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Project background

Ambitions and Constructions of Global Citizenship Education: Critical Readings from the University of Alberta Ali A. Abdi & Lynette Shultz, Co-Directors, Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research ( CGCER) University of Alberta . Project background.

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Project background

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  1. Ambitions and Constructions of Global Citizenship Education: Critical Readings from the University of AlbertaAli A. Abdi & Lynette Shultz, Co-Directors, Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research (CGCER) University of Alberta

  2. Project background • Emerged out of University of Alberta’s explicit commitment to fostering student excellence in the area of global citizenship. • Builds upon President Samarasekera’s vision of the university as one which links the local and the global. • Responds to the challenge issued by the President’s office and echoed by students at the University of Alberta, to create educational initiatives which foreground a global perspective and foster global citizenship.

  3. Vision Our vision is that the U of A is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of global citizenship and international education. Every University of Alberta undergraduate student will have access to global citizenship education curricula that reflect excellence in research and teaching. These educational opportunities will result in the development of students who are able to contribute to building a more democratic, peaceful, environmentally secure and just world.

  4. Mission statement Global Citizenship Curriculum Development’s mission is to engage in a participatory and interdisciplinary process that will facilitate the development of a shared understanding of global citizenship through a campus wide dialogue. This dialogue, coupled with the project’s own research, will contribute to the collaborative development of a unique curriculum which reflects excellence in global citizenship education and creates a sustainable international teaching and learning resource for the University of Alberta and beyond.

  5. Educating for global citizenship Developing students’ • Sense of their common humanity with all others. • Ability to recognize the connections between local and global events and to act upon this recognition for the common good. • Motivation and ability to participate in the world. • Ability to engage in critical reflection. • Understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship

  6. Structure of the project

  7. Possible quadrants of global citizenship Anti-globalization De-globalization Strong Structural Analysis Human Rights; diversity; multiple worldviews Building Diverse Community Building Community Weak Inter-Cultural Focus Strong Inter-Cultural Focus Economic and social Mobility Language skills Cultural competence Weak Structural Analysis

  8. To achieve global citizenship: citizenship education • For people to exercise good governance, must understand it (Dewey, 1926) • All education is citizenship education (Soltis, 1988) • Billions of de-citizenitized subjects everywhere (Mamdani; 1996; Abdi, 2008) to be re-educated • What should the citizenships mean for them; what of citizenship education would they need? • A new idea from the west? • An imposition of western ways of knowing and living? • A new assault on the possibilities of their redemption? • A new version of development, after the failure of the old one (Ake, 1996; Leys, 1996; Rist, 2003; Abdi, 2006)? • No, not exaggerating, just asking.

  9. Canadian/UofA students • Global citizens: how did that happen? A claim of space, the right to name/categorize • who assigned the status; were Africans or Asians, or Indigenous Canadians asked if they agree: the latter not yet certified as global citizens • If they are local students, what is the point • Global citizenship, local student: the learning locus de-globalizes the U of A subject? • Reframing the local-global imaginary: beyond the mobile citizen, you are joining, co-learning, co-developing, co-achieving

  10. Global citizenship education • Conceptual popularity: pre-21st century and now (Dewey, 1926; Oakeshott, 1954; critical theory; Freire, 2000 [1970]) • Current massive re-appearance: potentialities for thick shallowness in theoretical and practical constructions • Temporal reasons or theoretical ‘stylization’; indeed, • Dangers of the fashionable: recolonizing the terrain of citizenship and citizenship education, whose citizenship is this, any way? • Cultural superiority implicit in the uni-directional stories • New ‘end of history’: is this the last sky? Definitely more to global citizenship than the ‘liberal democratization’ of citizenship

  11. Students need to understand • Historical issues: • Primordial citizenship: taken away (Nyerere, 1968; Rodney, 1982; Abdi; 2008) • Power relations and citizenship: processes of de-citizenization(European vs. The Other): theorized, designed, achieved • Re-reading the longue durée effects of the colonial project in both physical and mental terms (waThiongo, 1986, 2009; Nandy, 1997) • New processes of in situ orientalization and possible schemes of subjugation (revisiting Said, 1978, 1993; Fanon, 1967, 1968; Nyerere, 1968, 1974; Achebe, 1958, 2000); Canadian Indigenous scholars describe epistemological genocide (Steeves, 2010; Sockbeson, 2011; Weber Pillwax 2009;2010; 2011) • Early, multi-epistemological platforms of citizenship: re-alignable ontological possibilities

  12. They need to appreciate the multi-centricities of the GC & GCE story • To qualify for some form of global citizens, students must be: • Bound by multi-directional readings of the world and the text • Bound by the descriptive and analytical humanization of the inter-discursive spaces • Bound by the radical equiticization of the living epistemic lines, harnessable paradigms, and the construction of contemporary meanings, needs and intentions • Bound by non-paternalizing ethical spaces that do not hybridize, but live difference • Bound, not by the rhetoric of charity, but by a genuine global ethic (Dower, 2002, 2008) that needs the world – ‘ubuntuization? Yes: in the spirit of the African philosophy of Ubuntu, before making assumptions or doing global citizenship, let us start by seeing our humanity through the humanity of others. That could assure the genuine understanding and relationship with other potential global citizens.

  13. What now for GCE in Higher Education? • creating ethical space to understand globalization, internationalization, and citizenship • Resisting the commodification of knowledge and citizens • Moving international partnerships and relationships from instrumentalized relations between education institutions toward partnerships that serve the social goals of education • possibilities of social justice in a world where international relations have too long been cemented in the centre-periphery dynamics of marginalization • U of A Transdisciplinary GC course; certificate; research and teaching collaborations

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