Global Citizenship Education / Learning for Sustainability: tensions, 'flaws', and contradictions as critical moments of possibility and radical hope in educating for alternative futures

Abstract

Global citizenship’ entered public parlance prominently during heightened globalisation. To be a citizen of this new globalised, interconnected world was to be a subject of capital. Like Janus, a subject of this neoliberal world order was to be both an inwardly-gazing subject of the nation state, and simultaneously an outwardly-gazing subject of global capital. The term, global citizenship (GC), carries the inherent contradiction of Janus, being a juridical contradiction. It looks both inwards and outwards and carries borders as shadows. Viewing contradiction at the heart of GC as a ‘productive tension’, rather than ‘flaw’, by way of an entry into Global Citizenship Education (GCE), and by implication Learning for Sustainability (LfS), may offer the necessary vector in prizing open new windows to hopeful, alternative futures. The difficult task of doing so should not be sidestepped in the shift from GCE to LfS, as exemplified in Scotland’s national curriculum, Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), a shift also resonating in other global/local educational contexts. Recognition of the various ‘distancing strategies’ deployed within GCE and LfS discourses, and revealing the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions inherent in such discursive manoeuvrings, is critical in overcoming GCE and LfS’s overdetermination as instruments of state social, national and economic ambitions. The implications for education and our socio-ecological futures of the critical embrace of contradiction and ambiguity at the heart of GC needs considered attention toward the imperative of mobilising Critical GCE (CGCE) to enact possibilities of radically hopeful futures.