Charting a Democratic Course for Global Citizenship Education : Research Directions and Current Challen ges

This article outlines research directions for global citizenship education, based on making the field an important democratic goal of schooling in the 21stcentury. Despite a significant shift in educational policies and practices towards addressing education that respond to the conditions of globalization, there is not a clear vision of the field’s position in schools. Furthermore, curriculum reforms such as global citizenship education inevitably face the issue of whether to adapt to neoliberal tenets of privatization, high stakes testing and standards-based accountability or to resist and challenge these policies with alternative, democratic visions of schooling. The argument is made that for global citizenship education to reach maturity, there is a need for a programmatic research agenda that addresses the complex dynamics that globalization has introduced to school ing, particularly the challenges to teaching and learning for helping youth to make sense of the world and their role in it. An analysis of recent advances in research and practice in civic Charting a democratic course for global citizenship education 2 education is used as a starting point to advance directions for global citizenship education. Two key directions are suggested: to gain a more secure foothold in schools and the need to focus on a shared conceptual focus that helps researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders to access the same body of practices and knowledge.


Charting a Democratic Course for Global Citizenship Education
Is education for global citizenship (GCE) on a trajectory as a significant democratic goal of schooling in the 21 st century?Educational practices and policies worldwide are converging to address the need for learning goals and teaching practices that respond to the conditions of globalization (Stromquist & Monkman, 2014;Suárez-Orozco, 2007).The GCE movement has recently coalesced as a response to these conditions, most evident in recent policy documents and reports (Fricke, Gathercole, & Skinn, 2015;OXFAM, 2006;UNESCO, 2013;UNESCO, 2014;UNESCO, 2015).There is now a diversity of GCE programs, some driven by justice-oriented and democratic principles that seek to include all youth (Gaudelli, 2016).Yet there remains a lack of attention to the political dimensions of global citizenship education.In particular, more work is needed to achieve consensus regarding the purposes, practices, and theory that contribute to a strong vision for the field and that allows for deeper understanding of its relationship to educational policies and the institutional forms of schooling.Based on these claims, I argue that the field of global citizenship has reached a critical point in its development and seek in this article and special issue to contribute to the debate over what GCE is and should be in light of the challenges the field faces, in order to begin to mark out its territory as democratic practice.
Global citizenship education1 refers to a range of educational practices focused on "the knowledge and understanding, skills, values and attitudes that learners need both to participate fully in a globalised society and economy, and to secure a more just, secure and sustainable world than the one they have inherited" (OXFAM, 2006).As democratic practice, GCE considers the underlying political purposes and goals of the field that reveal the connections between GCE practice with the broader policy and institutional contexts in which it operates.At stake is whether GCE is another add-on to the curriculum that serves to reinforce current education structures.Curriculum reforms inevitably face the issue of whether to adapt to neoliberal tenets of privatization, high stakes testing and standards-based accountability that have re-made education across the world (Ball, 2012) or to resist and challenge these policies with alternative, democratic visions of schooling (Fischman & Haas, 2009;Gandin, 2007).Reforms such as GCE are in jeopardy of being coopted by these dominant philosophies.For example, Mitchell (2003, p. 400) has shown how citizenship formation can be used to support privatization and success in the global economy under the guise of the strategic cosmopolitan as "the new, superior footsoldier of global capitalism."In the same way that globalization can be driven from above to promote neoliberal logic of the free market, GCE can become wrapped up in a market-oriented skill set that prepares students for achievement on high stakes testing and global economic competitiveness (Guimarães-Iosif, 2015).
GCE as transformative practice is based on the belief that globalization is a new paradigm of the world as an interconnected system that changes the rules of the game for how citizenship operates within this system.Globalization requires a re-assessment of assumptions and practices across education due to its re-articulation of relationships between the state and its citizens (Sassen, 2003).It also acts to change individual consciousness of the world in terms of the way the world is experienced and interpreted (Robertson, 2003).Khondker (2013, p. 530) aptly describes this notion: 'Global', in the end, is a perspective, a frame through which we look at the world.Studies of nations, locality, and even the individual can be accomplished under the global framework.We can profitably look at how forces beyond the nation-in both a spatial and hegemonic sense-affect and are affected by and intersect with local, national, or individual units of analysis.Understanding those forces constituting and shaping the outcomes of intersections could be of great value to the students of society.
The notion that a global frame engages with-as opposed to being stratified from-local and national issues significantly contradicts some major criticism of global-oriented education.Thus, a global framework needs to be understood as one framework among several for interpreting the world and that it does not replace other ways of knowing and interpreting.
In this sense, I argue that GCE is a re-orientation of citizenship education.GCE is not a stream of citizenship education, not a branch, not another level or layer, nor is it extending or adding on to citizenship education.Yet GCE is often separated from mainstream civic education, as if 'civic life' can be broken neatly down into discrete levels.Models of GCE as a series of concentric circles or a Venn diagram miss this fundamental point by oversimplifying the phenomenon of globalization on which it is justified.A better model for understanding GCE is a web of interconnected and intersecting experiences as individuals become aware of the ways that political issues and actors shapes the local, familiar world around them.Thus, teaching youth to understand how to engage with the world can hardly "stop at the border," whether a real or imagined border at a local, regional or national scale.Rather than wrangling over which affiliated fields, such as human rights and environmental education, to include under the meta-discipline of global education, the field needs a deeper understanding of how the diverse dimensions of civic knowledge, identity, and engagement operate.
Another challenge is that the struggle over the purposes of the public school curriculum makes GCE an inherently political field.Obviously, the field of global and international studies is fundamentally contentious, as it deals with issues that are controversial.These public and academic disagreements shape the way that the methods and curriculum of GCE are conceptualized and practiced.Presently, there is a constellation of definitions, proposals, and practices for educating for global citizenship, driven by diverse and sometimes contradictory educational ideologies (Spring, 2004).
Even within justice-oriented GCE programs, there is an amalgam of purposes, methods, and platforms that are based on different understandings of the global.For example, a typology of globally-informed programs of citizenship education yielded four main quadrants based on the emphasis on civic purpose (between political enlightenment and political engagement) and civic values (between culturally-specific values and universal values): (1) Cross-cultural sensitivity: Intercultural dialogue using information and communications technology (ICT) to cultivate social cohesion.
(2) Glocal service: Cross-cultural interactions and exchange, often through immersion service projects, to develop intercultural competency and reflective thinking.
(3) International understanding: Comprehensive study of global issues to promote understanding of world events.(4) Global justice: Political activism for social justice causes that link local to global issues.(White and Myers, in press) This typology highlights ideal-type combinations of purpose and values as conceptualized for these programs, many of which operate outside of the formal school system.Existing empirical research in the field remains generally unsystematic and has primarily concentrated on curricular issues, namely what content to teach, what is left out, and epistemological stances (Myers and Cozzolino DiCicco, 2015).This focus on the curriculum is built on the assumption that we only need to select the 'right' global topics and that global citizenship will follow.
As the contributors to this special issue of Educational Policy Archives Analysis variously show, GCE is an emerging collection of programs and practices that will remain, for the foreseeable future, contested and contradictory in ways that require imaginative thinking and sustained critique of the underlying ideas and assumptions that restrain its practice.I argue that to reach intellectual maturity as an educational field, GCE requires a programmatic research agenda to address the complex dynamics that globalization has introduced into schooling.For this purpose, we can learn a lot from the trials that other such fields have encountered to inform the complexity of its practices and discourses.

Lessons from Citizenship Education
Despite their academic affinity (Davies, Evans, & Reid, 2005), research in GCE has historically remained insulated-both conceptually and methodologically-from citizenship education research.Disciplinary foundations explain much of this situation, as citizenship education emerged in respect to nationalism while GCE draws on global studies, sociology of globalization and other fields that fundamentally react against the processes of nationalism.However, if research in GCE is going to advance, one starting point is to review the connections and differences with research in the field of citizenship education in order to learn from its development.For decades, citizenship education in the U.S. was marginalized in the curriculum, lapsing out of many state curricula.The recent revival has been driven by warnings of widespread civic decline that have steadily built since the 1990s, involving high profile, bi-partisan supporters to champion the field and mobilize public opinion (Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, 2011;Campbell, Levinson, & Hess, 2012).In recent years, the increased attention to citizenship education has produced a general consensus over some important characteristics, such as the most effective teaching methods (Feldman, Pasek, Romer, & Jamieson, 2007), For example, in the state of Florida the Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Civics Education Act, passed in 2010, served to revive citizenship education in the state by instituting a seventh grade civics course beginning in 2011-12 school year with a required end of course exam (Postal, 2010).
Citizenship education has had its share of problems and false starts over the year, beginning with its conceptualization across disciplines.The field has long been divided by a range of approaches organized around disciplinary perspectives, including civics teaching and learning, political socialization (Niemi & Hepburn, 1995), youth activism and organizing (Bishop, 2015), and informal learning in politics (Pinnington & Schugurensky, 2009).I argue that these different approaches have helped to articulate specific questions and important areas of research by bringing into focus the key issues under debate for the field, thereby clarifying which issues matter.Although scholars from these diverse areas may disagree on important issues, they have contributed to the conversation around central tensions that civic educators and researchers have grappled with over time, such as: 1) Locating civics in formal schooling or in community contexts 2) Promoting civic knowledge or civic engagement 3) Portraying civic engagement as formal electoral politics or as social activism Other academic debates have also spurred the field at various periods, such as research methodology and choice of subjects (Sigel, 1995), and more recently the state of citizenship education in urban schools for minority students (Levinson, 2012).
Critique and the application of novel theoretical perspectives have also helped citizenship education to mature by critically questioning the basic assumptions and approaches in the field.The traditional master narrative of schooling, part of the founding purposes of U.S. public schools (Tyack, 2003), has been criticized for its narrowness and exclusion of ethnic and linguistic minorities (Junn, 2004).Abowitz and Harnish (2006, p. 654) described the citizenship curriculum as "pallid, overly cleansed, and narrow view of political life in Western democracies promoted by the dominant discourses of citizenship in K-12 schooling."Levinson's (2012) research showed that minority students in the U.S. suffer from a "civic education gap" that prevents them from accessing political power.This critique has spurred considerable attention to the state of citizenship education in school systems that serve minority student populations, calling for the recovery of schooling's original civic intent.The traditional civic narrative has also been critiqued for its use of the "Cartesian citizen" model that reduces citizenship to a set of easily taught competencies (Fischman & Haas, 2012, p. 173) and that the effort to transmit this preconceived model to mold students is problematic and unlikely to succeed (McCowan, 2011).These competencies usually include "the values, skills, and attitudes that they need to take an active part in governing themselves" (Finkel, 2003, p. 137).Other scholars have pointed out that political participation, now considered the gold standard of civic education goals, has typically been taken up without question and usually assumed to be linked with formal political institutions, namely voting (Haste & Hogan, 2006).Yet, as Banaji (2008) suggests, most participation is pro-social and conformist (for exceptions, see for example McCowan, 2011), and participation is seen as a uniform good-but when can civil disobedience and apathy be democratic alternatives to statist civic engagement?I contend that GCE has not yet had this type of sustained academic debate.For this to happen, research that serves to develop the field is needed.For example, what do diverse approaches of world history, geography, 21 st century skills, global civics, and globalization and education each contribute?What are their unique contributions and how does each critique other fields that sheds light on persistent problems and tensions?Is there a course or courses that would provide a disciplinary home for GCE, or does this even make sense for a field that has strong interdisciplinary foundations?Since the field cannot include everything under the sun, scholarship is needed to help think about a shared conceptual focus that would provide researchers with a common programmatic language.
First, if GCE is going to move beyond an academic debate to have a deep and meaningful impact on students' lives, scholars need to gain a more secure foothold in schools.The long-time goal of global studies in K-12 education has been to "internationalize" the curriculum by adding a global perspective, an approach that is still influential in higher education (e.g.Stearns, 2009) but has not had a broad impact on the K-12 school curriculum.Presently, GCE has been most successful in charter and private schools, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations.Ultimately, because the internationalization of the K-12 school curriculum has not been successful, GCE scholars should work to integrate it in ways that better align with current courses, especially world history.
Second, the field of GCE needs a shared and agreed-upon conceptual focus that helps researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders to access the same body of practices and knowledge.I am not arguing that there has to be perfect consensus; only that researchers need to work toward what is essential-and what is not-in order to strengthen the field's academic identity.A shared focus for GCE would facilitate communication between researchers as well as allowing for greater impact on schools by developing innovative pedagogical tools, curricula, and practices that take seriously what is happening in young people's the minds as they come to understand their place in the world and construct meaning for it.For example, schools that seek to add a global approach are often left to navigate a range of conceptual approaches and to build curriculum on their own, which has proven to be a daunting task.The past debates have been important for the definition of the field, but have also served to stall its development in other areas.I argue that researchers need to build on (rather than discard) the curricular and philosophical debates that have been the focus of the scholarship for forty years, toward a broader view of the ways that the practice of GCE in classrooms, schools and community contexts shape how students think about the complexities of the contemporary world and their own role in it.

(Still) Searching for a Place at the Table
As the history of civic education has shown, lacking a place in public schools is a serious concern for the development of the field.Despite a groundswell of interest in global citizenship, the problem of its place in the school curriculum remains.The strategy to internationalize the curriculum, which involves individual teachers independently introduce a global perspective to traditional subject area courses across subject, is admirable but has not had a major effect in public schools.The recent emergence of international schools are a positive development in the landscape although largely relegated to the private and charter systems.Finding a place in the public school system is a prerequisite for GCE to make a meaningful contribution toward the conversation over the democratic aims of schooling in a global age.There are both serious concerns, as well as some positive developments, about the place of GCE in schools.
Although universities have increasingly made global citizenship a top priority, global studies programs in higher education also find themselves in a tenuous position in the curriculum as universities struggle to identify a strategy for introducing global education (Stearns, 2009).Universities provide greater flexibilities for interdisciplinary courses and programs study, yet global studies programs have met resistance and had to struggle for their own foothold within traditional academic disciplines (Steger, 2015).One of the strengths of global studies in higher education is the ability to act as an organizing center for the international programs scattered across campus.Universities have also experimented with internationalizing across disciplines and traditional academic colleges, with mixed success.However, such efforts conflict with other "across the curriculum" programs such as critical thinking and multicultural diversity (Stearns, 2009, p. 52).
Formal global studies courses have been intermittently adopted in schools, with various iterations of courses such as World Studies and Contemporary Global Issues.A course that may have greater staying power is the recently developed AP Seminar course (https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-seminar), which is a central course for the new AP Capstone program.Although it is not strictly a global studies course, contemporary global issues based on student interests is a central theme.Such courses have typically occurred in suburban school districts that primarily serve middle class students.Students in urban and rural schools have rarely had access to global studies courses and a persistent criticism of programs such as the International Baccalaureate is that they have largely served elite students (Conner, 2008).Ultimately, the strategy of internationalizing the curriculum with global discourses for citizenship education have rarely challenged the dominant national paradigm: Critical and transnational discourses of citizenship raise basic questions about identity (who we are as citizens), membership (who belongs, and the location of the boundaries), and agency (how we might best enact citizenship)--questions debated in political life across the globe by scholars and activists, political thinkers and neighborhood organizers.However, the critical and transnational civic reconstructions are marginalized in the curricular texts that define the standards and prominent meanings of citizenship taught in schools.The diminution of these discourses in the taught curriculum means that much of our schooling in citizenship fails to reflect the continual struggles of democratic politics.(Abowitz & Harnish, 2006, p. 657) In an already over-crowded curriculum with high stakes testing that minimize time spent on arts and humanities, over a half-century of unfulfilled attempts suggest that it is unlikely global studies courses will take a permanent role in the K-12 curriculum.
A major barrier to GCE remains the traditional master narrative of schooling to develop patriotic citizens loyal to the nation state.It is unsurprising that schooling in the U.S. has resisted a global discourse of citizenship while more attention has been paid to global civics in some other nations (Schissler & Soysal, 2005).In fact, internationalism has traditionally been one of the dividing lines in the history and social studies curriculum.For example, history education teaching and scholarship is primarily built on assumptions that look to the school curriculum as the exclusive carrier of national identity and the "nation-building story" (VanSledright, 2008, p. 109), a characteristic that can insulate history education from the overall globalizing curriculum trends (Yemini, Bar-Nissan, & Shavit, 2014).This "heritage approach" to history education employs the study of the past as a means to transmit a singular narrative in order to "tell ourselves who we are, where we are from, and to what we belong" (Lowenthal, 1998, p. xvii).In classrooms, students are taught the story of American exceptionalism, although many students, especially those from ethnic and linguistic minority groups, reject this narrative (Myers and Zaman, 2009).In addition, societal changes brought on by globalization have contributed to an erosion of the national story as linear progress (Rosenzweig, 2000, p. 271).
History education has reflected this privileging of national identity and American exceptionalism.To illustrate, nearly all of the approximately 175 empirical works cited in Barton's (2010) review of history education research deal exclusively with national history, presenting a picture of history education that subsumes history with the nation.This situation has left little space for civic purposes in world history education or for expanded notions of identity beyond the nation.The comments by Wineburg et al. (2007, p. 70) are instructive: "Despite endless concerns one hears nowadays over fractured identities, the death of the nation-state, and 'imagined communities,' the response of these youngsters suggest that a common national narrative is alive, well, and in constant state of re-creation."Diehard defenders of the nationalist master narrative of schooling need not worry that it is disappearing; however, a recognition that it is in fact global changes that are a major impetus for this "constant state" of re-creating the national narrative, and young people's identities within this narrative, would provide a more powerful connection between the history curriculum with students' lived experiences and beliefs that is sorely lacking in most classrooms.
In this context, a strong case can be made for world history as the best positioned subject in the school curriculum to anchor the goal of global citizenship.World history educators and scholars frequently cite global citizenship as one of the guiding purposes of the field (Diskant, 2010;Girard & Harris, 2010;Myers, 2015;Stearns, 2007).Some world historians have also called for a greater emphasis on the modern period of world history to inform students' ability to act as global citizens (Stearns, 2007).In terms of scholarship, world historians have challenged the Eurocentric "rise of the West" narrative and the dominant historical narrative based on the nation that have traditionally been the foundation of Western civilization courses (Manning, 2003).Global history in particular developed in response to world changes, focusing on the modern development of globalization by drawing on social science scholarship, such as world systems theory and postcolonial theory (Sachsenmaier, 2006).However, I am not suggesting that the world history course should revolve strictly around global citizenship as a learning goal as there are themes that are less relevant.Yet, the move in history education from Western Civilization courses to a global approach to history has been both widespread and popular among students.This change did not occur smoothly, however, and competing practices of world history remain (Dunn, 2008).
GCE as a field has emerged in a changing context of school reform and educational policy that includes the 21 st century skills movement, international schools, the International Baccalaureate organization, and internationalization and other developments in higher education such as global studies programs.Understanding the influence of these varied initiatives on the practice of GCE in schools is an important research need.Recently, a range of efforts have created a climate favorable to GCE, especially a movement toward interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and curriculum.Research has largely overlooked this policy and reform context and its effect on global education in schools.I content that it is particularly important to understand how these multiple initiatives shape the development of GCE in varied ways with an eye to comparisons of their diverse features and impact on students.

Envisioning a Shared Goal
Research in GCE still lacks an articulated focus and sense of a shared goal that would provide a distinctive identity.There are several frameworks that have attempted to capture the global studies in K-12 education, ranging from the classic to more recent formulations, such as "global consciousness" (Boix Mansilla & Gardner, 2007).Ultimately, scholars in the field need to decide what is essential and what is not.I argue that it is necessary to shift attention from the curriculum-what should students know?-to questions of the role of schooling in what it means to be, and think like, a global citizen.Which civic concepts, values, ways of thinking, and knowledge are uniquely transnational and global?GCE is not simply a version of citizenship education at a global scale; the fields' ideal visions of citizenship are fundamental different and built on distinct foundations.Conversely, they share theoretical and practical considerations.If GCE is going to become an important goal of schools, the field needs to reflect the realities of young people's thinking, experiences and ways of being in the world rather than developing a laundry list of competencies to be learned that when reached signify the 'global citizen.' A fundamental insight into our understanding of contemporary citizenship education is the imperative to consider the effects of globalization on the ways that young people think and learn.Building on this insight, one of the defining characteristics of global citizenship, in contrast to the state-bound conception of citizenship, is its non-state status.Global citizenship is a matter of identification and personal belonging that involves cultivating prosperity in the world community at large.Sassen's (2003) description of the citizen in today's globalizing world as a "blurred subject" suggests the old adage that citizenship has 'little meaning except in the context of a state' no longer applies, or at least must be re-thought.
For GCE to mean more than the arrangement and re-arrangement of curriculum topics, the field must embrace a democratic and critical stance that builds an inclusive and unbounded conceptualization of GCE that is open to new scholarship.I argue that the meta-discipline approach for which the concept of global citizenship serves to warehouse a collection of existing curriculum topics is based on the assumption that if global topics are in the curriculum, then they will therefore be learned and produce global citizens.From this logic, we just need to package the right set of topics and global citizenship will follow.Moving away from the notion that global citizenship is a product created by the curriculum belies the complexity of learning global issues.Ultimately, this approach pays too little attention to students: who they are, what they know, and their misconceptions about the world.We need to understand better how students make sense of global issues in classrooms that "somehow meld together civic knowledge, civic megatrends and civic realities in a way that will meet young people where they are" (Kennedy, 1997, p. 3).For a start, what are the metaphors (Fischman & Haas, 2012) that make up young people's emerging "global imaginaries" (Steger, 2008)?
Starting with an expansive concept of global citizenship would help to challenge the master narrative of schooling as making formal citizens built on a set of transferable behaviors, attitudes, skills and knowledge.This approach requires that scholars work to articulate the reasons that GCE is relevant and needed in all schools.This also means considering multiple identities, loyalties, and beliefs that students bring to the classroom, not to impose but to provide students with better selfunderstandings and to construct their own sense of self-in-the-world.In other words, GCE cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.Global citizenship in this respect is not imposed on "subjects" linked to an institution but involves the active construction of meaning about the world based on one's beliefs and experiences in relation to broader social and political contexts.
An expansive concept of global citizenship as a shared goal also matters for the development of research on GCE that allows for the careful description and analysis of pedagogies and programs.Such an effort would require shifting attention in GCE to include teaching practices that foster global thinking and civic identity development in classrooms that examine the ways that young people take up global citizenship and what they take away from classrooms about historical and contemporary global issues.It would also include a better understanding of the type of global citizenship that the diverse programs and schools foster, if at all.To achieve this goal, scholars need to develop analytical frameworks that allow for investigating the cognitive and affective aspects of global citizenship.In developing better tools for research, however, I am not suggesting that we forego the significance of what different theoretical perspectives bring to the field, particularly the contributions of critical social theory.
One example is the potential to understand how youth construct global citizenship within cultural, social and political contexts.Despite highly sophisticated theory on global imaginaries and identity, we still lack research on the ways that classrooms foster students to engage in global identity work and thinking that is of personal significance.Empirical evidence suggests that civic identities are best understood as fluid and contingent shifts between diverse scales (local, national, and global) of civic attachment (Dolby, 2005;Myers, McBride, & Anderson, 2015).Thus, a largely unexamined aspect of civic identity is the nature of the "public" with which a person identifies: with whom or what am I concerned and what responsibilities do I hold to them?This question is much more complex in a global age than it was in the past when national identity provided the sole expression and purview of civic responsibility.The cause or issue with which an individual identifies is a central concern of civic identity research.Yet we know little about the effect of globalization on schools for "how students are sorted as certain kinds of people and where they learn to make choices about their identities" (Lee & Anderson, 2009, p. 204).
Global citizenship education is at a critical juncture in its development as an academic field.Despite the convergence of interest, GCE is not yet a unified field of inquiry.A common critique of GCE is fundamentally political from factions who see schools as serving nationalist interests, an argument that is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.However, scholars in the field also need to face up to the challenges of building the field and helping it to advance a democratic vision for future scholarship within the constraints of public schooling.

Research and Practice in Global Citizenship Education
This special issue brings together four articles presenting diverse practices of global citizenship education through the examination of tensions generated by competing education policies and goals with the current practices of global citizenship education.Collectively, they show that this process is contested and political, and that policy and educational structures powerfully influence the direction and form that global citizenship curriculum, methods and programs ultimately take.These articles also show that dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism do not always have the upper hand in shaping what occurs in classroom, schools, and online settings in which youth learn about the world.There is also resistance to these structures that embrace more justice and humanistic forms of global citizenship that have the potential to provide students with powerful ways of understanding, conversing about, and acting in the world that address profound global issues of the day.As one might expect in a field still in an early stage of development, these efforts may also sometimes have conceptual blind spots, misdirected efforts, or other omissions that may alter or subvert the intended educational goals.This sort of problematizing practices is important because it brings the inherently political tensions to the surface to allow for debate and discussion over the direction and development of the field.
The first article, Wang and Hoffman's, "Are WE the world?A Critical Reading of Selfhood in Global Citizenship Education," critically examine the discourse of several publically available global citizenship curricula.Using the conceptual device of selfhood, they set their sight on the complex cultural implications of cosmopolitan citizenship and the construct of shared values as homogenizing and hegemonic, revealing how current GCE practices can reinforce and impose Western cultural and class based constructions of selfhood.They understand selfhood as the process by which we create ourselves as certain kinds of people "constituted through cultural discourse and practice within specific "figured worlds.""They analyze how the implicit characterizations of the self in GCE practices can be universalized to include the rest of the world in a manner that obscures Western cultural bias and social class privilege.Their concern is with the dangerous effects of these practices especially when aligned within a neoliberal educational agenda that already perpetuates Western privilege and influence.They call for a reciprocal and postcolonial GCE that practices selfreflexivity and more open dialogue about how other communities understand the world, within the framework of activism.
The next two articles, move our attention from the conceptual assumptions built into notions of GCE to the local and regional education contexts in which GCE operates.School reform, asserts DiCicco in her article "Global Citizenship Education within a Context of Accountability: the case of Olympus High School," is powerfully shaped by neoliberal policies.Her ethnographic study of a single high school as it develops and implements a GCE curriculum reveals how the pressures of test-based accountability and standards are ideologically restrictive on the ability of school actors to include a more socially just approach to the reform and instead pushed it toward alignment with the global marketplace and students as knowledge workers.Yet these two contradictory ideologies coexist within the official school curriculum policies, illustrating how transformative alternatives models of schooling can be undercut and diluted by the dominant neoliberal context for schooling.
The unique policy and educational context of global cities provides the theoretical basis for the third paper, Alviar-Martin and Baildon's "Context and Curriculum in Two Global Cities: A Study of Discourses of Citizenship in Hong Kong and Singapore."The authors examine the urban contexts and the discourse of policy and curriculum documents in both cities to understand how citizenship education is being re-made under globalization.Searching for signs of GCE, they find a shared construction of a depoliticized model of the "citizen-worker" whose purview is to contribute to national success in the global economy and remains conspicuously silent on issues of equality and justice.Alviar and Baildon's work complements other contributors to this collection by demonstrating that the ways that state educational systems actively effect top-down utilitarian agendas.
The final article draws us more directly into schools to investigate the ways that teachers take up global citizenship in classrooms and across subject areas.In "Expanding Approaches to Teaching for Diversity and Justice in K-12 Education: Fostering Global Citizenship across the Content Areas," Tichnor-Wagner, Glazier, Parkhouse, and Cain seek to identify the signature pedagogies that teachers enact for global citizenship through a fine grain study of teachers' practice.Taking off from where the two preceding articles end, the authors seek to provide schools and districts seeking to take up GCE by providing dedicated resources as 'visions of possibility' to internationalize classrooms with rich description of teacher practice.
Clearly, further work is needed that critically analyzes policy, program initiatives, and classroom practice in GCE.These articles present global citizenship education as an evolving practice that is at the nexus of the global, national, and local pressures in U.S. public education.As global citizenship education reaches further into schools and higher education, we can expect conflicting interests that result in power struggles over the direction of global education.More research is also needed in areas that have received little attention, including the challenges of teaching complex global issues, the dynamics of power and equality, or to the beliefs and identities that students bring to, and develop within, the global classroom.The articles in this special provide an important reference point for the challenges to and ways forward for a democratic global citizenship education in an era of high stakes testing and accountability.

Sherman Dorn, David R. Garcia, Oscar Jimenez-Castellanos, Eugene Judson, Jeanne M. Powers
education policy analysis archives editorial board Lead Editor: Audrey Amrein-Beardsley (Arizona State University) Executive Editor: Gustavo E. Fischman (Arizona State University) Associate Editors: (Arizona State University) Cristina Alfaro San Diego State