Global citizenship values among students: testing the thesis with World Values Survey data

Abstract

The many universities across the world that promote internationalisation together with global citizenship education overtly or covertly orient their students around particular global citizenship values. Neoliberal and liberal humanist perspectives on global citizenship have historically dominated global citizenship education. The neoliberal ‘global competitiveness’ model promotes the values Achievement and Power, and the humanist ‘global rights and responsibilities’ model promotes the values Benevolence and Universalism. The critical perspective has emerged to challenge these dominant approaches. Inter alia, the critical perspective has argued against the prescription of certain values (or homogeneity of values) and for value pluralism that is open-ended. We investigated the extent to which these different perspectives on global citizenship values correspond with patterns in the value priorities among students from across the world. With data from the World Values Survey, we tested for homogeneity of values among students and assessed whether either global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness values are dominant. There is no clear evidence of students’ values converging as either global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness. These findings suggest that a critical perspective on global citizenship education, which acknowledges value pluralism, is better suited to work with differences in student value priorities by creating opportunities in dialogical non-prescriptive ways for the conceptualisation of multiple global citizen selves.