Global Citizenship Education:
Philosophy, Theory and Pedagogy
Paperback Global Citizenship Education
SEMINAR & BOOK LAUNCH
Monday 3rd March 2008 from 4.15pm to 5.15pm
Room 432, Faculty of Education, St Andrew’s Building, University of Glasgow
Michael Peters, Alan Britton and Harry Blee, Editors
The seminar is free and open to the public.
The essays in this edited collection argue that global citizenship education has to be
viewed within the context of our contemporary political realities. As a form of
education it must actively engage in a critically informed way with a set of complex
historical issues that emerge out of a colonial past and the often heavy handed
globalization which can perpetuate unequal power relations or cause new inequalities.
The essays in the book explore these notions and the emergent world ideologies of
globalism, as well as presenting territorial conflicts, ethnic, tribal and nationalist
rivalries, issues associated with increasing international migration and asylum, growing
regional imbalances and increasing world inequalities. Contributors to this collection,
each in their own way, argue that global citizenship education needs to assert new
values, to re-examine contemporary affairs, and to debate the language, concepts and
theories of global citizenship. It must also engage critically with the proto-world
institutions that seek to give expression to nascent aspirations for international forms of
social justice and citizen participation in world government.
Many of the contributors argue that global citizenship education offers the prospect of
extending the liberal ideologies of human rights and multiculturalism, and of developing
a better understanding of forms of post-colonialism. One thing is sure, as the essays
EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP UNIT
FACULTY OF EDUCATION,
St Andrew’s Building, University of Glasgow, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH
Tel: 0141 330 3060 Fax: 0141 330 3012 Email: J.Jackson@educ.gla.ac.uk
presented in this book demonstrate so clearly, there can be no one dominant notion of
global citizenship education as notions of ‘global’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘education’ are all
contested and open to further argument and revision. Global citizenship education does
not name the moment of global citizenship or even its emergence so much as the hope
of a form of order where the rights of the individual and of cultural groups, irrespective
of race, gender, ethnicity or creed, are observed, preserved and protected by all
governments in order to become the basis of citizen participation in a new space that we
might be tempted to call global civil society.
Tea and coffee will be provided from 4pm, please email Jacqui Jackson if you
would like to attend: mailto:J.Jackson@educ.gla.ac.uk <J.Jackson@educ.gla.ac.uk>
EDUCATION FOR GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP UNIT
FACULTY OF EDUCATION,
St Andrew’s Building, University of Glasgow, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH
Tel: 0141 330 3060 Fax: 0141 330 3012 Email: J.Jackson@educ.gla.ac.uk