Connections and Relationships Within Global Citizenship Education

Abstract

This chapter presents, analyses and discusses empirical interview and focus group data collected from six Australian secondary schools in order to portray how senior leaders, teachers and students positioned various connections and relationships central to global citizenship education within their practices and experiences. The chapter is divided into two sections—(1) school leaders’ and teachers’ views and (2) students’ views—and three themes are surveyed in each. The first theme is how participants conceived the connections between local, national and global spheres of citizenship. The second theme explores how participants conceived engagement with diversity. The third theme concentrates on how participants positioned relations to/with others elsewhere in the world. Interrogation of the data highlights several significant considerations about how connections and relationships within global citizenship education were conceived by participants, including that in the main participants in the empirical research positioned different spheres of citizenship in fluid terms and spoke about engagement with diversity in wholly positive terms, editing out key sensitivities and tensions.