International Perspectives on Critical Global Citizenship Education

There is heightened consciousness around Global Citizenship Education in the international educational arena. It is included as a key principle of the UN Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI, n.d.). UNESCO (2014) has included global citizenship in the reaffirming fundamental principles and as a key imperative in its position paper on Education post-2015. It is a strong discourse framing international understandings of education at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels as well as in in informal education. In support of these developments there has been a growing amount of scholarly writing in educational journals, book compilations, conference papers, and symposiums devoted to GCE. Andreotti (2011) notices that “[t]he different meanings attributed to ‘global citizenship education’ depend on contextually situated assumptions about globalisation, citizenship and education that prompt questions about boundaries, flows, power relations, belonging, rights, responsibilities, otherness, interdependence, as well as social reproduction and/or contestation” (p. 307; see also Marshall, 2009, 2011). This symposium brings together scholars from across European and North American contexts working to theoretically map and practically engage with the critical possibilities in GCE.