orientation as it offers students a jumping-off
point to reject the paradigms of higher education that are justified by eco-
nomics and instrumentalism, demanding that education should be effi-
cient and its outcomes justified by hard evidence. With GCE constructed
from a point of view of critical pedagogy, no student would be ignorant of
or accepting of social injustice. Students would be given support to iden-
tify and transform the division paradigms of North/South, Indigenous/
nonindigenous, white/black/brown that represent paternalism, ethno-
centrism, depoliticization, ahistoricism and hegemony (Bosio & Torres,
2019; Torres & Bosio, 2020a; Torres & Bosio, 2020b). A metacritical
GCE would also support students to develop a non-killing attitude;
that is, a profound commitment to nonviolence through a philosophy of
non-killing originating from the transformative power of each and all
faiths and philosophies (Bosio, 2017a; 2017b).
A metacritical GCE also involves educators offering students the
opportunity to engage in principles of otherwise/postcoloniality, con-
viviality, and planetary citizenship. Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti
describe the notion of “GCE/Otherwise”, or a means to cultivate par-
ticular values in learners (e.g. postcolonial views) that will then deter-
mine their actions. In this case, a metacritical GCE also incorporates an
opportunity to invite learners to deepen their intellectual engagements,
sensitize themselves to the complexities and contradictions involved
in making change, and develop a more expansive sense of entangle-
ment with the world. Similarly, the notion of conviviality in relation
to metacritical GCE highlights that supporting students to understand
that building good relationships with other people, communities, spe-
cies is pivotal as described by Lynette Shultz in her chapter. It lifts the
cloud of individualism that has settled on people through the hegemony
of neoliberal ideology, making it difficult to see that we have a shared
planet and a shared future. In addition, a metacritical GCE includes
Silvia, Eduardo, and Josefina Moraes’s notion of planetary citizenship
where students are encouraged to understand that a culture of coexist-
ence is a primary necessity in today’s world. This approach arises as a
dialectic response to global citizenship, stemming from the realization
that the different human identities and ways of being are expressions of
the inherent richness and diversity of the human soul. Metacritical GCE
also involves pedagogical encounters which are deliberative, iterative,
and equal as Yusef Waghid suggested in his chapter.
However, the approaches suggested above are more effective if they
can be combined with the development of students’ global skills for
social justice, critical semiotics, and critical engagement with neolib-
eralism. Within the discussions on the possibilities to conceptualize
a metacritical GCE, the notion of global skills and its relationship to
global citizenship, there is a need to encourage learning that not only
recognizes the different ways skills can be interpreted but also to bring
in themes of global social justice and global responsibility as suggested
by Douglas Bourn in his chapter. Developing students’ global skills in a
metacritical GCE need to be much more than skills for employment in
the global marketplace, but skills for life and skills to make sense of the
impact of globalization on our daily lives. Within this broader interpre-
tation of global skills, a connection to global citizenship debates emerges
particularly if the theme of global social justice is included.
This should also include, as suggested by Massimiliano Tarozzi,
advancing a non-neutral notion of GCE oriented toward global social
justice which considers GCE not only new educational content, as a mere
extension of the citizenship’s concept from the national to the global
level, but a new perspective that allows policy-makers and practitioners
188 Emiliano Bosio
to reconceptualize old issues within a new educational perspective by
combining inter-multicultural education with a perspective of educa-
tion to environmental sustainability and providing new meanings to the
problems of citizenship in global, plural and heterogeneous societies. In
addition to this, a metacritical GCE incorporates the notion of semi-
otics, firmly rooted in Philosophy, Logic and Science as described by
Maureen Ellis in her chapter. Semiotics in metacritical GCE adds values
through the science of signs, insight into how signs emerge and develop
into symbols, in short how meaning is made. Framing Ellis’ views on
semiotics in the context of metacritical GCE vision, attention to mean-
ing means a renewed interest in the individual developing consciousness,
the sources of a learner’s beliefs and opinions, the power of conversation,
the internal processing of what is presented to learners, the incremental
absorption process, or as Miri Yemini concludes in her chapter, an open
and continuous process, where all the participating actors are actively
involved which will develop graduates who will critically engage with
neoliberalism and internationalization, while fighting for more equate
and just society locally and globally.
Furthermore, the process of conscientization and social justice devel-
opment via metacritical GCE develops students’ “flourishing”, aware-
ness, responsibility, participation, and humanistic ideals. In his chapter
William Gaudelli explains that part of flourishing is for learners to fully
use one’s mind and capacities. The value of flourishing as an aim is
that it unites students’ personal desire for attainment and achievement
while helping to build the social capacity of all people as we encourage
the growth of each other. This is fundamental to being human and
developing one’s ability to think, to know, to reason and to feel points
always outward and beyond. A metacritical GCE also incorporates
Hans Schattle’s notions of awareness, responsibility, and participation.
As he suggests one way to develop students’ awareness, responsibility,
and participation is by offering courses that look at the world as truly
interconnected, as a single interdependent unit, and across a wide range
of issues – economic development, food and agriculture, environmental
degradation and global warming, poverty, public health, immigration,
security risks such as nuclear proliferation and suicide terrorism. Another
important perspective that a metacritical GCE implements is Maria
Guajardo’s perspective; this is rooted in humanistic and transforma-
tional elements which include students’ becoming more human, know-
ing self and others; and praxis – taking action. These elements would
create a learning environment that fosters individual transformation.
Lastly, it is clear that developing pedagogical frameworks like the
metacritical I proposed in this chapter will have limitations and be open
to criticism. These frameworks tend to stress basic understanding and
to conflate many issues of considerable complexity, place more stress on
ideals without undertaking in-depth practice and curriculum analysis.
Also, they might lack consideration for or recognition of alternative
regional or national cultures. Any framework for the classification
description of theory and practice, including that for GCE I proposed in
this chapter, will always be susceptible to being criticized. Nevertheless,
in order to contrast market-driven only approaches to GCE it is imper-
ative that we constantly redefine what GCE means in fostering the kind
of citizens needed to engage actively in the creation of world peace today
and to attain the transformations imperative for achieving more just
societies. I am of the opinion that this vision needs to be transferred
holistically as an ideal aim of university core curricula, not separately
labelled as an “international programme”. A metacritical GCE has
therefore at its heart notions of knowledge and values as infinitely inter-
dependent and endlessly engaging, for, as Heisenberg suggests (as cited
in Bosio, 2020, p. 203): “The existing scientific concepts cover always
only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet
been understood is infinite.”
References
Bosio, E. (2017a). Educating for global citizenship and fostering a nonkilling atti-
tude. In J. Evans Pim, & S. H. Rico (Eds.), Nonkilling education (pp. 59–70).
Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling.
Bosio, E. (2017b). How do we create transformative global citizens? University World
News, December 1. Accessed July 4 2020: https://www.universityworldnews.com/
post.php?story=20171129082744388
Bosio, E. (2019). The need for a values-based university curriculum. University World
News, September 28. Accessed July 4 2020: https://www.universityworldnews.
com/post.php?story=2019092415204357
framework in the modern university. In D. Bourn (Ed.), Bloomsbury hand-
book for global education and learning (pp. 187–206). London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Bosio, E., & Torres, C. A. (2019). Global citizenship education: An educa-
tional theory of the common good? A conversation with Carlos Alberto
Torres. Policy Futures in Education, 17(6), 745–760. https://doi.org/10.1177/
1478210319825517
Torres, C. A., & Bosio, E. (2020a). Global citizenship education at the crossroads:
Globalization, global commons, common good and critical consciousness.
Prospects. Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning, and Assessment.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-019-09458-w
Torres, C. A., & Bosio, E. (2020b). Critical reflections on the notion of global cit-
izenship education. A dialogue with Carlos Alberto Torres in relation to higher
education in the United States. Encyclopaideia, 24(56), 107–117. doi: https://
doi.org/10.6092/issn.1825-8670/10742
Index
ActionAid 40 Critical Global Educator 109

awareness 34, 77, 106, 124, 144, Critical Global Semiotics 104, 108
148, 149, 151, 154, 156, 160, 161, Critical Realism 108
162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, curriculum 28, 33, 35, 38, 42, 45,
172, 177, 184, 185, 189 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59,
61, 63, 77, 85, 87, 86, 88, 102,
Brazil 45, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117,
Brazilian 45, 49, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 128, 131, 142, 143, 149, 151, 167,
61, 75, 76 169, 178, 182, 190
Britain 110, 153
citizenship 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, decolonial 35, 37, 42
40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, democracy 27, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71,
54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 59, 61, 162, 164, 176, 183, 186
62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, Desmond Tutu 64
78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, dialectic 104
88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 103, dialogue 57, 58, 76, 81, 83, 92, 113,
104, 106, 107, 102, 104, 108, 110, 118, 151, 173, 172, 173, 174, 176,
120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 178, 181, 183, 184, 189
132, 134, 140, 142, 143, 147, 153, Donald Trump 75
154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 161,
163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, Earth CARE’s Global Justice
170, 172, 173, 171, 184, 185, Framework 15
187, 189 ecological 28, 29, 34, 50, 55, 91,
civil society 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 83, 120, 140
109, 167, 184 ethical 37, 40, 44, 75, 94, 112, 139,
colonialism 27, 35, 38, 40, 41 162, 167, 185, 189
competencies 50, 75, 76, 79, 84, 85, ethics 40, 43, 51, 112, 113, 139, 150,
100, 124, 125, 131, 181 163
conviviality 37, 38, 42, 43, 185, 187 Europe 41, 75, 76, 77, 92, 96,
cosmopolitan 67, 69, 71, 79, 80, 85, 98, 104, 105, 106, 111, 142,
164, 172 145, 151
COVID-19 89, 140, 142, 169 European 38, 40, 41, 47, 77, 88, 92,
critical 25, 26, 28, 29, 53, 54, 55, 93, 96, 100, 106, 110, 121, 129,
59, 60, 64, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 134, 142, 145, 153, 159, 160, 162,
85, 88, 94, 98, 102, 104, 102, 103, 168, 169
104, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, European Union 77, 153, 159, 162
118, 119, 120, 123, 128,132, 143,
162, 163, 172, 174, 176, 181, 183, Faculty of International Liberal
185, 186, 187, 189 Arts 174
Index 191
Gesturing Towards Decolonial Intercultural Graduation Courses 56
Futures 17 internationalization 87, 100, 123, 124,
global citizen 27, 33, 37, 41, 52, 70, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 189
79, 80, 86, 88, 115, 130, 143, 153, Israel 123, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131,
154, 156, 164, 166, 167, 170, 174, 132, 133
178, 181, 182
global citizenship 30, 37, 40, 62, 75, Kant 106
76, 79, 81, 86, 87, 86, 89, 94, 102,
132, 140, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, Latin America 75, 92, 158
160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, Latin American Institute for
187 Education and Communication
global citizenship education 37, 62, (ILPEC) 45
76, 88, 89, 98, 104, 106, 107, 102, Learner autonomy 112
132, 134, 160, 173, 189 Makiguchi 88, 171
global issues 40, 43, 76, 77, 83, 84, Masters Programme on Development
87, 92, 98, 108, 115, 141, 151, 154, Education and Global
162, 166, 171 Learning 84
global learning 42, 76, 77, 79, 88, metacritical 185, 186, 187, 189
146, 147, 148, 177
Global Social Justice Framework 90, Nelson Mandela 64
98, 104 neoliberal 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 80,
global south 169 85, 86, 98, 104, 124, 125, 131,
globalization 38, 41, 43, 52, 54, 75, 187
80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 93, 94, 98, 105, neoliberalism 41, 123, 124, 128,
125, 137, 138, 151, 157, 162, 164 131, 134, 158, 164, 185, 189
New York Times 145, 151
Habermas 107 Noddings 173, 171, 182, 184
Hannah Arendt 173
Henry Giroux 76, 186 OECD 79
heteroglossic 104 oppressed 64
higher education 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, Oxford 159
38, 40, 42, 56, 59, 69, 75, 76, 79,
participation 63, 69, 85, 119, 138,
85, 86, 87, 88, 98, 100, 102, 109,
140, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 163,
111, 115, 123, 125, 127, 128, 130,
164, 167, 169, 170, 185, 189
131, 132, 134, 142, 148, 166, 169,
Paulo Freire 40, 45, 49, 76, 172, 173,
175, 181, 182, 186, 189
183, 184
holistic 104
pedagogy 30, 37, 38, 49, 71, 76, 81,
house modernity built 13
86, 88, 90, 104, 105, 107, 113,
human development 107, 117, 146,
131, 173, 178, 183, 185, 186
173
philosophy 43, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 70,
human flourishing 137, 138, 139,
104, 109, 149, 160, 163, 177, 178,
140, 144, 146, 147, 150
186
human rights 33, 62, 64, 67, 70, 77,
planetary 45
91, 93, 96, 108, 140, 141, 146, 152,
populism 96, 153, 164
154, 156, 159, 168, 169, 170, 183
postcolonial 35, 47, 80, 90, 94, 98,
humanity 27, 51, 54, 62, 66, 67, 94,
102, 128, 187
96, 113, 116, 146, 156, 166, 172,
programme 88, 110, 131, 189
173, 175, 177
responsibility 34, 35, 42, 66, 67, 69,
Ikeda 88, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 130, 154, 156,
176, 182, 183, 184 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167,
Indigenous 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 41, 168, 169, 170, 172, 182, 185, 186,
42, 54, 56 187, 189
192 Index
Semiotics 110 transformation 41, 43, 47, 63, 64, 81,
skills 30, 32, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 109, 110, 131, 132, 171, 172, 173,
58, 59, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 175, 176, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189
86, 87, 86, 88, 89, 100, 102, 104, Transformational Model of Social
115, 124, 125, 126, 131, 143, Activity (TMSA) 108
148, 149, 150, 168, 181, 185, 187 Truth and Reconciliation
social cartography 15 Commission 64
social change 23, 75, 77, 104,
UCL-Institute of Education 84
172, 175
UNESCO 44, 76, 79, 89, 90, 96,
social justice 76
106, 102, 104, 122, 183
society 35, 38, 40, 47, 51, 52, 54, 60,
United States 77, 153, 157, 158,
59, 66, 67, 69, 77, 81, 83, 86, 93,
160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 173,
115, 120, 124, 125, 126, 130, 132,
175, 189
137, 138, 139, 146, 147, 151, 170,
university 32, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43,
175, 176, 189
45, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59,
Soka University 174, 175
60, 61, 64, 67, 68, 71, 85, 87, 100,
South Africa 43, 62, 63, 64, 67,
106, 103, 104, 118, 121, 128, 130,
69, 70
131, 143, 147, 148, 149, 154, 161,
South Korea 104, 166, 167, 168
164, 166, 167, 168, 173, 174, 175,
Sustainable Development Goals 140
176, 177, 181, 183, 189
systemic 104
University of Alberta 40
Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL) 103 values 30, 32, 41, 47, 54, 55, 57, 58,
Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS) 59, 60, 66, 71, 76, 80, 81, 86, 87, 90,
108 93, 94, 96, 102, 107, 112, 114, 115,
131, 148, 149, 150, 168, 171, 175,
Thomas Pogge 137, 146 181, 182, 185, 187, 189

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Conversations on Global

This volume offers a remarkable collection of theoretically and practi-

Emiliano Bosio is a Senior Lecturer at Tokyo Woman’s Christian Univer-

1 Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Critical Global

2 Educating the Global Environmental Citizen

3 The Struggle for Citizenship Education in Egypt

4 Teacher Education for Sustainable Development and Global

5 Exploring the Complexities in Global Citizenship Education

6 Conversations on Global Citizenship Education

Edited by Emiliano Bosio

ISBN: 978-0-367-36544-8 (hbk)

List of Figures and Tablesvii

1 Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship Education3

2 Global Citizenship Otherwise13

3 Global Citizenship Education as a Counter Colonial

4 From Global to Planetary Citizenship: A Proposal

5 Cultivating Global Citizenship Education and Its

6 Global Skills and Global Citizenship Education 75

7 Educating for Global Citizenship in Diverse

8 Global Citizenship Education as Critical Global Semiotics 103

9 Intersections of Neoliberalism, Internationalization,

10 Flourishing and Global Citizenship Education 137

11 Global Citizenship Education as Awareness,

12 Global Citizenship Education and Humanism:

13 Global Citizenship Education as a Metacritical

Vanessa Andreotti is a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race,

“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the

In this book of conversations, Professor Emiliano Bosio raises several

“The moral qualities of dialogue or deliberation account for yet

“While the World may be increasingly interconnected, human rights

Dialogical practices are central to address how education (and, particularly,

Carlos Alberto Torres

Educators form a cohort whose working life regularly interacts with

Distinctiveness of the Book

1 Educators who are seeking to develop their theoretical understand-

From this point of view, the purpose of the conversations is to offer

Main Themes and Structure of the Book

Critical Views in Global

1.2 Dialogue with Henry A. Giroux

Figure 2.1 In Earth’s CARE Global Justice Framework.

2.2 Dialogue with Sharon Stein and Vanessa Andreotti

• Illusions related to human-centeredness, merit, innocence, and

If we are facing problems of denial rather than problems of ignorance,

House subsidised & maintained

Modern Promise Colonial Process

Roof: global Continuous growth Racialized expropriation and

What can individuals do to contribute toward that? As well, the

• beyond modern forms of social economy (e.g. capitalism and

We have embedded this curricular approach in several courses at our

Table 2.3 LAPSED Approaches to Social Justice and Change

(heroic) Framing oneself or a particular person or population as

1 The systemic colonial violence that underwrites the mainte-

There is significant potential for GCE to contribute to the prepa-

• Deepen analyses of historical and systemic forms of violence

• Become comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort.

• Work through the complexities of relationships with people who

• Interrupt patterns of consumption of knowledges, experiences,

• Reflect on the challenges of global justice from different cultural

BOSIO: Ultimately, what are three themes a higher education curriculum

• Identify and transform problematic ongoing patterns of North/

3.2 Dialogue with Lynette Shultz

4.2 Evolution of a Planetary Citizenship in Brazil

4.3 Conversation with Silvia Elisabeth Moraes, Eduardo

List of Figures and Tablesvii

1 Critical Pedagogy and Global Citizenship Education3

2 Global Citizenship Otherwise13

6 Global Skills and Global Citizenship Education 75

8 Global Citizenship Education as Critical Global Semiotics 103

10 Flourishing and Global Citizenship Education 137

4.3 Conversation with Silvia Elisabeth Moraes, Eduardo

6.2 Development and Global Education,

6.3 Global Citizenship Education as a

8.2 Five Critical Realism Concepts as Foundational

12.2 Becoming via Global Citizenship

12.3 Knowing via Global Citizenship