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Global citizenship education (GCE) is a contemporary version of international education (Tarc, 2011), that seeks to educate learners for a highly interconnected and interdependent world. National agendas and nationalisms are to give way to larger loyalties and concern for others, including non-human others, on a planetary scale.
There are, however, competing versions of international education that are founded upon a spectrum of more instrumental to critical perspectives. GCE tends to connote a more critical, justice-oriented approach (Oxfam, 2006) but there are variations (Andreotti, 2010). Traditional divides between the university (teacher education faculty) and schools, research and teaching (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990; Korthagen, 2017), and the mismatch between prescriptions to internationalize and the every-day demands of teachers isolated in their “own” classrooms, continue to be obstacles to a collaborative, research-informed and teacher empowered approach of ‘learning to teach’ for GCE (Tarc, 2011a) in the K-12 classroom. While the teacher is central to whether and how GCE is enacted in the classroom (Klein & Wikan, 2019; Walker 2006), their learning and pedagogical insights are largely absent from the growing literature in GCE which is heavy on prescriptions and, at times, theoretical abstractions.
The teacher as learner/researcher, supported by wider collaborations inside and beyond the school, represents a better starting point to more substantively operationalize GCE. In the context of schooling GCE tends to represent a progressive and/or critical approach to teaching very well suited for teacher inquiry, research, collaboration and grounding theory; it broadens or supplements a more nation-centric multicultural education. In the context of the Faculty of Education’s international education cohort in teacher education, students want to understand how the ideas on global citizenship (internationalizing curricula, culturally relevant pedagogy, transnational citizenship, super-diversity and migration) discussed in class can be applied in their practicums or future classroom teaching. They sense a divide between the university and the K-12 school and typically celebrate opportunities to hear from K-12 experienced teachers
