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Global citizenship education: a critical introduction to key concepts and debates

2018, British Journal of Educational Studies

Related Papers

Dakmara Georgescu

A pedagogical guidance from UNESCO on Global Citizenship Education (GCE). UNESCO Publication, with Dina Kiwan and Mark Evans as main authors (Dakmara Georgescu and others acknowledged as contributors and reviewers)

Werner Wintersteiner

In this paper, the concept of global citizenship education (GCED), which has increasingly gained importance beyond the English-speaking world in recent years, is presented and critically discussed. It is shown that the true meaning of the concept compared to related pedagogical directions such as global education, global learning or intercultural education is the emphasis of the citizenship concept. This means that GCED cannot be limited to the broadening of horizons, education for moral responsibility and for a global consciousness, but must also broach the issue of the unequal political balance of power and unjust structures on a global scale. Unlike other critical approaches, however, I advocate for not playing the structural and the individual level off against each other. On the contrary, with recourse to the sociologist Derek Layder, I support an integrative approach.

Titus O . Pacho

Global citizenship education (GCE) has become an important topic in education and development discourses in an increasingly globalised world. Globalisation has affected the world socially, culturally, economically, politically, environmentally, and technologically. This calls for education that can empower learners to become engaged global citizens: learners who can understand that factors like globalisa-tion, the global economic crisis, the refugee crisis, and climate change challenge traditional boundaries because of their ripple effects. Global citizenship education becomes an important tool to aid learners' appreciation the interconnectedness of the world and its diverse cultures, and their role in responding to global challenges. The aim of global citizenship education is to create active and responsible global citizens. Based on a qualitative research approach, this chapter discusses the concepts of global citizenship , global citizenship education, and the role of global citizenship education in sustainable development.

Global Citizenship Education Critical and International Perspectives

Abdeljalil Akkari

In this concluding chapter, we first consider some common obstacles to achieving the implementation of global citizenship education (GCE) identified in the different national contexts presented in the book and reiterate how different contexts call for diverse designs and operating strategies. Second, we examine why GCE has become a highly contested concept, subject to multiple interpretations and in which a wide range of conceptions and objectives coexist. Third, we present considerations for implementing GCE in educational policies and suggest operational-izing GCE within three distinct fields: (a) education for sustainable development (ESD); (b) inter/multicultural education; (c) citizenship education. We argue that this strategy could help link these fields and broaden students' understanding of the interconnections between issues related to citizenship, democracy, participation, identity, inter/multiculturalism, global issues and sustainable development. Finally, we synthetize current research on GCE and conclude by calling for more comparative and critical research to challenge GCE's underlying assumption of the univer-sality of Western paradigms and worldviews to embrace multiple ways of conceiving global citizenship.

PERENNIAL JOURNAL OF HISTORY

Global citizenship education is a type of civic learning in which students take part in projects that deal with social, political, economic, or environmental problems that affect the whole world. The goal of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is to give people of all ages the tools they need to take part in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, and safe societies, both locally and globally. As a basic need of citizens, global citizenship education is of paramount importance today. The purpose of the paper is to provide understanding related to global citizenship and global citizenship education. The data was collected using secondary sources such as journals, articles, web sources, etc. Researchers shed light on the major elements, dimensions, and themes of global citizenship education. The major themes of global citizenship education, such as peace education, human rights education, civic education, humanitarian norms, and the psychosocial dimensions of global citizenship, a...

Werner Wintersteiner , heidi grobbauer

This publication provides a sound, but very readable introduction into the field of global citizenship education (GCED), compared to peace education, intercultural education or civic education. It offers a rationale and a didactics of this very timely educational approach. It distinguishes between "soft" and "criticial" GCED (according to Andreotti) and refers as well to the UNESCO concept.

Jason N Dorio

Retrieved April

Lynette Shultz

International Education Studies

Mohammad H Yarmohammadian

werner wintersteiner

A comprehensive presentation of this emerging subfield of peace education, for scholars and practitioners

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Citizenship Education (Definition and 11 Teaching Ideas)

Citizenship education is designed to teach children about citizenship as well as teaching them how to do citizenship.

Teaching about citizenship often involves teaching the fundamentals of democracy, while teaching  how to do  citizenship involves getting students to be democratic participants in the classroom.

Some examples of how to do citizenship education include:

• Encouraging voices to be heard
• Establishing formal avenues for representation
• Teaching conflict management
• Recognizing the legitimacy of elections you lose
• Giving students democratic power

Below, I look over more of these examples as well as some background details into the fundamentals of what citizenship means.

1. How Should I Teach Citizenship to my Students?

Something to keep in mind when teaching citizenship is that we shouldn’t only teach about citizenship, but we should also teach children how to do citizenship.

In other words:

• Teaching about citizenship: giving a definition of citizenship and looking at case studies in books, etc.
• Teaching how to do citizenship: providing students with opportunities to speak up and make change in their communities.

Below I outline several strategies you can use to teach children to be active citizens. Some of these strategies teach about citizenship while others teach how to do citizenship.

2. Citizenship Education in your Classroom: 11 Teaching Ideas

• Teach about how to have respectful relationships with one another and encourage students to practice respectful relationships;
• Teach students how to manage conflict in ways that respect the individual liberties of others;
• Teach about how to be respectful of the property of others;
• Encourage students to sit on representative councils;
• Collaboratively make school rules with students (without any prejudice or predetermination of what the rules will be);
• Teach students the importance of following rules that have been democratically agreed upon;
• Support students when they want to lawfully agitate for changes that will positively affect the lives of children;
• Teach students to give back to their community by using fundraising drives, etc.;
• Undertake projects that emphasize the importance of living in harmony with our environment. Use the principles of education for sustainable development (ESD) ;
• Read books and critique the citizenship virtues of characters in the books;
• Teach about the history of citizenship if your students are old enough!

3. What is Citizenship?

The concept of citizenship has been around for over 4000 years. There are four types of citizenship.

a) Aristotle’s Idea / Greek Citizenship

Aristotle thought of citizenship as a right for members of a society. He believed citizens should:

• Have the right to participation in social affairs like government; and
• Be free to pursue the good life.

Aristotle claimed that citizens should rule themselves democratically so that the ‘common good’ would be established within a society.

However, Aristotle excluded many groups in society – the old, the young and slaves – from his version of citizenship. He believed that young people were unable to make rational decisions so were therefore not allowed to be citizens.

So, as long as citizenship has been around, young people have been excluded from exercising its full benefits.

b) Enlightenment / Liberal-Democratic Citizenship

The Enlightenment in Scotland in the 17th Century and, later, 18th Century Europe and the United States, brought about a ‘liberal-democratic’ notion of citizenship.

For scholars of the Enlightenment, citizenship was characterised by:

• Individual property ownership;
• The right to self-governance; and
• The right to the pursuit of one’s own self-interests.

So, you can see that this model of citizenship is a lot like Aristotle’s one.

However, these people of the enlightenment strongly believed that the government should be restricted in order that the individual citizen can be protected from tyranny of queens, kings and dictators.

You can probably see that the United States still holds firmly to this model of citizenship.

c) European Social Citizenship

Post-war Europe came up with its own model of citizenship.

Marshall (1950) identified three key pillars of post-war European citizenship:

• Civic rights : The right to individual liberty and to own personal property
• Political rights : The right to vote and stand for election.
• Social rights : The right to healthcare and education.

You can see here that there are certain social rights that you might associate with Europe: healthcare and education.

Here’s a quick contrast between the liberal (US) model and the social (European) model:

• Liberal Model: A focus on restricting the government from harming people. A strong emphasis on individual liberty.
• Social Model: A focus on using the government to provide services to citizens. Citizens have collective responsibility to contribute to society in the form of taxes to ensure rights are maintained.

4. What is Childhood Citizenship?

Here are some ways our ideas of childhood citizenship have evolved over the years:

a) Citizens in the Making

For most of human history, children have been seen as ‘citizens in the making’ or ‘future citizens’. Even today, we don’t allow children to exercise the full rights of citizenship like buying land, voting or standing for elected office.

b) Protected Citizens

Childhood citizenship is a concept that has been around since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was agreed upon by most nations in 1989.

Since then, there has been an increasing push towards seeing children as citizens with their own unique rights.

c) Citizens with a Voice

The UNCRC also enshrined in international law the importance of providing children with a participatory voice.

Now, signatories to the UNCRC (which is most nations, except the United States), have an obligation to allow young people to speak up and participate in everyday affairs that affect them.

Even in the US hasn’t ratified the UNCRC, it is still widely accepted in US Education that children should have a say about what happens to them.

5. Core Principles of Children’s Citizenship

The core principles of a children’s citizenship approach include:

• Children have the right to a participatory voice;
• Children deserve unique protections;
• As the future of the world, children’s opinions matter;
• Children should be taught how to behave in an ethical manner to contribute positively to society.

Scholarly Sources

If you’re writing a report or essay on student or childhood citizenship, I encourage you to cite scholarly sources.

Related Post: How to find Scholarly Sources Online

Here are a range of scholarly sources I used when writing this piece:

• Arthur, R. (2015). Recognising children’s citizenship in the youth justice system.  Journal of social welfare and family law ,  37 (1), 21-37.
• Bacon, K., & Frankel, S. (2014). Rethinking Children’s Citizenship.  The International Journal of Children’s Rights ,  22 (1), 21-42.
• Bath, C., & Karlsson, R. (2016). The ignored citizen: Young children’s subjectivities in Swedish and English early childhood education settings.  Childhood ,  23 (4), 554-565. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0907568216631025
• Cohen, E. F. (2005). Neither seen nor heard: children’s citizenship in contemporary democracies.  Citizenship Studies ,  9 (2), 221-240. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020500069687
• Cordero Arce M (2015) Maturing Children’s Rights Theory: From Children, With Children, Of Children. International Journal of Children’s Rights 25 (1): 283–331.
• Devine, D., & Cockburn, T. (2018). Theorizing children’s social citizenship: new welfare states and inter-generational justice.  Childhood ,  25 (2), 142-157. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0907568218759787
• Faulks, K. (2000). Citizenship. London: Routledge.
• Grindheim, L. T. (2017). Children as playing citizens.  European Early Childhood Education Research Journal ,  25 (4), 624-636. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2017.1331076
• Hart, S. (2009). The ‘problem’ with youth: young people, citizenship and the community.  Citizenship studies ,  13 (6), 641-657.
• Jans, M. (2004). Children as citizens: Towards a contemporary notion of child participation. Childhood, 11 (1), 27-44.
• Larkins, C. (2014). Enacting children’s citizenship: Developing understandings of how children enact themselves as citizens through actions and acts of citizenship. Childhood, 21 (1), 7-21.
• Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’ is not enough: conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  British educational research journal ,  33 (6), 927-942.
• Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class London: Pluto Press.
• Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (2009). The problems with using the concept of ‘citizenship’in early years policy.  Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood ,  10 (3), 280-290. Doi: https://doi.org/10.2304%2Fciec.2009.10.3.280
• Raby, R. (2008). Frustrated, resigned, outspoken: Students’ engagement with school rules and some implications for participatory citizenship.  The International Journal of Children’s Rights ,  16 (1), 77-98.
• Stasiulis, D. (2002). The active child citizen: Lessons from Canadian policy and the children’s movement.  Citizenship Studies ,  6 (4), 507-538.
• United Nations General Assembly. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York, NY: United Nations. Available at: http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx

All the above citations are in APA format. If you need to change it to a different format, read our advice on how to reference in an essay .

Related Post: How to Write a Quality Essay

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Viewpoint: How to foster global citizenship through education

Global Citizenship, that is a sense of solidarity between citizens across the world, is increasingly important in today’s society. As we grow increasingly connected and interact with many different people so global citizenship teaches people of all ages not simply to understand these differences but to embrace them.

One of the central tenets of global citizenship is Global Citizenship Education (GCED). Teaching children to read and write is no longer enough. The challenges of the 21st century are fundamentally interconnected and education helps us to solve these challenges by promoting care and concern for our global family. GCED instils respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, gender equality and environmental sustainability. Working to attain these attributes helps to produce responsible global citizens.

To help ensure that GCED is integrated in education systems and featured in the future global agenda for education beyond 2015, UNESCO is organizing the Second Forum on Global Citizenship Education (Paris Headquarters, 28-30 Jan 2015) 

GCED is about more than simply learning however. It is about actions. By living your life according to the lessons of GCED and promoting those lessons to others, you can make a real difference in the world, as the following interview shows.

Rolando Villamero, 26, Philippines, is founder of an organization known as TOPDAC (Ten Outstanding Persons With Disability in Negros Oriental Alumni Community), empowering people with disabilities and raising awareness of their rights. Rolando is also a member of the United Nations Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) Youth Advocacy Group (YAG). GEFI advocates for education in three priority areas – put every child in school, improve the quality of education and foster global citizenship. As a youth advocate, Rolando uses GCED to help build and promote initiatives aimed at helping people with disabilities in his home city of Dumaguete in The Philippines.

Q: What does it mean for you to be a global citizen?

 Being a global citizen is more of a process. The very first thing you have to consider is having a deep level of awareness about the idea that we live in one world. I am particularly fond of the Ubuntu saying ‘I am because you are and because you are I am’. In other words everyone is connected and the first step towards global citizenship is having an awareness of one’s community.

Q: How does your work at a local level support global awareness and a global sense of belonging?

 A:  Just having programmes at a local level is the first step to global awareness. To use my own experience – I come from Dumaguete City in the Philippines, one of the country’s smallest regions. Since 2008 I have worked with children with disabilities to ensure that they have an inclusive education, this is the local level. On a global scale I advocate for that work and promote and explain the needs of these children – GCED enables me to share their stories, it gives me a voice and perhaps enables me to influence policy makers. I have also been able to use social media to connect with other people throughout the world and share practises and ideas. This is GCED in action.

Q: Anything else?

Through my work with United Nations Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) I have met other young people who are advocating for GCED and we’ve shared our different interests and experiences. So I talk about disability and my colleague from Australia advocates for education for indigenous people. We all come together to discuss what can be done and this shows a move from local to global synergy and demonstrates how we can push forward.

Q: Why do you think GCED is so important?

 GCED provides an awareness that we live in one interconnected society and makes us understand how those connections can affect other people. Teaching GCED and learning from it develops an awareness of our respective communities, making us understand that although we belong to one society the people within that society are from many diverse backgrounds. The key, however, is to recognise that awareness alone is not enough, you have to respect and embrace that diversity. One of the most important things about GCED is that it makes you aware of the pitfalls we have in society, the lack of tolerance, the misunderstandings. If we embrace and respect diversity then we can work against that discrimination and prevent isolation. GCED helps us strive towards creating a society for all.

Q: How can we work to better promote GCED throughout the world?

A: We want to create a universal approach but we need to respect context and individual difference at the same time. We need to get a balance between these two things. For example the context and needs of Malawi and The Philippines are very different and when we are promoting GCED we have to consider those different contexts. It’s important that we don’t impose our wishes on other people but that we listen to them.

Q: How does GCED help on a day-to-day basis?

A: It helps people understand that diversity may take different forms. A classroom setting is really a small world in microcosm in which we see a lot of diversity of gender, ethnicity, language and disability. GCED teaches children and their teachers to really appreciate and respect diversity in addition to reflecting on society and what they can bring to the community. The idea of the global citizen must start in the classroom. For example we run a lot of simulation workshops for children, helping them to understand how it feels to be blind or unable to walk and this really helps children without disabilities to understand their classmates. Using GCED to teach diversity to children helps them deal with their classmates and other people they may meet with higher levels of sensitivity and respect.

Q: What are the difficulties in promoting and implementing GCED?

A: The basic issue would be how do we make theory and practice meet? It’s not enough to simply say ‘here’s a paper talking about GCED’ we need to go beyond that and make sure that it’s being implemented practically at a grassroots level. We need to understand not only the politics but also the personal. If people don’t understand what GCED is then they won’t sustain it. The best way to sustain GCED is through the community.

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Article contents

Education for global citizenship.

• Carlos Alberto Torres Carlos Alberto Torres UCLA
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.91
• Published online: 29 March 2017

The emergence of post-national citizenships questions the principles and values as well as the rights and responsibilities in which national citizenships were founded. Does this new reality reflect a crisis of classical liberalism and particularly of its neoliberal declination facing the new challenges of globalization and diversity? Multiculturalism, one of the answers to the dilemmas of citizenship and diversity shows signs of crisis. In these context concepts such as cosmopolitan democracies and global citizenship education have been invoked as solutions to the possible demise of the regulatory power of the nation-state and failed citizenship worldwide. The implementation of the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) in 2012 by the UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon sets a new program for education where Global Citizenship Education is predicated as a resource to enhance global peace, sustainability of the planet, and the defense of global commons.

• global citizenship education
• global commons
• liberal democracy
• cosmopolitan democracies
• global peace
• sustainable development education
• planetarian citizenship
• multiculturalism

In the context of multiple globalizations, the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) launched in 2012 by the UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon, predicates global citizenship education as a solution to enhance global peace, improve the sustainability of the planet, and bolster the defense of global commons. The first section discusses the phenomena of globalization and the proposal of the GEFI of furthering global citizenship, a central mantra of the UN program. The second section briefly discusses key elements affecting global peace, including growing inequality; global poverty; neoliberal globalization; banking education; and predatory cultures destroying the environment and our planet. Section three defines global citizenship education as an intervention in search of a theory. From this standpoint, section four discusses the intersections and contradictions between global citizenship, democracy and multiculturalism. The final section outlines the connections between global citizenship education, global commons, and common good. 1

The Globalization of Citizenship

Globalization is a central concept and foundational background for the analysis in this chapter—it is complex and multifaceted. 2 Globalization has been defined as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.” 3 The meaning of globalization thus takes on different forms and we really should talk about globalizations processes in the plural.

Several forms of globalization can be conceived as follows. First, there is globalization from above . This is framed by an ideology of neoliberalism and calls for an opening of borders, the creation of multiple regional markets, the proliferation of fast-paced economic and financial exchanges, and the presence of governing systems other than nation-states—particularly in the form of international trade agreements enforced by the World Trade Organization.

A second form of globalization represents the antithesis of the first. This form can be described as globalization from below or anti-globalization . It manifests itself in individuals, institutions, and social movements that are actively opposed to what is perceived as corporate globalization. For these individuals and groups, their motto is “no globalization without representation.”

Another distinct form pertains more to rights than to markets—the globalization of human rights . With the growing ideology of human rights taking hold in the international system and in international law, many traditional practices endemic to the fabric of particular societies or cultures (from religious to esoteric practices) now being called into question, challenged, forbidden, or even outlawed. The advancement of cosmopolitan democracies and plural democratic multicultural global citizenship is the theme of this version of globalization. 4

Globalization can also be characterized as a trademark of our contemporary world: hybridity . There are multiple forms of hybridity crossing the globe. For example, hip-hop cultures that were born in the Bronx now have Japanese, Indian, or Chinese practitioners and cultural modalities. What all of them have in common is that they are showing some form of opposition to the establishments and new ways for youth cultures to express themselves. Another prominent form of hybridity is related to intermarriages that create new categories not easily classified within traditional taxonomies of race and/or ethnicity in demographic surveys.

A fifth manifestation of globalization can be characterized by the intersection of two processes defined by the concepts of the “information society” and the “knowledge society.” The idea of the information society rests on the ability of digital cultures to beam information to all corners of the globe almost instantaneously, affecting the equation of time and space like never before—and is intimately linked with the idea of a network society made possible by developments in digital cultures technologies. 5 This face of globalizations is impacting drastically global (cultural and material) productions. Its twin, the emergence of the knowledge society (itself an outcome of robotization and digital cultures) dramatically impacts the way we conceive the factors of production, which were traditionally considered land, capital, labor, and technology. Now we add a fifth factor of production: knowledge.

A by-product of the former yet distinct form is well articulated by what was defined on the threshold of the 21st century as the “network society.” 6 Never before have social networks been as widely discussed as they are in the 21st century —a day in which living in the so-called network society seems to be a prevailing motto. The presence of these networks alters some traditional dimensions of human life. Questions about academic authority and moral character become central elements in discussing the credibility of messages, methods, research, data, analyses, and narratives that pullulate in the Internet.

A seventh manifestation of globalization extends beyond markets and to some extent is against human rights. It is globalization of the international war against terrorism . This new form of globalization has been prompted in large part by the events of 11 September 2001 —which were interpreted as the globalization of the terrorist threat—and the reaction of the United States to said event. This form of globalization is represented by the anti-terrorist response, which has been militaristic in nature, resulting in two coalition wars led by the United States against Muslim regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Islamophobia is also a theme of this globalization. Terrorism and the terrorist threat were made synonymous with Islam and Muslims becoming a global norm. Yet the overall theme of this process was not only its military flavor but also the emphasis on security and control of borders, people, capital, and commodities—that is, the reverse of open markets and high-paced commodity exchanges. Security as a precondition of freedom is a key theme of this form of globalization.

Finally, an eighth form of globalization, namely the globalization of terrorism is well represented by the al-Qaeda network, with terrorist actions of many kinds. Examples of these actions include Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 300 girls from a Christian school in Nigeria, forcing them to convert to Islam and having them forcefully married to fighters. Another example is the growing consolidation of ISIS in the Middle East providing a platform, a kind of sacred fire for youth who are disaffected with modernity and Western practices. Thousands of youths have moved to Iraq and Syria to fight for what they believe is a sacred cause of social change, leading to the establishment of a new Caliphate in the Levant and Middle East. The motto of terrorism is probably best defined in the following terms: Only chaos will bring about freedom. Let me be clear on one point. As describe by many the war against terrorism has singled out specific populations, religions, and countries and therefore implies a challenge to the human rights regime. However, the level of anarchy in the world system that terrorism in all its forms has created calls for a global solution, particularly in its most violent expressions such as ISIS controlling territories, imposing specific draconian laws, or beheading those they consider their enemies for an inadmissible spectacle of terror via digital culture. The search for solutions is underway and different institutions are now considering how education can help to prevent extremist violence.

In this seemingly chaotic scenario or what some have defined as a risk society, 7 when secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, launched in 2012 the GEFI he envisioned education as the linchpin for reducing poverty and hunger, to end wasted potential—and as a key element for the development of stronger and better societies for all. Three pillars support this initiative: putting every child into school, improving the quality of learning, and fostering global citizenship. By cultivating the third pillar (i.e., global citizenship education) new programs of a teaching and research for global learning. As regions of the world face multifaceted crises, global learning that is fostered by global citizenship education becomes an essential tool to not only build understanding across borders and cultures but to advance our social, political, economic, and environmental interconnectedness necessary to address global and local issues. Raising the stakes by launching the Global Education First Initiative, and linking education for all with quality of education, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon spoke of global citizenship as a new model of intervention in securing peace and sustainable development in the global system. 8

Global Citizenship Education and Global Peace

The first answer of why we need global citizenship education is that global citizenship education contributes to global peace. But how can we define global peace? The Global Peace Index ranks 162 countries covering 99.6% of the world’s population. The Index gauges global peace by noting the level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic or international conflict, and the degree of militarization. It ranks countries according to 22 indicators of peace. 9 Some of the key findings of the Global Peace Index are the following:

Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling, and the level of regional integration.

Peaceful countries often shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption.

Small, stable countries that are part of regional blocks are most likely to get a higher ranking. 10

What are the main problems affecting global peace? Domination, aggression, exploitation, discrimination and oppression of people, families, communities, nations, and the planet are crucial elements to undermine progress, peace, and happiness on earth.

Paulo Freire, recognizing that relations of domination are central to public and private life, argued that domination, aggression, and violence are an intrinsic part of human and social life. Any political education nourishing the construction of a public sphere should recognize that overcoming oppression, domination, and exploitation is a central goal of any project of global democratic citizenship building. 11

There are multiple manifestations of structural violence that add to individual, collective, and government actions undermining peace. I would like to emphasize briefly some of the problems in the global system undermining peace and prosperity and to put in the conceptualization of Freire as structural violence. 12 These clusters of problems include but cannot be restricted to: (1) unabated poverty; (2) growing inequality; (3) neoliberal globalization that has weakened the systems of organized solidarity of the democratic nation-state; (4) banking education with authoritarian and inadequate curriculum in elementary, secondary, and higher education; and (5) destruction of the planet’s eco-system. What follows is a brief description of each cluster problem, which will deserve a specific in-depth description and analysis that cannot be provided herein.

Economic inequality is a palpable reality. The crisis of 2008 has made even more evident the importance of the growing inequality that has affected market democracies, and particularly affecting the middle class. As I have said elsewhere, “A casualty of these crisis in the global economy has been the loss of jobs, which has in turn increased inequality and poverty. In a recent book Jim Clifton Chairman of Gallup Corporation argues that of the 7 billion people in the world, 5 billion are over 15 years of age. Three billion said they currently work or wanted to work, yet only 1.2 billion have full-time formal jobs. Hence there is a shortfall of 1.8 billon jobs worldwide.” 13 Facing a jobless society, the educational system and the university system have many challenges, from being able to offer a service without pricing itself out of the market or being partially responsible from what some see as the new bubble of crisis in capitalism: student’s massive debts to showing that the course work in which student engages will have a positive pay off in the markets, and may make students more marketable and productive, hence enhancing the levels of accountability of universities.

In his monumental study documenting growing global inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Thomas Piketty Professor of the École des Hautes Etudes argues, “Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century , inequalities of wealth that had supposedly disappear are close to regaining or even surpassing their historical highs. The new global economy has brought with it both immense hopes (such as the eradication of poverty) and equally immense inequalities (some individuals are now as wealthy as entire countries).” 14

Unabated poverty remains a stubborn fact deeply affecting the daily life of billions of people. Measurements of poverty abound, showing unequivocally that poverty and social exclusion are persistent, more so in rural areas than in urban areas—though the marginal labor force in urban areas, having migrated from the rural areas, remain mostly in an occupational limbo and temporary jobs. While the World Bank Global Monitoring Report ( 2014 ) claims that there are gains, the line of demarcation of extreme poverty (people living under the poverty line of 1.90 dollars per day) constitutes 900 million people or roughly one-seventh of the world population. 15 As the new Global Monitoring Report suggest: “Despite solid development gains, progress has been uneven, and significant work remains. With an estimated 900 million people in 2012 living on less than $1.90 a day—the updated international poverty line—and a projected 700 million in 2015 , extreme poverty remains unacceptably high. 16 . ” One of the paradoxes of poverty is that advances worldwide preventing children to die before their fifth birthday have brought more surviving children from poor families into higher poverty levels than before.

Neoliberal Globalization

We should talk about globalizations in the plural. It is worthwhile to emphasize the implications of some of these forms of globalizations for education. Without any doubt, the dominant form of neoliberal globalization has affected “competition-based reforms” transforming educational policy in K–12 and higher education. These reforms are characterized by efforts to create measurable performance standards through extensive standardized testing (the new standards and accountability movement that lined to the “banking education” model we describe below), introduction of new teaching and learning methods leading to the expectation of better performance at low cost (e.g., universalization of textbooks), and improvements in the selection and training of teachers. Competition-based reforms in higher education tend to adopt a vocational orientation and to reflect the point of view that colleges and universities exist largely to serve the economic well-being of a society. Privatization is a major reform effort linked to neoliberal globalization and perhaps the most dominant. There is no question that multiple faces of globalization and globalization agendas described above are playing a major role in defining the role and purposes of education today—and more so when one confronts the dialectics of the global and the local.

Global citizenship education interacts with globalization and neo-liberalism , key concepts that designate global movements that have come to define our era of global interdependence. Global capitalism , which reflects the interaction of g lobalization and neo-liberalism , now defines the top-down model of global hegemonic dominance, which rests on the power of elites, multinational corporations, bilateral and multilateral organisms, and the global and regional power of nations—who in turn exercise control over people, commodities, territories, capital, and resources of all kinds, the environment included.

Neoliberalism has utterly failed as a viable model of economic development, yet the politics of culture associated with neoliberalism are becoming the new common sense shaping the role of government and education. Privatization policies are preferred policy instruments, even if the outcome of some of its instruments, as in the implementation of vouchers, are not clear in its benefits against traditional models of schooling financing. 17 This “common sense” has become an ideology playing a major role in constructing hegemony as moral and intellectual leadership in contemporary societies. Two elements radically affect the formulation of public policy: privatization and the reduction of public spending. These two policies are highly compatible, and in fact, privatization can be considered an important strategy for achieving reductions in public spending.

Neoliberal globalization, predicated on the dominance of the market over the state and on deregulatory models of governance, has deeply affected the university in the context of “academic capitalism.” The resulting reforms, rationalized as advancing international competitiveness, have affected public universities in four primary areas: efficiency and accountability, accreditation and universalization, international competitiveness, and privatization. There is also growing resistance to globalization as top-down-imposed reforms reflected in the public debates about schooling reform, curriculum and instruction, teacher training, and school governance. One of the most dominant outcomes of neoliberal policies and their attempt to undermine the regulatory policies of nation-states have diluted organized solidarity, and particularly the safety network implemented in the models (with national and regional variations) of the welfare state. 18

Neoliberal globalization is not wholly hegemonic, pervasive, all encompassing, or uncontested at the local and global levels. Likewise, while this article asserts that, in terms of policy orientations, the early 21st century is the age of neoliberalism, it does not, as any hegemonic model, go uncontested. Nor has it demonstrated itself to be technically—and more importantly, politically—capable of ruling with an “iron fist” that cannot be challenged or defeated. Global citizenship education should play a major role in challenging neoliberalism, but as any other concept, it could become a sliding signifier, and hence it could be coopted and implemented following a neoliberal rationality. 19

Banking Education

Traditional models of education built on the power of teachers in the classrooms through a teacher-centered pedagogy, and the overwhelming power of educational bureaucracies had been challenged and criticized by Paulo Freire and a host of educational reformers as banking education. The metaphor of banking education, based on the idea that students are empty vessels that need to be filled with knowledge is a strong metaphor that calls for changes at several levels. One of the key changes is to recognize that the students of all ages that come to our classrooms bring with them knowledge and experience, and they can make serious contributions to teaching and learning. Freire posit this in the analogy of the teacher as a student (which is an obvious fact since we continue to learn until our last breath) and the student as a teacher (since they bring questions, analysis, or live experience that enrich, challenges, defies, and even improve upon the instructional design). Authoritarian educational models, as argued by Freire and a number of pedagogues of liberation, undermines student autonomy and creativity and reproduces rules and regulations that perpetuate discrimination, domination, exploitation, and oppression. The alternative that has been suggested is problem-posing education, which confronts the students with questions—and often their own questions in learning and instructions—rather than “off the shelf” preconceived answers based on instrumental rationality.

For banking education, the teacher is the subject of the pedagogical adventure and the student is the object. Freire’s contribution to understanding education as the act of freedom is an invitation to see the interminable dialectics in the struggle to free us and others from constraints. In and of itself, the struggle for liberation is another form of intervention that can be considered part of the ethics of intervention. Certainly, education as the act of freedom implies a different perspective on local, socially constructed, and generationally transmitted knowledge. It also implies a perspective that challenges normal science and non-participatory planning, constructing a theoretical and methodological perspective that is always suspicious of any scientific relationship as concealing relationships of domination. 20

Contemporary expressions of “banking education” are not only traditional authoritarian models that have proven inefficient but still survive in many countries. A new incarnation is the standards model associated with high-stakes testing. They have resulted in a back-to-basics goals based on three key strategies, standardization, competition, and corporatization, which have not obtained the expected results: “The standards movement is not achieving the objectives it has set for itself. Meanwhile, it is having catastrophic consequences on students’ engagements and teacher morale.” 21

Predatory Cultures and Destruction of the Planet

Predatory cultural and technical practices have deeply affected the eco-systems. The planet is our only home, and we should prevent its ecological destruction. After a UN decade of education for sustainable development, it is clear the need for policy orientations linking Planetarian Citizenship, global citizenship education, sustainable development, and global peace. Though we do not have the space in this chapter to discuss the intersections between global citizenship education and education for sustainable development, it is worthwhile to mention the priority action areas highlighted in the UNESCO Roadmap linking both models. 22 They are as follows:

PRIORITY ACTION AREA 1. Advancing policy: Mainstream ESD into both education and sustainable development policies to create an enabling environment for ESD and to bring about systemic change.

PRIORITY ACTION AREA 2. Transforming learning and training environments: integrate sustainability principles into education and training settings.

PRIORITY ACTION AREA 3. Building capacities of educators and trainers: increase the capacities of educators and trainers to more effectively deliver ESD.

PRIORITY ACTION AREA 4. Empowering and mobilizing youth: multiply ESD actions among youth.

PRIORITY ACTION AREA 5. Accelerating sustainable solutions at local level: at community level, scale up ESD programs and multistakeholder ESD networks.

Needless to say that we have to work within formal, non-formal, and informal systems of education to bridge the gap between policy and practice, aligning in all systems the concepts of education for sustainable development and global citizenship education as a new paradigm.

These are some of the “cardinal sins” of the global system that may be confronted by the implementation of global citizenship education as an educational counterpart of a global policy reform in areas of economics, politics, morality, and ethics. What it is and how can this be implemented is a question that deserves scrutiny.

Global Citizenship Education: An Intervention in Search of a Theory

A central premise of this analysis is that global citizenship as articulated in the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), and UNESCO’s work on global citizenship education has been conceived as an intervention that is still in search for a robust theory.

Global citizenship education is seen as an intervention dealing with

a new class of global challenges which require some form of collective response to find effective solutions. These include increasingly integrated and knowledge-driven economies; greater migration between countries and from rural to urban areas; growing inequalities; more awareness of the importance of sustainable development and including concerns about climate change and environmental degradation; a large and growing youth demographic; the acceleration of globalization; and rapid developments in technology. Each of these elements carries far-reaching implications, and taken together, these represent a period of transition of historical significance. Education systems need to respond to these emerging global challenges which require a collective response with a strategic vision that is global in character, rather than limited to the individual country level. 23

Theories of global citizenship have been studied in diverse knowledge fields for quite a long time. Still, there is a need for a theory to articulate the concept of global citizenship and its intervention in education: “No clear definition of global citizenship—or as otherwise referred to, cosmopolitan or world citizenship—have been concisely articulated.” 24

Global citizenship is a form of intervention in searching for a theory and an agency of implementation; this is because the world is becoming increasingly interdependent and diverse and its borders more porous. 25 There is “a deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities, and of discourses about loyalty and allegiance.” 26

A claim in this chapter is that any definition and theory of global citizenship should address what has become the trademark of globalization: cultural diversity. Therefore, global citizenship should encapsulate a definition of global democratic multiculturalism . In addition, to be effective and acceptable worldwide, conceptualizing and implementing global citizenship within education, it is imperative that global citizenship adds value to national citizenship. Yet the expansion of a universalistic claim of world solidarity rests on the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship nested in a model of cosmopolitan democracies. 27

Global citizenship cannot be seen as an alternative to or a substitution for national citizenship. On the contrary, it is a substantive policy tool to reinforce the robustness of representative and participatory democracies worldwide. Global citizenship education ultimately seeks to guarantee the social democratic pact on the rights of persons, and not only the rights of property. 28 Yet there is more. We have learned after a decade of education for sustainable development that we need also to guarantee the rights of the planet. Global citizenship will offer new contributions to expand education for sustainable development worldwide. 29

The gist of this argument is that global citizenship adds value to national citizenship. Moreover, because national citizenships could be considered unfinished business or work in progress, the value added of global citizenship may be another layer of support for a process of transforming citizenship making and citizenship education into models based on principles of liberty and equality for all, including what Seyla Benhabib, Jacques Derrida, and Garret Brown call the “rights of hospitality” in the Kantian sense. 30

Global citizenship is marked by an understanding of global ties, relations, and connections and a commitment to the collective good. Robert Rhoads and Carlos Alberto Torres advanced the idea of “democratic multicultural citizenship” in which education helps students to develop the dispositions and abilities to work across social and cultural differences in a quest for solidarity. They argued that such skills are essential to citizenship in a multicultural, global environment. 31

Furthermore, Robert A. Rhoads and Katalin Szelényi have developed this thesis with foci on the responsibilities of universities. Rhoads and Szelényi’s position is that we should “advance a view of citizenship in which the geographic reference point for one’s sense of rights and responsibilities is broadened, and in some sense, complicated by a more expansive spatial vision and understanding of the world.” 32

They go on to argue that “the engagement of individuals as citizens reflects understandings of rights and responsibilities across three basic dimensions of social life: the political (including civic aspects), the economic (including occupational aspects), and the social (including cultural aspects).” 33 In this vein, Soysal advanced a “postnational” definition of citizenship in which one’s rights and responsibilities are rooted not in the nation-state but instead are tied to one’s personhood: “What were previously defined as national rights become entitlements legitimized on the basis of personhood.” 34

Others scholars speak of a denationalized definition of citizenship considering new conditions affecting citizenship in novel terms. With the onset of multiple processes of globalization the positions of nation-states in the world and their institutional features have changed. These transformations in the nation-state have a parallel effect in the emergence of new actors, including transnational social movements unwilling to respect the traditional levels of political representation within nation-states. 35

Given these foundations, it is imperative to confront the challenges of building global citizenship education with the challenges of democracy and multiculturalism in a global world.

Global Citizenship, Democracy, and Multiculturalism in a Global World

The questions of citizenship, democracy, and multiculturalism are at the heart of the discussion worldwide on educational reform, deeply affecting the academic discourse and practice of education. Democracy is a slider signifier, meaning different things to different people. There are minimal procedural conditions of democracy, advocated by constitutional models of democracy. A social democratic approach prefers aggregative forms of democracy as proposed by Robert Dahl, based on equal rights and liberties. More contemporarily, there is a deliberative concept of democracy: “On a deliberative conception of democracy, political actors are viewed as capable of being motivated by a desire to promote the common good.” 36 Cloaked in different robes, questions about citizenship, the connections between education and democracy, or the problem of multiculturalism affect most of the decisions that we face in dealing with the challenges of contemporary education.

Theories of citizenship and theories of democracy mark the advent of modern political science and reflect, in their complexities, the theoretical and practical challenges to democracy in contemporary societies. Both also underline the dilemmas of negotiating power in democratic societies.

Theories of citizenship relate to every problem of the relations between citizens and the state and among citizens themselves, while theories of democracy relate clearly to the connection between established—hidden and explicit—forms of social and political power, the intersection between systems of democratic representation and participation with systems of political administrative organization of public governance and with political party systems. Ultimately, theories of democracy need to address the overall interaction between democracy and capitalism.

Finally, theories of multiculturalism, so prevalent in the educational field in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, have emerged as a particular response to the constitution of the pedagogical subject in schools or to the interaction between diverse pedagogical subjects and political subjects in democratic societies. They appear important in understanding multiple identities in education and culture. In short, theories of multiculturalism are intimately connected to the politics of culture and education.

Thus, theories of multiculturalism relate to the main analytical purpose of theories of citizenship. Both attempt to identify the sense and sources of identity and the competing forms of national, regional, ethnic, or religious identity. Yet theories of multiculturalism have addressed the implications of class, race, and gender for the constitution of identities and the role of the state in a way that mainstream theories of citizenship mostly have not. While the interconnections between identity and citizenship are not at all evident in the specialized bibliography, they have a practical grounding that also brings them closer to theories of democracy. This is so because not only are theories of democracy preoccupied with participation, representation, and checks and balances of power, but some brands also are concerned with ways to promote solidarity beyond particular interests of specific forms of identity.

Theories of citizenship, democracy, and multiculturalism, in their specific spheres of influence and empirical locus, strive to identify a sense of identity (for the notion of a democratic citizen and a multicultural political subject) including all its contradictory sources. They also seek to vigorously define the limits and possibilities of forms of sociability that will promote the ability of individuals to understand, appreciate, tolerate and work together with people who are different from them. Likewise, these theories may enhance people’s (or in a more restricted formulation, citizens’) ability and desire to participate in the political process of promoting the public good and accountability. Finally, these theories will help individuals’ willingness to exercise self-restraint and personal responsibility in their economic demands and in personal choices that affect the health and wealth of society and the environment as well as the process of community formation. This is so because, as Jürgen Habermas has convincingly argued: “The institutions of constitutional freedom are only worth as much as a population makes of them.” 37

The dilemmas of citizenship in a democratic diverse multicultural society can be outlined as follows: theories of citizenship had been advanced—in the tradition of Western political theory—by white, heterosexual males who identified a homogeneous citizenship through a process of systematic exclusion rather than inclusion in the polity. That is, women, identifiable social groups (e.g., Jews, Gypsies), working-class people, members of specific ethnic and racial groups (i.e., people of color), and individuals lacking certain attributes or skills (i.e., literacy or numeracy abilities) were in principle excluded from the definition of citizens in numerous societies.

Theories of democracy, while effective in identifying the sources of democratic power, participation, and representation in legitimate political democratic systems, had been unable to prevent the systemic exclusion of large segments of citizenry. Thus, formal democracy drastically differs from substantive democracy. More worrisome still is the fact that theories of democracy had been unable to differentiate the roots of representative democracy (based on the notions of equal representation, equity, and equality) from their immersion in the foundational principles that articulate capitalist societies. By definition, capitalism requires differential representation in power and politics, fostering inequity formation through hierarchies and competing interests and inequality through the workings of a profit-seeking system.

Theories of multiculturalism have been effective in discussing the politics of culture and identity and the differential sources of solidarity across and within specific forms of identity. They have been insightful in showing the remarkable complexity of multiple identities. However, they had been unable or unwilling to embrace a theory of citizenship and a theory of democracy that could be workable, in practical, procedural terms; ethically viable, in moral terms; and politically feasible in the context of capitalist civil societies. More so considering the global interpenetrations of economies, cultures, and politics.

We need a theory of global democratic multicultural citizenship that will take seriously the need to develop a theory of democracy that will help to ameliorate (if not eliminate altogether) the social differences, inequality, and inequity pervasive in capitalist societies and a theory of democracy able to address the draconian tensions between democracy and capitalism, on the one hand, and among social, political, and economic democratic forms, on the other. 38

With these theoretical considerations in mind, it is imperative to define the foundational terms of global citizenship. Our definition of global citizenship dovetails nicely with the central components of a global Education for Sustainable Development. Our definition is based on the concept of global commons understood in parallels with the concept of common good.

Global Citizenship, Global Commons and Common Good: Peace, Planet, and People

Since ancient times philosophers have discussed the concept of common good, and this is not the place to provide heuristic analyses of this foundational concept in politics. Suffice it to say, following the ethicist John Rawls, that “government is assumed to aim at the common good, that is, at maintaining conditions and achieving objectives that are similarly to everyone’s advantage.” 39 This position clearly antagonizes the idea of the invisible hand of the market “that turns self-interest into common good.” 40

Though common good is a key concept in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and entrenched in Catholic theology and social doctrine, there are a number of criticisms of the concept. From a relativist position, it is argued that a concept of common good is inconsistent with a pluralist society. Second, there is the free-rider problem in which some individuals benefit from common good without putting their own share of efforts in building this common good. A third criticism emerges from the utilitarian philosophy of individualism rejecting what is seen as dominant communitarism. Unequal sharing of burden is a fourth critique, since developing and sustaining a common good requires differential effort by different groups. 41

Despite these reservations, we would argue that the philosophy of human rights establishes a basic platform of values for the common good and the notion of the “good society.” 42 Individualism versus collectivism or communitarianism is a perpetual tension in organized societies, but this tension does not deny the importance of a concept of common good as the notion of a good society to guide citizenship building. Similarly, there are always differential appropriations and use of resources, but this article will argue that developing a concept of common good that could inspire global citizenship will diminish rather than enhance free riders. The unequal sharing of burdens is already a problem with growing inequality. A global concept of the common good will confront this problem head on and help us think of a model of society we want to achieve and how to reach that goal.

Once a concept of the common good or global commons is defined, we need to define the concept of global citizenship. It is important to move beyond historical or legal considerations, and to move beyond the notion of citizenship as a kind of personal status, a combination of rights and duties that those who are legal members of the nation-state hold or should hold.

A theory of what a good citizen is or should be relatively independent of the formal premises of the legal question of what it is to be a citizen. This is so because of the dual theoretical concerns of citizenship: citizenship as identity and as a set of civic virtues. Yet civic virtues need a civil minimum that can be found only in a historical-structural context where these civil minimums overlap with basic material conditions. One may also ask what are those civil minimums and civic virtues in a globalized world?

Global citizenship needs not to focus exclusively on the status and role associated to citizenship (obtained either through ius sanguinis or ius solis ). It should focus on civic minimums that should work at a global level, and civic virtues that are needed to accomplish this model of global citizenship education. Questions of stateless people, aboriginal communities, and refugees challenge the nature of citizenship in our globalized societies. 43

Two key elements of citizenship should be defined at the outset. First, civic minimums, because full participation in citizenship as argued by T. H. Marshall rest ultimately on material bases. Hence, growing poverty and inequality exclude large segments of individuals from active citizenship. An economic citizenship cannot be accomplished without bare essentials, including the right to a job, education, medical care, housing, and retraining over the life course. From a Marshallian perspective, the notion of democracy as a civil and political right cannot be excluded from the notion of democracy as a socioeconomic right. 44

Also important are civic virtues. Amy Gutman, writing from a philosophical Western perspective, has argued that “education for citizenship should focus on the justification of rights rather than responsibilities, and, at the same time, that schools should foster general virtues (courage, law-abidingness, loyalty), social virtues (autonomy, open-mindedness) economic virtues (work ethic, capacity to delay self-gratification) and political virtues (capacity to analyze, capacity to criticize).” 45

With these general virtues, this article has expressed the need for a set of civic virtues nurtured by a democratic multicultural ethics. That is “an antiracist, antisexist, and anti-classist philosophy based on tolerance, an epistemology of curiosity à la Freire, a rejection of cynicism and nihilist postures, a secular spiritually of love, and skillful engagement in dialogue as a method but also as a process of cognition constitute central virtues of a democratic multicultural citizenship, a bridge between foundational canons and cultures.” 46

The question of relationship among citizenship, the nation-state, and the city, seems to be part of some kind of Greek law of eternal return. Citizenship was created in cities, hence the citoyen . Today, however, there is a disparity between citizenship building in the nation-state and citizenship building in the context of the cities, particularly the global cities: “In the context of a strategic space such as the global city, the types of disadvantaged people described here are not simply marginal; they acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a politics. What this politics will be will depend on the specific projects and practices of various communities. Insofar as the sense of membership of these communities is not subsumed under the national, it may well signal the possibility of a politics that, while transnational, is actually centered in concrete localities.” 47

This article has argued that global citizenship should add value to national citizenship and to the global commons. But what is this global commons? And how can global citizenship add value? Global commons is defined by three basic propositions. The first is that our planet is our only home, and we have to protect it through a global citizenship sustainable development education, moving from diagnosis and denunciation into action and policy implementation. Recently the government of Ecuador has enshrined in the Constitution the rights of nature, which follows an important learning of a whole decade of education for sustainable development: climate justice. 48 The long march for global planetarian citizenship has begun.

Secondly, global commons is predicated on the idea that global peace is an intangible cultural good of humanity with immaterial value. Global peace is a treasure of humanity.

Thirdly, global commons is predicated on the need to find ways for people to live together democratically in an ever-growing diverse world, seeking to fulfill their individual and cultural interest and achieving their inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The great question about peace is how we can cultivate the spirit of solidarity across the lines of difference. 49 Global citizenship may help global peace, planet, and people through its contribution to civic engagement, in its classical dimensions of knowledge, skills, and values. There is a cosmopolitan imperative as suggested in many publications by Ulrich Beck ( 2006 ), an imperative of economic equality, welfare, and cultural diversity that may produce an individual who may admire others more for their differences than for their similarities.

In the end a concept of global citizenship could be based on a particular appraisal of the importance of spirituality (secular and/or religious) in the life of people and communities. In multiple debates, it is argued for the creation of a movement of global spirituality as global consciousness . 50 Many have argued for the need of a Council of World Consciousness as one of the engines of the global commons, and one way in which our human civilization, creeds, and faiths can accomplish a rich and informed dialogue in solidarity. I am sure we can work on this project as part of the conversation on global citizenship education.

Thus planet, peace, and people constitute the global commons. This holistic definition of global citizenship can only be implemented if we focus on a global system of governance that plays the role of a global equalizer to smooth over the deficiencies emerging from nation-state conflicts affecting the rest of the system. Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio addressing a Kantian paradox asks the appropriate question: “Can a state be fully democratic in a world that is not (as yet) democratic.” Posing a Kantian dilemma in considering the relationships between domestic and international systems, Bobbio points to a vicious circle: “States can become democratic only in a fully democratic international society, but a fully democratized international society presupposes that all the states that compose it are democratic. The completion of one process is hindered by the non-completion of the other.” 51

T. H. Marshall’s model argued that the nature of the welfare state guarantees social integration and cohesiveness of the polity and the exercise of rights and responsibilities of the citizen. Should we consider that this global system of governance might rest on a globalized form of the welfare state as a guarantee of global citizenship? If so, how can it be constructed? How can we deal with the challenge of scale, assuming that global citizenship works at several levels: from the documented individual to the undocumented immigrant, from the global city, to the countryside and to the nation-state, from the community to the individual, and from application of the law in the nation-state to concrete practices of politics in disenfranchised communities.

Asking whether global citizenship education may nurture a culture of global peace, human rights, and democracy is an important question. It is also relevant because, traditionally, citizenship education has been associated to “civic education”: that is, the teaching of constitutional democracy as a way to facilitate conflict resolution and conviviality. Three categories are associated with civics education: civic knowledge , which in the context of constitutional democracy entails the knowledge of basic concepts informing the practice of democracy such as public elections, majority rule, citizenship rights and obligations, constitutional separation of power, and the placement of democracy in a market economy that is used as the basic premises of civil society. The second category associated with citizenship building is civic skills , which usually means the intellectual and participatory skills that facilitate citizenship’s judgment and actions. The last category is civic virtues , usually defined in light of liberal principles such as self-discipline, compassion, empathy, civility, tolerance, and respect.

The central question is the creation of a global democratic multicultural citizenship that facilitates an education for democracy and a global consciousness. How to build better schools— that is, intellectually richer schools—particularly for those who are at the bottom of society? How to build a global democratic multicultural citizenship curriculum where everybody learns from the rich diversity of society and where the trends toward balkanization and separatism in modern societies can be prevented and even reversed? How we can address the experience of the uneducated, unemployed, angry, and disenfranchised youth bulge implementing new models of learning and praxis? How we can effectively link global citizenship education praxis with education for sustainable development worldwide? We can do a better job in preparing teachers capable of working in school settings that become the center of collective experience and solidarity.

Cosmopolitan democracies may engender global citizenship education considering the growing presence of transnational social movements that focus on issues of equity, equality, or the defense of the planet biomass and diversity. 52 Global citizenship education may be enhanced by the strengthening of an international global system of international relations consolidated around the United Nations as a supranational model for conflict resolution. Finally, global citizenship education exemplifies the growing presence of the legal framework of human rights as a principle of orderly negotiation within and across nation-states of the principles of human and environmental protection. But as I have concluded elsewhere “It is important therefore, to emphasize that citizenship education is wedded to politics and by implication is a contested concept, one that relates to the notion that sociologists call ‘political socialization’ a notion that, in turn, links the formation of individuals to state policies.” 53

The struggle for citizenship building has been marked by revolutions and war, but also peaceful marches of non-violence side by side to bloodshed. Let us take advantage of the legitimacy of UNESCO’s “soft” power and launch the silent revolution for global citizenship education worldwide.

• Ban Ki-moon . The Global Education First Initiative . Paris: UNESCO.
• Beck, U. (2006). The cosmopolitan vision . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
• Benhabib, S. (2006). Another cosmopolitanism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity: Human rights in troubled times . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
• Bobbio, N. (1995). Democracy and the international system. In D. Archibugi & D. Held (Eds.), Cosmopolitan democracy: An agenda for a new world order . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
• Falk, R. (1993). The making of the global citizenship. In J. Brecher , J. B. Childs , & J. Kutler (Eds.), Global visions: Beyond the new world order (pp. 39–50). Boston: South End Press.
• Falk, R. (2002). An emerging matrix of citizenship: Complex, uneven and fluid. In N. Dower & J. Williams (Eds.), Global citizenship: A critical introduction (pp. 15–29). New York: Routledge.
• Gutman, A. (1987). Democratic education . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Habermas J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Lauder, H. , Brown, P. , Dillabough, J. , & Halsey, A. H. (Eds.). (2006). Education, globalization and social change . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Reid, A. , Gill, J. , & Sears, A. (Eds.). (2010). Globalization, the nation-state and the citizen: Dilemmas and directions for civics and citizenship education . New York: Routledge, 2010.
• Tully, J. (2014). On global citizenship: James Tully in dialogue . London: Bloomsbury.

1. We have discussed the connections between global citizenship education and the conundrums of multiculturalism and interculturalism in Massimiliano Tarozzi and Carlos Alberto Torres (in press). Global Citizenship Education and the Crises of Multiculturalism. Comparative Perspectives . London: Bloomsbury.

2. I have developed these arguments in Carlos Alberto Torres ’s (2009). Education and Neoliberal Globalization . Introduction by Pedro Noguera. New York and London: Routledge; see also Torres ’s (2009). Globalizations and education: Collected essays on class, race, gender, and the state . Introduction by Michael W. Apple, Afterword by Pedro Demo. New York and London: Teachers College Press-Columbia University; see also Torres ’s (2015). Global citizenship and global universities: The age of global interdependence and cosmopolitanism, European Journal of Education , 3 , 262–279.

3. See D. Held (Ed.). (1991). Political theory today (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 9.

4. See R. A. Rhoads , & K. Szelényi (2011). Global citizenship and the university: advancing social life and relations in an interdependent world (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

5. UNESCO (2005). Towards knowledge societies (Paris: UNESCO World Report).

6. C. Manuel (1996). The rise of the network society (Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell).

7. B. Ulrich (1998). World risk society (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press).

8. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/global-education-first-initiative-gefi/ .

9. http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#/page/our-gpi-findings .

10. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-global-peace-index-ranks-121-countries-58694072.html .

11. C. A. Torres (1998). Democracy, education, and multiculturalism: Dilemmas of citizenship in a global world (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), 246. See also C. A. Torres (2014). First freire: Early writings in social justice education (New York: Teachers College Press); and M. Gadotti (2004). Os Mestres de Rousseau (São Paulo: Cortez Editores).

12. For an analysis of Freire’s contributions see Torres, Carlos Alberto (2014). First freire: Early writings in social justice education (New York: Teachers College Press).

13. C. A. Torres (2013). Comparative education: The dialectics of globalization and its discontents, in R. Arnove , C. A. Torres & Stephen Franz (Eds.), Comparative education: The dialectics of the global and the local . 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), p. 472.

14. T. Piketty (2014). Capital in the twenty first century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), p. 471.

15. World Bank (2014/2015). Ending poverty and sharing prosperity. Global Monitoring Report http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-monitoring-report .

16. The new World Bank Monitoring Report entitled Development Goals in an Era of Demographic Change situate 900 people below the line of poverty http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/503001444058224597/Global-Monitoring-Report-2015.pdf

17. C.A. Torres (2011). Public universities and the neoliberal common sense: Seven iconoclastic theses, International Studies in Sociology of Education , 21 (3), 177–197; and C. A. Torres (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: A Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education, International Studies in Sociology of Education , 23 (2), 80–106.

18. R. A. Rhoads , & C. A. Torres (Eds.). (2006). The University, State, and Market. The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

19. L. Shultz (2015). Decolonizing UNESCO’S Post-2015 Education Agenda: Global Social Justice and a View from UNDRIP, Postcolonial Directions in Education , 4 (2), 96–115.

20. C. A. Torres (2009). Carlos Alberto. Globalizations and Education: Collected Essays on Class, Race, Gender, and the State . Introduction by Michael W. Apple. Afterword by Pedro Demo (New York and London: Teachers College Press-Columbia University), 41–42.

21. R. Ken , & A. Lou (2015). Creative Schools. The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (New York: Viking), 20.

22. UNESCO (2014). Roadmap for Implementing the Global Action Programme on Education for Sustainable Development. Paris, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002305/230514e.pdf .

23. UNESCO, Concept Note UNESCO Forum on Global Citizenship Education: Preparing learners for the challenge of the 21st Century, December 2–4, 2013, Bangkok, Thailand.

24. Rhoads and Szelényi, Op. Cit. , 2011, p. 22.

25. S. Benhabib (2005). Borders, Boundaries, and Citizenship . Political Science and Politics , 38 (4), 673–677. Accessed 30/11/2011 17:36 http://www.yale.edu/polisci/sbenhabib/papers/Borders,%20Boundaries,%20and%20Citizenship.pdf .

26. S. Sassen (2002). The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 46 , 4–25. See page 6.

27. J. Habermas (2004). Why Europe Needs a Constitution, in E. O. Eriksen , J. E. Fossum , & A. J. Menéndez (Eds.), Developing a Constitution for Europe (London: Routledge).

28. C.A. Torres (1998). Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism: Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield); C. A. Torres (2009a). Globalizations and Education: Collected Essays on Class, Race, Gender, and the State . Introduction by Michael W. Apple. Afterword by Pedro Demo (New York and London: Teachers College Press-Columbia University); and C. A. Torres (2009b). Education and Neoliberal Globalization . Introduction by Pedro Noguera (New York and London: Routledge).

29. Ministers and heads of delegation attending the UN Climate Change Conference 2014—COP20—(1–12 December 2014, Lima, Peru) have adopted The Lima Ministerial Declaration on Education and Awareness-raising. This declaration calls on governments to include climate change into school curricula and climate awareness into national development and climate change plans.

30. S. Benhabib (2005). Borders, boundaries, and citizenship . Political Science and Politics , 38 (4), 673–677. Accessed: 30/11/2011 17:36, http://www.yale.edu/polisci/sbenhabib/papers/Borders,%20Boundaries,%20and%20Citizenship.pdf . See also Garret W. Brown’s rendition of this discussion on universal or cosmopolitan laws of hospitality in a response to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kant about the cosmopolitan rights to visit contrasted to the universal right to reside. https://www.academia.edu/10167129/The_Laws_of_Hospitality_Asylum:Seekers_and_Cosmopolitan_Right_A_Kantian_Response_to_Jacques_Derrida .

31. See Rhoads and Torres, Op. Cit.

32. See Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011, Op. Cit. , p. 160.

33. See Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011, Op. Cit. , p. 17.

34. Y. Soysal (1994). Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press), p. 7.

35. S. Sassen (2002). The repositioning of citizenship: Emergent subjects and spaces for politics, Berkeley Journal of Sociology , 46 , 4–25. See p. 4.

36. S. Song (2012). The boundary problem in democratic theory: why the demos should be bounded by the state , International Theory , 4 (1), 39–68. Quote in p. 44, and Cambridge University Press.

37. J. Habermas (1992). Citizenship and national identity: Some reflections on the future of Europe, Praxis International , 12 , 7.

38. These arguments have been developed in more detail in Torres, 1998.

39. J. Rawls (1971). A theory of justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 233.

40. D. L. d’Avray (2010). Rationalities in history. A Weberian essay in comparison (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press), 30.

41. M. Velasquez, A. Claire, S. J. Thomas Shanks, & M. J. Meyer , The common good , http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/commongood.html .

42. Republican culture is the expression of universal rationality and of ethical values rooted in human rights. Hence, it follows that the school is aimed at allowing individuals to access this rationality and these universal values, liberating them from the ties of belonging to groups (Tarozzi and Torres, Op. Cit, p. 64, in press).

43. S. Sassen (1999). Globalization and its discontents: Essays on the new mobility of people and money (New York: The New Press).

44. T. H. Marshall (1950). Citizenship and social class and other essays (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press).

45. Cited in Torres (1998), Op. Cit., p. 111.

46. See Torres (1998), Op. Cit. , p. 258.

47. Sassen (2002), Op. Cit. , p. 22.

48. http://therightsofnature.org/ecuador-rights/ .

49. T. Gitllin (1995). The twilight of common dreams: Why America is wracked by culture wars (New York: Henry Holt).

50. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-xfEcC2RXro

51. Cited in Carlos Alberto Torres (1998). Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism. Dilemmas of Citizenship in a Global World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), 95–96.

52. C. R. S. Milani, & R. N. Laniado (2006). Transnational social movements and the globalization agenda: A methodological approach based on the analysis of the World Social Forum. Working Paper 5, December 2006. The Edelstein Center for Social Research. Accessed December 15, 2010, from http://www.edelsteincenter.org .

53. Torres (1998), Op. Cit. , p. 219.

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Importance of citizenship education

Why is citizenship education important.

Citizenship education gives people the knowledge and skills to  understand ,  challenge  and  engage with democratic society including politics, the media, civil society, the economy and the law.

Democracies need active, informed and responsible citizens – citizens who are willing and able to take responsibility for themselves and their communities and contribute to the political process.

How does it benefit young people?

It helps them to develop  self-confidence and a sense of agency,  and successfully deal with life changes and challenges such as bullying and discrimination.

It gives them a  voice : in the life of their schools, their communities and society at large.

It enables them to  make a positive contribution  by developing the knowledge and experience needed to claim their rights and understand their responsibilities. It prepares them for the challenges and opportunities of adult and working life.

Who else does it benefit?

Citizenship also brings benefits for schools, other educational organisations and for society at large.

For schools and other educational organisations, it helps to produce motivated and responsible learners, who relate positively to each other, to staff and to the surrounding community. For society it helps to create an active and responsible citizenry, willing to participate in the life of the nation and the wider world and play its part in the democratic process.

One of the first steps on the civic journey is the education system. Education should help young people become active citizens once they understand their role within society and how they can go about improving it. The Ties that Bind – House of Lords Report on Citizenship, 2018

Society belongs to all of us. What we put into it creates what we get out of it.

At Young Citizens, we believe society is best when we  all  join in. That is, when we all bring our energy and judgment to it. This helps make it fairer and more inclusive. It supports a democracy in which people participate and belong. We have countless examples of how  even the youngest  can  make a difference .

But it means we all need enough  knowledge ,  skills  and  confidence  to take part effectively.

We want everyone to feel they belong. And we want everyone to feel they can drive change.

The European Commission supports the following definition of active citizenship:

Participation in civil society, community and/or political life, characterised by mutual respect and non-violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy Hoskins, 2006

So let’s make this a reality. Let’s help people become effective citizens. The cost is much greater if we don’t.

Suggested Next Steps:

• Read about what citizenship education entails.
• Here are opportunities to volunteer with Young Citizens  to be a part of the difference we are making.
• Find out more about our programmes to become active and engaged citizens.

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Evidence on Curriculum—Citizenship Education and Classroom Teaching Methods

• First Online: 03 May 2019

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• Clive Harber 2  

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This chapter argues that citizenship education is often seen as playing a potentially key role in peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. The chapter begins by discussing overview studies of citizenship education in post-conflict, developing countries before going on to examine evidence from a range of African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Central and South American countries. There follows a section of the chapter specifically on teaching methods used in classrooms in a range of post-conflict, developing countries. The chapter concludes that the evidence on system-wide transformation of citizenship education and classroom teaching methods in order to help to facilitate peacebuilding in post-conflict, developing societies is as weak as evidence on school structures and other potentially positive areas of curriculum intervention. As in the previous evidence-based chapters, this chapter suggests there may well be some individual schools or teachers who have made successful attempts to change their practice, but the evidence suggests that even these are not entirely straightforward and unproblematic.

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Harber, C. (2019). Evidence on Curriculum—Citizenship Education and Classroom Teaching Methods. In: Schooling for Peaceful Development in Post-Conflict Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17689-1_9

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What is Citizenship Education? Definition, Types, and Importance

Citizenship is the status of a member of a particular country with certain rights and responsibilities. Therefore, citizenship education refers to teaching and learning the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes that will equip individuals to become active and responsible citizens. 

In today’s world, the importance of civic education or citizenship education, is more critical than ever because being responsible goes beyond just our actions; it affects the well-being of the entire society. 

Citizenship education teaches individuals about their rights and responsibilities and how to participate effectively in the democratic process. It also promotes social cohesion and unity by teaching people about their society’s diverse cultures, beliefs, and perspectives. 

Citizenship education is essential in forming a well-rounded national identity, which is essential for fostering national development. Young people who receive citizenship education become responsible citizens who participate in the democratic process, volunteer in their communities, and make informed decisions. 

Citizenship education encourages respect for human dignity, diversity, and social justice, concepts not inherent in human beings but rather taught through education. This blog post will walk you through everything you need about citizenship education, its importance, components, and challenges. 

What is Citizenship Education?

Citizenship education is an educational process that aims to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to be responsible and active citizens. It’s all about teaching individuals to participate in the democratic process and understand their rights and responsibilities.  

But citizenship education is more than just memorizing facts and figures. It’s about instilling a sense of belonging and identity, understanding and appreciating different perspectives and cultures, and promoting social cohesion. 

This means understanding the concept of citizenship beyond legal definitions and acknowledging the diverse identities and experiences that make up our communities. 

Citizenship education is more critical than ever in a world plagued by divisiveness and, polarization. It’s the foundation for building a better, more just society. So, let’s not dismiss it as just another subject to tick off our to-do list. Let’s embrace it, learn from it, and use it to create positive change in our communities.

Related: 150 Quotes About Education for Students

Importance of Citizenship Education

Have you ever thought about the importance of being a responsible citizen? Citizenship education plays a vital role in shaping individuals who positively contribute to society. 

Building responsible citizens is one of the key aspects of citizenship education. It involves instilling the values of respect, empathy, and responsibility towards oneself and others. 

These values are essential in promoting a sense of moral duty and ethical responsibility. When citizens act responsibly, they are more likely to make decisions that benefit the community. 

Fostering social cohesion and unity is another vital aspect that citizenship education addresses. Social cohesion involves creating a sense of togetherness among individuals from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs. 

Citizenship education promotes understanding and respect for diversity, creating a united community that works together towards a common goal. 

Promoting national development is an essential outcome of citizenship education. When individuals become responsible and actively participate in developing their country, they contribute to the nation’s overall growth. 

By encouraging civic responsibility, citizenship education cultivates active citizenship, which is crucial for any country’s economic, social, and political development. 

In summary, Citizenship education plays a vital role in creating responsible citizens who positively contribute to society. It fosters social cohesion and unity, builds responsible citizens, and promotes national development. 

By implementing citizenship education, you can play a more significant role in shaping a better future for yourself and your community.

Also Read: What is Bantu Education? All You Need to Know

Types of Citizenship Education

In the Nigerian school curriculum, citizenship or civic education encompasses three major types: citizens’ civic, social, and political rights.

1. Civil Rights

Civil rights pertain to fundamental entitlements that all citizens possess, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity, physical or mental ability, or sexual preference. Some of these rights include:

• Right to own properties
• Freedom of speech
• Right to life
• Right to education
• Right to personal liberty
• Freedom of religion
• Freedom to vote
• Freedom to have a fair court trial

2. Social Rights

Social rights focus on an individual’s basic human needs. These rights encompass necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, and other provisions for oneself. Some of these rights are:

• Right to good physical and mental health, with access to care.
• Right to an adequate standard of living, including food, clothing, and housing.
• Right to housing, ensuring freedom of habitation.

3. Political Rights

Political rights allow individuals to participate, directly or indirectly, in the country’s political activities. These rights include:

• Right to freedom of assembly
• Right to vote
• Right to hold a political office
• Right to join the political party of your choice

Related: US States In Alphabetical Order

Goals of Citizenship Education in Nigeria

Citizenship education in Nigeria has several objectives:

• Informing citizens about national affairs and political matters.
• Promoting good governance by fostering political awareness and citizen participation.
• Educating individuals about their rights and responsibilities as citizens.
• Instilling a sense of responsibility and loyalty to serve the nation.
• Equipping citizens with problem-solving skills for societal challenges.
• Cultivating cultural and ethnic values and national integrity.

Different Types of Citizenship

Below are the different types of citizenship:

Birthright Citizenship

Birthright citizenship, also known as jus soli, is granted to individuals born within a country’s territorial boundaries. 

Regardless of the parents’ citizenship status, anyone born on the country’s soil is automatically considered a citizen. This type of citizenship ensures that individuals born in a country have a legal and national connection to it from birth.

Descent or Bloodline Citizenship

Descent or bloodline citizenship, or jus sanguinis, is acquired through lineage or parentage. Individuals are granted citizenship if they have at least one parent who is a citizen of the country. This type of citizenship recognizes the importance of familial ties and heritage in determining one’s nationality.

Naturalization

Naturalization is the process by which a foreign national becomes a citizen of a country. It typically involves meeting specific residency requirements, demonstrating good moral character, passing language and civics tests, and taking an oath of allegiance. 

Naturalization allows individuals not born in the country to become full-fledged citizens through a formal legal process.

Dual Citizenship

Dual citizenship, also known as dual nationality, is a situation in which an individual simultaneously holds the citizenship of two different countries. Some countries allow individuals to acquire citizenship without requiring them to renounce their existing citizenship. 

Dual citizenship can result from birth, marriage, or naturalization, and it can offer individuals various legal rights and responsibilities in both countries.

Multiple Citizenship

Multiple citizenship is a broader concept that goes beyond dual citizenship. It refers to the possession of citizenship in more than two countries. 

Some countries, such as those that allow for dual citizenship, may inadvertently result in multiple citizenship for individuals who acquire additional citizenship through various means, such as birth, descent, or naturalization.

Honorary Citizenship

Honorary citizenship is a symbolic and honorary status granted to individuals who have made significant contributions or demonstrated exceptional achievements in a country, even if they do not meet the standard criteria for citizenship. 

It is typically a gesture of appreciation and recognition and may or may not come with legal rights or responsibilities.

These different types of citizenship reflect various ways individuals can become members of a country by birth, descent, naturalization, or special recognition. Each type carries its rights, duties, and legal implications.

Also Read: 100 Educational Quotes for Students Motivation

Components of Citizenship Education

Citizenship education encompasses various components that help build active and responsible citizens capable of making informed decisions. These components include values education, civic education, democratic education, multicultural education, and human rights education .

• Values education is focused on instilling morals and principles in individuals, such as empathy, respect, responsibility, and integrity. 
• In contrast, civic education aims to broaden the individual’s understanding of the state and its institutions, where citizens learn about their societal roles and responsibilities. 
• Democratic education focuses on the importance of democracy and democratic principles, including freedom of speech and the right to vote.
• Multicultural education emphasizes respecting diversity and increasing appreciation of other cultures, promoting cultural awareness and harmony. 
• Lastly, human rights education helps individuals understand their inherent rights as human beings and the responsibilities that come with them.

While each component is equally vital, teachers must tailor their approach to ensure a balanced citizenship education curriculum. For example, teachers can use a combination of classroom activities, debates, and discussions to engage students and encourage critical thinking and active involvement.

However, several challenges can hinder the effective implementation of citizenship education. These challenges include inadequate funding, political interference, and resistance to change. 

Teachers must collaborate with stakeholders, including policymakers, parents, and communities, to address these challenges to secure the necessary resources and support.

Related: NUC Requirements for Private Universities Establishment

Role of Teachers in Citizenship Education

To be effective in citizenship education, teachers have a great role to play. They are responsible for preparing and delivering the curriculum that covers the various aspects of citizenship education.

 This involves imparting knowledge on civic responsibility, democratic participation, multicultural education, and human rights. Through this approach, students can learn to understand and appreciate the value of their role in society.

Apart from teaching, it is also crucial that teachers create opportunities for active engagement. This could involve organizing community service projects, debates, or moot courts. Students can apply their knowledge and develop a sense of social responsibility by engaging directly with the community.

To encourage critical thinking and positive attitudes, teachers must foster a classroom environment that values and respects diversity. This can be done by promoting dialogue, encouraging questions, and creating a safe space for students to express their opinions. 

By doing this, teachers can raise a generation of responsible and empathetic citizens willing to work towards a common good.

To sum it up, teachers play a crucial role in citizenship education. They can nurture responsible and engaged citizens by preparing and delivering the curriculum, creating opportunities for active engagement, and fostering critical thinking and positive attitudes.

Challenges in Citizenship Education

Citizenship education faces several challenges that prevent it from achieving its full potential. 

• One of such is the lack of funding and resources. Unfortunately, this affects the quality of education students receive and the ability of teachers to deliver lessons effectively. 
• Another major challenge is political interference, which hampers the curriculum’s integrity. This often leads to teachers being coerced to focus on certain topics or propagate certain ideologies, which can hinder students’ understanding of citizenship.
• Lastly, resistance to change also poses a challenge in citizenship education. Some people are skeptical about new teaching methods and may resist changes, making instituting effective citizenship education programs difficult.

It is essential to address these challenges if citizenship education is to achieve its goal of building responsible, active, and engaged citizens. Overall, it is important to create an enabling environment to ensure that citizenship education is delivered effectively, empowering students with the knowledge and skills they need to participate actively in society.

What is citizenship education in SS1?

Citizenship education in SS1 provides knowledge, skills, and understanding that enable students to comprehend their rights, duties, and responsibilities within society.

What are the four types of citizenship education?

The four types of citizenship education are:

a) Active Learning and Citizenship

b) Single-Issue Politics

c) Democracy and Student Rights

What is citizenship education in primary schools?

Citizenship education in primary schools is a subject that equips students with the knowledge, skills, and understanding required to actively participate as responsible citizens in a democratic society. It covers topics such as democracy, politics, parliament, and voting.

Also Read: Full List of States and Capital In Nigeria and their Slogans

What is Citizenship Education (Summary) 

Wow! We’ve come to the end of this exciting journey through citizenship education. We’ve learned what it means to be a responsible citizen and how citizenship education can shape our lives and build our nation.

Citizenship education is critical to shaping responsible citizens who care about their country’s social cohesion and national development. The components of citizenship education, such as values, civic, multicultural, human rights, and democratic education, have proven to be powerful tools for equipping students with the right skills and knowledge.

The role of teachers in delivering citizenship education cannot be underestimated. Through creating opportunities for active engagement, encouraging critical thinking and positive attitudes, and preparing and delivering a citizenship education curriculum, teachers can help students realize the importance of citizenship education.

However, the challenges in citizenship education, such as lack of funding and resources, political interference, and resistance to change, cannot be ignored. Still, we can overcome them through collective efforts.

It is time to rise to the occasion and embrace citizenship education as a tool for building a responsible society. As you go about your daily activities, let us all remember that we have a role in building our nation.

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The rights and responsibilities of citizenship and civic participation are critical components of civic integration and a key component of IELCE. IELCE instruction in this topic can include information about documentation and citizenship preparation as well as community engagement more broadly, such as through topics like navigating community services and achieving a more digitally equitable future. Resources in this section highlight how IELCE activities can support civics education and deliver citizenship and civic participation services.

Research, 2021

Measuring Civic Readiness: A Review of Survey Scales

This publication is a U.S. Department of Education review of state and local civic readiness efforts to quantify civic readiness, including descriptions of the format and structure of survey scales, civic readiness categories measured by the scales, and a summary of the reliability and validity evidence associated with the scales. States can use this resource to support the creation of state-level civic readiness measures. A webinar about the review is also available.

Policy, 2021

Texas Adult Education and Family Content Standards

The Texas Workforce Commission’s adult education standards now include Citizen/Community Member Content Standards (see pages 122–129) under four categories: Become and Stay Involved; Form and Express Opinions and Ideas; Work Together; and Take Action to Strengthen Communities. States can use these standards to identify their own standards, activities, and benchmarks around civics education.

Research, 2012

The Economic Value of Citizenship for Immigrants in the United States

Migration Policy Institute’s research demonstrates that naturalized citizens earn more than their non-naturalized counterparts, with a 5%+ wage premium identified for citizenship status. States can use this to promote the value of citizenship activities and naturalization efforts for both individuals and communities.

Policy, 2020

State Government Guide to Promoting U.S. Citizenship and Facilitating Naturalization

The New Americans Campaign is a bipartisan initiative to increase the number of people gaining citizenship through naturalization by promoting the benefits of citizenship and modernizing the process. States can use these recommendations for state governments to promote the route to U.S. citizenship.

Policy, 2022

Civic Objectives and Additional Assessment Plan (COAPP) Information

California’s Civic Participation and IELCE assessment system was developed by CASAS for the California Department of Education EL Civics program and has been updated for IELCE and California’s immigrant integration legislation (AB 2098). States can use this information to develop their own additional assessments on core civic and immigrant integration areas, including digital literacy.

Instructional Material, 2022

Civic Objectives and Additional Assessment Plans List

California’s Civic Participation and IELCE assessment system was developed by CASAS for the California Department of Education EL Civics program and has been updated for IELCE and California’s immigrant integration legislation (AB 2098). Programs can use the COAPP rubrics to develop and evaluate explicit civics instruction across multiple immigrant integration goal areas including economic security, civic and community participation, and digital literacy.

Video, 2024

Civic Engagement Activities in Adult Education

This video, developed by EARN, showcases how Briya Public Charter School, in Washington, DC, provides opportunities for civic engagement. An audio description version is available in the description of the video.

Video, 2023

Contextualizing Civics for the Workplace

This video, developed by OCTAE’s EARN project, showcases how Montgomery College, in Maryland, contextualizes civics content to IELCE activities to prepare learners for IET.

Instructional Material

California EL Civics Exchange

This repository was created by CASAS, the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network, and the California Department of Education to share original instructional materials for the seven EL Civics competency areas.

Teaching Skills That Matter Civics Education

Instructors can use the OCTAE issue brief, case study, lesson plans, instructional resources, and video on civics education to support civics instruction.

“Why Vote?” Voter Engagement Resources

The Right Question Institute provides online and downloaded resources in English and Spanish to support voter engagement, self-advocacy, and the Question Formulation Technique. Instructors can use these materials to build awareness, stimulate discussion, and support learners’ formulation of their own questions.

Access America - USA Learns

This online adult ESOL course from the Sacramento County Office of Education focuses on immigrant integration. Instructors can use these materials in remote, hybrid, and blended IELCE activities.

Informational Materials, 2023

Civics in the Adult Education Classroom

This spotlight describes and provides examples of how civics content and activities can be integrated and contextualized into instruction in four discrete ways: 1) teaching specific civics education topics, 2) supporting civic integration, 3) offering opportunities for civic engagement, and 4) focusing on a civic understanding for the workplace.

Expanding the Use of Online Resources in IELCE Activities to Support Immigrant Integration and Inclusion

This guide offers tips and guidance for program administrators and instructors on using virtual learning strategies for serving ELs, especially in the Integrated English Literacy and Civics Education (IELCE) context. This guide also describes how programs can leverage online resources for IELCE instruction to support immigrant integration and inclusion.

Applying for residency and citizenship requires completion of government-issued documents. Many resources exist to outline these complex procedures, and this section provides resources to support these efforts.

Informational Material

USCIS Green Card

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provide helpful information about Green Card eligibility and the application process.

How to Apply for a Passport

The State Department provides an easy-to-read overview of the steps for how to apply for or renew a U.S. passport.

States Offering Driver’s Licenses to Immigrants

This article outlines the laws enacted in 18 states and the District of Columbia to allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Avoid Scams Resource Center

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services provides materials on how to avoid immigration scams. Materials are available in multiple languages.

Citizenship preparation instruction, typically offered in citizenship preparation programs funded by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, supports immigrants in preparing for the naturalization exam, which assesses English literacy and knowledge of American history and government. Adult education instructors may want to be aware of these resources as IELCE activities can prepare ELs for these formal citizenship preparation activities through partnership with citizenship preparation programs, student supports, and instruction related to civics.

USCIS Citizenship Resource Center

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services resources support civics and citizenship programs, including a toolkit with a program development guide and instructional materials. Programs can use these materials to develop their citizenship preparation courses and outreach to the community. Instructors can use these materials to support their direct civics and citizenship test prep instruction and direct learners to independent study materials.

Instructional Material, 2021

U.S. Citizenship Course -USA Learns

This online course from USA Learns provides direct instruction for the U.S. citizenship test. Instructors can use these materials in remote, hybrid, and blended citizenship preparation programs and encourage their use as self-study materials.

The ability to navigate community services such as schools and health care are critical for immigrants’ socioemotional well-being and for civic integration. Resources in this section provide guidance for instruction on these vital civic integration topics and strategies for connecting immigrants and English learners to community resources, such as through community navigators.

Research, 2019

Health Literacy and Adult Basic Education

This supplement of Health Literacy Research and Practice seeks to affirm the relevance of adult basic education to advancements in the health literacy field.

Two-Generation Family Approaches to Citizenship Education

This tip sheet from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Division of Education and Training provides a model for two-generation civics education and highlights ways K-12 schools and adult citizenship education programs can engage the entire family through civics education.

A Novel Approach to Improve Health Literacy in Immigrant Communities

The Anchorage Health Literacy Collaborative developed a community-wide program to address the health literacy needs of the city's immigrant and refugee population. This journal article describes the collaborative, services, and outcomes.

ORR Fact Sheets

These fact sheets from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) provide information about eligibility for ORR benefits and services.

Informational Material, 2017

CASA Know Your Rights Booklet

CASA provides this booklet summarizing a variety of legal services for low-income immigrants who are experiencing housing, employment and immigration-related issues.

Informational Material, 2022

Know Your Rights/English for Speakers of Other Languages Tool Kit

This toolkit developed by the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice with ESOL teachers has four sections that each include several lesson units: Basic Human Rights, Knowing Your Rights in a Car Stop, Protecting Families in Cases of Separation, and Understanding the U.S. School System.

Professional Development

Social & Emotional Learning and Trauma-Informed Approaches in Refugee Education

This free online mini-course illustrates the use of social and emotional learning and trauma-informed approaches in their classrooms to support refugee student well-being and learning.

Teaching Skills That Matter in Adult Education (TSTM)

OCTAE’s TSTM Toolkit provides an issue brief, a case study, lesson plans, and an annotated bibliography in the topics of digital literacy, health literacy, financial literacy, civics education, and workforce preparation.

Financial Literacy Guide from Maryland Skilled Immigrant Task Force

This Maryland Department of Labor resource includes Quick Start Guides related to financial literacy in multiple languages.

Practitioners Guide to Supportive Servicess

This guide, from the U.S. Department of Labor, aims to help workforce professionals in quickly and accurately locate emergency and long-term resources for workforce program customers to gain economic stability. It includes information on rental assistance, earned income tax credit, nutrition, food security, health care resources, and legal aid, among others.

Many immigrant families experience digital inequity and do not have adequate access to key digital tools such as home broadband internet services and digital devices. Resources in this section provide strategies for accommodating immigrant families’ current digital access and supporting their ability to obtain these key digital tools.

Informational Material, 2020

Digital Navigators

The Digital Navigators services model is a solution to address digital access and learning and upskilling. States can use this model and the toolkit to develop policies and support programs with implementation of Digital Navigators.

Media Literacy Education to Counter Truth Decay: An Implementation and Evaluation Framework

This report presents a framework for implementing and evaluating media literacy educational efforts. Instructors can use this resource as a guide for incorporating implementation and evaluation of media literacy into instruction.

Research, 2022

The Digital Literacy Action Plan: A Strategy for Differentiation and Learner Agency in Digital Literacy Instruction

The Digital Literacy Action Plan is an instructional strategy designed to differentiate, increase learner agency, and address digital equity concerns. Instructors can use this resource to help with integration of digital literacy.

CrowdED Learning

Open Educational Resources (OER) are open resources that can support differentiated, no-cost instruction for English learners. Instructors can use the resources provided on this site for various OERs to inform instruction.

A network of partners may deliver these services to adult English learners , including internationally-trained professionals.

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ATS Resume Templates

Download an ATS-friendly resume template for free. These templates can be edited in Microsoft Word and can be accurately scanned by an applicant tracking system.

If you’ve made it to this page, then you probably already know more about applicant tracking systems (ATS) than the average job seeker. That gives you an advantage! Why?

Many companies use ATS to manage resumes and applications. In fact, Jobscan research shows that over 97% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS.

If an ATS can’t read or understand the information on your resume, then your application might not be seen when a recruiter searches for candidates with specific skills or experience – even if you have those skills or the experience!

Your resume needs to be ATS-friendly in order to give you the best chance of getting a job interview. That means that you need an ATS resume template.

We’ve designed 15 ATS resume templates that can be downloaded as Microsoft Word files and easily edited. Download one for free or use our free resume builder to get a customized ATS-friendly resume in minutes.

Free ATS Resume Templates

Executive and Management ATS-Friendly Resume Templates

As a leader, you want your experience and accomplishments to shine. These resume templates give you opportunities to show the measurable results you’ve achieved, as well as your hard and soft skills .

Using correct formatting is critical here. The ATS needs to be able to parse all of that vital information and categorize it correctly. You also need your resume to be searchable by an ATS so that when a recruiter filters candidates by skills, your application stays on the list.

Entry-Level ATS-Friendly Resume Templates

You might not think you have a lot to show on your resume, but you do! These templates provide sections where you can highlight your education, internships, volunteer experience , personal accomplishments, and more.

An ATS-friendly resume will help you get found by recruiters and hiring managers. This is important because an entry-level position could have hundreds of applicants! Use these templates to make sure the ATS picks up your skills and experience.

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ATS Resume Templates - What You Need to Know

How to make the perfect ats resume.

Remember, an ATS is just a computer filing system. It needs to be able to scan and understand the text on your resume in order to correctly parse the information and sort it properly.

An ATS will never auto-reject a resume, but an ATS optimized resume does make it easier for a recruiter to find you among the sea of applicants.

Even more importantly, an ATS-friendly resume naturally follows expert-recommended resume writing standards as well. That means that when the recruiter personally views your resume, it will include the relevant information they’re looking for and will be formatted in a way that makes it easier to read

Follow these tips for making the perfect ATS resume :

1. Tailor your resume to the job you are applying for

Focus on quality over quantity. Each job you apply for is unique, even if they all have the same title. Every company has different needs for that role. The job description will make it clear which hard skills, soft skills, experience, and education the company is looking for. So tailor your resume to show them that you are the perfect candidate.

Tailoring each and every resume can be time consuming, but it’s worth the effort!

You can speed up this process by using a tool like Jobscan’s resume scanner . Powered by AI-technology , this tool analyzes your resume against the job description and provides you with a resume score that tells you how closely your resume matches the job description. It also tells you exactly what you need to do to increase your score.

2. Match your resume keywords to skills found in the job description

Recruiters might use an ATS’ search function to find applicants with specific skills. How do you know what skills they will search for? By examining the job listing. Use a resume scanner to automatically pick out the hard and soft skills the recruiter might search for, and then include those on your resume.

Even if the recruiter doesn’t search applications for those skills, they’ll definitely be looking for mentions of them on each resume they review.

3. Use long-form and acronym versions of keywords

Some ATS will only return resumes with the exact keywords the recruiters would search for. For example, if you included “Search Engine Optimization” in your resume but the recruiter searched for “SEO,” your profile may not appear in the results. Try to include both the acronym and the unabbreviated form of the term.

Use a tool like Jobscan’s resume fixer to make sure your resume doesn’t contain mistakes that will eliminate you from consideration.

4. Use Chronological or Hybrid resume format to write your resume .

Recruiters do not like the functional resume format . Unless you’re making a career change, a functional resume is going to work against you. (And even then, we recommend you steer clear of the format for a career change resume .)

The best format for the ATS is traditional reverse chronological. You can also use chronological and hybrid resume formats as these are familiar to most recruiters.

5. Use an easy-to-read, traditional font

For readability, use a traditional serif or sans serif font. Untraditional or “fancy” fonts can cause parsing errors, which means the full text of your resume won’t be searchable.

6. Use standard resume section headings

Section headers like “Where I’ve Been” in place of “Work Experience” will confuse applicant tracking systems, causing them to organize information incorrectly.

7. Save your file as a .docx if possible

A docx file is most compatible with ATS.

What is the best resume format for ATS?

There are three standard resume formats to choose from in your job search. They shape your first impression and determine the way recruiters and hiring managers view your fit as an applicant.

Your resume formatting can also determine how well your resume is parsed within an applicant tracking system (ATS) and how likely you are to be noticed as a result.

Regardless of the format you use, the most important thing is to use standard section headings like Experience, Skills, and Education. That will make it easier for the ATS to categorize the text.

How to tailor your ATS-friendly resume to a job

Tailoring your resume proves to recruiters that you’re an experienced professional. Most importantly, it shows them that you’re the perfect fit for this role.

Follow these three steps for tailoring your resume to a job description:

1. Examine the specific job description of the position

Go line by line through the job description and ask yourself these questions:

• “Does my resume experience section clearly state that I can do what’s required of this role?”
• “Am I using the same language found in the job description or job posting?”

You might find several different or missing skills and keywords in your generic resume.

2. Match skills and keywords from the job description

Mirroring the language, keywords, and buzzwords found within the job description is the easiest way to demonstrate you’re a better match than the competition.

The best way to show you’re the best fit for the position is to take words from the job posting and strategically put them in your job descriptions and other resume sections. A resume scanner will automatically pull out these keywords in seconds and speed up this process.

3. Write your job title clearly

Recruiters might search for people who have done the job they’re hiring, so list your job titles clearly and match the titles to the one in the job posting when possible. If you haven’t held the job before, list it under your name at the top or as part of your summary section.

What is Applicant Tracking Software (ATS)?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software used to assist with human resources, recruitment, and hiring. While each system offers a different package of features, applicant tracking systems are primarily used to help hiring companies organize and navigate large numbers of applicants.

For example, an ATS stores job candidate information like resumes, cover letters, references, and other recruitment and hiring data that HR teams can easily access and organize. It will also track job candidates and their application status throughout the hiring pipeline.

Ultimately, an ATS automates time-consuming administrative tasks such as manually screening applicants, reading resumes, scheduling interviews, and sending notifications and emails to job candidates and employees.

Can you add graphics to your resume?

When it comes to creating an ATS-friendly resume , the rule is: The simpler, the better. ATS are improving at scanning different formatting features, but not all of them are good at this.

Adding graphics and images could cause ATS parsing errors , which means the text on your resume won’t be fully searchable or accurately categorized by an ATS. We recommend that job seekers err on the side of caution. Avoid graphics, images, and photos.

Are Google Docs or Microsoft resume templates ATS-friendly?

They can be. We talked about some formatting features to avoid on your resume – fancy graphics and non-traditional fonts. Those features can trip up an ATS, even if they’re on a Word document or Google Docs file.

However, as long as you follow the guidelines on this page, or use one of these ATS resume templates, you’ll be fine.

How to get your cover letter past the ATS?

To increase your cover letter’s chances of passing an ATS, focus on using a clean format without complex formatting, incorporate relevant keywords and phrases from the job description, and ensure that your content is easy for the ATS to parse.

Consider using a tool like Jobscan’s cover letter generator to help you create an ATS-friendly cover letter. If you already have a cover letter, run it through our cover letter checker tool to get personalized feedback on how to improve your cover letter and make it more compelling to employers.

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