Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Global Citizenship
Global Citizenship
CITIZENSHIP
Global Citizenship
Global Citizenship refers to the rights, responsibilities and
duties that come with being a member of global entity as a
citizen of a particular nation or place. The idea is that one’s
identity transcends geography or political borders and that
responsibilities or rights are derived from membership in a
boarder class: “humanity”.
Global Citizenship
In general usage, the term may have much the same
meaning as “world citizen” or cosmopolitan, but it also has
additional, specialized meanings in differing contexts.
Various organizations, such as the World Service Authority,
have advocated global citizenship.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
In education, the term is most often used to describe a
worldview or a set of values toward which education is
oriented.
Example: the priorities of the Global Education First
Initiative led by the Secretary- General of the United
Nations.
The term “global society” is sometimes used to indicate a
global studies set of learning objectives for students to
prepare them for global citizenship.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
1. Global Citizenship Education
Beginning to supersede or overarch movements
such as multicultural education, peace education,
human rights education, Education for sustainable
Development and international education.
Has been linked with awards offered for helping
humanity.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Critical and transformative perspective
GCED can be taught from a critical and transformative
perspective, whereby students are thinking, feeling, and
doing. In this approach, GCED requires students to be
politically critical and personally transformative. Teachers
provide social issues in a neutral and grade-appropriate way
for students to understand, grapple with, and do something
about.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Worldmindedness
Graham Pike and David Selby view GCED as having two
strands. Worldmindedness, the first strand, refers to
understanding the world as one unified system and a
responsibility to view the interests of individual nations with
the overall needs of the planet in mind. The second strand,
Child-centeredness, is a pedagogical approach that
encourages students to explore and discover on their own
and addresses each learner as an individual with inimitable
beliefs, experiences, and talents.
GCED Common Perspectives:
•Holistic Understanding
Founded by Merry Merryfield, focusing on understanding
the self in relation to a global community. The perspective
follows a curriculum that attends to human values and
beliefs, global systems, issues, history, cross-cultural
understandings, and the development of analytical and
evaluative skills.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
2. Global Citizenship as Used in Philosophy
It refers to a broad, culturally- and environmentally-inclusive
worldview that accepts the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
3. Global Citizenship as Used in Psychological Studies
Studies of the psychological roots of global citizenship have found
that persons high in global citizenship are also high on the
personality traits of openness to experiences and agreeableness
from the Big Five personality traits and high in empathy and caring.
Oppositely, the authoritarian personality, the social dominance
orientation and the psychopathy are all associated with less global
human identification
Individuals’ normative environment and global awareness predict
global citizenship identification.
Normative environment: cultural environment in which one
is embedded contains people, artifacts, cultural patterns
that promote viewing the self as a global citizen)
Global awareness: perceiving oneself as aware,
knowledgeable and connected to others in the world.
Global Citizenship as Used in
Education
4. Global Citizen is Used in other aspects: Geography, Sovereignty,
and Mere Citizenship
At the same time that globalization is reducing the importance of
nation-states, the idea of global citizenship may require a redefinition
of ties between civic engagement and geography. Face-to-face town
hall meetings seems increasingly supplanted by electronic “town
halls” not limited by space and time. Another interpretation of given
by several scholars of the changing configurations of citizenship
becomes a changed institution; even if situated within territorial
boundaries that are national, if the meaning of the national itself has
changed, then the meaning of being a citizen of that nation changes.