Global Citizenship Education: A Southern African Perspective

Abstract

If global citizenship education in southern Africa, most notably South Africa, were to be enacted commensurately with a values-based approach of democratic citizenship education, the possibility exists that deeper levels of openness, accountability and democracy would be enacted and manifested in higher education institutions. In this chapter I argue for the continued enactment of pronounced ‘values’ such as equity, tolerance, multilingualism, openness, accountability, social honour, democracy, social justice, equality, non-racism and non-sexism, Ubuntu (humanness and human interdependence), an open society, accountability, the rule of law, respect and reconciliation (DoE 2001: 3) that can engender deliberative, open and reconciliatory change in higher education. My contention is that an enactment of such ‘values’ can lead to a much desired dissonance in pedagogical encounters that could deepen the cultivation of democratic citizenship education so necessary to advance global citizenship education especially as the latter can sustain deliberative democratic communities. A defence of democratic citizenship education ‘values’, with a glocal bias, has the potential to enhance the recognition of people’s rights and responsibilities, cultivate human rights discourses in an atmosphere of democracy and openness, and exercise universal and equal moral respect to all individuals and groups. It is a values-based approach to global citizenship education that can contribute towards enlarging the students’ and teachers’ moral perspectives, as they endeavour to disrupt pedagogical encounters in a dissonant way.