Understandings of, and Approaches to, 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 understood and approached global citizenship education. The first section of the chapter captures the views of senior leaders and teachers, exploring how they defined and justified global citizenship, how they approached global citizenship education, and the challenges they identified in education for global citizenship. The second section examines the views of students, setting out how students defined and justified global citizenship and the approaches to global citizenship education they experienced at school. The chapter reports that senior leaders, teachers and students alike predominantly conceptualised global citizenship in terms of global awareness, mindedness and consciousness. In addition, it highlights that several notable, and at times contradictory, discourses of global citizenship education were in operation within and across schools.