Practice Of Global Citizenship Research Articles

21st-century stewardship: infusing environmental stewardship education with global citizenship

Environmental stewardship education, as a locally oriented concept, benefits from being recast to account for the emergent, multidimensional, and interdisciplinary nature of today’s most pressing socio-ecological issues. In an effort to infuse environmental stewardship education with global citizenship, instructional materials on community-based conservation in Peru were delivered to high school students in New York, USA. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of instructional materials on student learning outcomes related to the practice of global citizenship in environmental stewardship education. The CLIA model for powerful learning environments was used to convey the competencies, learning conditions, interventions, and assessments that structured the delivery of the instructional materials. To evaluate learning outcomes, written student responses were analyzed, using the qualitative coding methodology. Additionally, transformative learning was assessed using the Learning Activities Survey. Results suggest a trajectory past knowledge comprehension and toward transformative, empowered action, progressing from a cognitive understanding to affective and ultimately behavioral shifts. Based on these findings, this study conceptualized and operationalized the concept 21st-century stewardship – a term coined here as an updated stewardship model that is infused with global citizenship’s multi-scalar perspectives, global compacts, and layered identities to achieve its maximum impact in our interconnected world.

Children’s narratives on migrant refugees: a practice of global citizenship

Globalisation has brought about great social and economic impact, as well as great challenges. Major developments have taken place in the mobility of capital and, to a lesser extent, of goods; not so in the mobility of people seeking asylum due to persecution and war. This article approaches the phenomenon of migration, particularly of refugees, as learning content for early childhood. The research is presented from a qualitative approach based on the results of a project on this topic implemented in a rural school in Spain. The results of the data analysis reveal that children attribute external reasons, of survival, to the refugees’ forced departure from their country of origin. The children’s imaginary reproduces the social construction of adults on the status and situation of refugees, and they also show a critical attitude towards the violation of human rights and the abuse of fellow children. Finally, respect, cultural empathy and social commitment in the face of injustice are presented as fundamental values for education in global citizenship from the earliest stages of schooling.

Value-Creating Perspectives and an Intercultural Approach to Curriculum for Global Citizenship

Several recent scholarly works have challenged the Western dominated paradigm underlying the UNESCO led agenda of global citizenship education. This includes the heavy influence of Enlightenment liberalism. Further discussions must also be centered on integrating non-Western perspectives so that the practice of global citizenship has a more critical and intercultural focus. This paper offers suggestions to develop curriculum for global citizenship based on a study of leaders and their movements, including Wangari Maathai and Daisaku Ikeda who have inspired people to act within their local communities based on their personal values that are rooted in their experiences with being engaged in both Western and non-Western modes of thinking.

What makes or breaks higher education community engagement in the South African rural school context: A multiple-partner perspective

The purpose of this study is to inform global citizenship practice as a higher education agenda by comparing the retrospective experiences of a range of community engagement partners and including often silent voices of non-researcher partners. Higher education–community engagement aims to contribute to social justice as it constructs and transfers new knowledge from the perspectives of a wide range of community engagement partners. This qualitative secondary analysis study was framed theoretically by the transformative–emancipatory paradigm. Existing case data, generated on retrospective experiences of community engagement partners in a long-term community engagement partnership, were conveniently sampled to analyse and compare a range of community engagement experiences ( parents of student clients ( n = 12: females 10, males 2), teachers from the partner rural school ( n = 18: females 12, males 6), student-educational psychology clients ( n = 31: females 14, males 17), Academic Service-Learning ( ASL) students ( n = 20: females 17, males 3) and researchers ( n = 12: females 11, males 1). Following thematic in-case and cross-case analysis, it emerged that all higher education–community engagement partners experienced that socio-economic challenges (defined as rural school adversities, include financial, geographic and social challenges) are addressed when an higher education–community engagement partnership exists, but that particular operational challenges (communication barriers, time constraints, workload and unclear scope, inconsistent feedback, as well as conflicting expectations) hamper higher education–community engagement partnership. A significant insight from this study is that a range of community engagement partners experience similar challenges when a university and rural school partner. All community engagement partners experienced that higher education–community engagement is challenged by the structural disparity between the rural context and operational miscommunication.

Dalit cosmopolitans: Institutionally developmental global citizenship in struggles against caste discrimination

AbstractBesides stating that global or cosmopolitan citizenship is an incoherent concept in the absence of a global state, some critics assert that it represents a form of Western-centric moral neoimperialism. This article develops some responses to such objections through examining the efforts of Indian activists who have undertaken intensive international engagement in their struggles against caste discrimination. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights has sought to close domestic rights-implementation gaps for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in part through vertical outreach to United Nations human rights bodies. This mode of outreach is shown to represent an important practice of global citizenship, and to challenge a view of South agent as primarily passive recipients of moral goods within a global citizenship frame. Further, the Dalit activists’ global citizenship practice is shown to be significantly ‘institutionally developmental’, in that it highlights implementation gaps in the global human rights regime and can contribute to pressures for suprastate institutional transformation and development to address them. NCDHR actions are, for example, highly salient to the recently renewed dialogue on creating a World Court of Human Rights.

The morality of border crossing

This critical exchange contributes to the ongoing discussion of the themes of economic migration and human rights that we have pursued previously in these pages. It begins with a comment by William Smith on Luis Cabrera’s The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge, 2010), and includes a response from Cabrera.

Citizenship and Humanity on the Frontier

The Practice of Global Citizenship. By Luis Cabrera. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 328 pp., $31.99 paperback (ISBN 978-0-521-12810-0). Cosmopolitan international theorists have long argued that there are duties to all other humans, as such, irrespective of borders (Singer 1972; Beitz 1979). According to a strong cosmopolitan position, borders of states are not morally relevant, and therefore it makes no sense to contrast thicker or more demanding duties of citizenship with thinner or less demanding duties of humanity (Brown 1992; Walzer 1994; Cochran 1999). Luis Cabrera's The Practice of Global Citizenship aims to rearrange this picture. Cabrera suggests it is appropriate to focus on duties of “citizenship,” which are indeed thicker and more demanding than duties of “humanity.” But in today's world, in his view, we owe these duties of citizenship to everyone, and not just to co-nationals. The book engages in “qualitative political theory,” which combines arguments, concepts, and conclusions from normative theory with detailed interviews and field work, and because of this, the book is a refreshing addition to its genre (Cabrera 2009; for another example, see also Rao 2010). Global citizenship is not merely put forward as an ideal toward which to aim. Rather, the book's main focus is on unpacking, firstly, the ways in which some individuals are already making great sacrifices in terms of their time and resources—in a way that goes beyond minimum standards of humanitarian aid—to improve the livelihoods of noncompatriots; and secondly, the ways in which supranational institutions, such as the European Union, are moving concretely toward thick and demanding conceptions of rights and duties across …

Book Review: International Relations: The Practice of Global Citizenship

Book Review: International Relations: The Practice of Global Citizenship

Imagining cosmopolitan space: spectacle, rice and global citizenship

How do you stage the world? This article reviews how a series of performance installations by the theatre company Stan's Cafe have approached global space. It examines the way Plague Nation and Of All the People in All the World tackle national and global scale through the representation of populations. Drawing on a discussion of cosmopolitanism by the geographer, David Harvey, the paper argues that the school versions of Plague Nation point towards a geographically rooted drama pedagogy for global citizenship. This pedagogy displays political and aesthetic features in common with Baz Kershaw's theorisation of ‘spectacles of deconstruction’. The article concludes by exploring how the installations' own global travels might be understood as a practice of global citizenship.