Tag Archives: global citizenship

New article in Critical Education: Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine: A Dialogue

Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine: A Dialogue

Linda Herrera
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v16i4.187433

Keywords: Palestine in Critical Pedagogy, Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy, popular education, empowerment, grassroots, global citizenship, genocide, Anti-colonial pedagogy

Abstract

Global pedagogy refers to a broad, ethically grounded approach to education that extends beyond national boundaries and emphasizes the collective responsibility to teach and learn about interconnected global crises and historical injustices. The question of Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza serve as the “canary in the coalmine”. Its suppression is not an isolated phenomenon but a diagnostic for a wider authoritarian turn that seeks to foreclose the very possibility of critical, transnational solidarity. In this dialogue, Michel Peters, a philosopher of education, and Linda Herrera, a critical anthropologist of education in the Middle East, engage in a dialogue about how educators can keep critical thought and solidarity alive by partaking in practices that are resilient, resourceful, and relentlessly focused on building counter-publics. These requires embracing a “fugitive” pedagogy, curating and archiving counter-memories, and building transnational literacies of solidarity.

Author Biographies

Linda Herrera, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has researched, written about, and taught courses on education and power in the MENA region, qualitative research methods (with a focus on critical ethnography and oral history), international development policy, youth and generations, childhood in global context, the social effects of technological change, and critical democracy and citizenship education. Her books include, Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt (OUP, 2025), Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-first Century (University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (State University of New York Press, 2006).

Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University Faculty of Education PRC, and Emeritus Professor in Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and founding editor of five international journals, Policy Futures in Education, E-Learning and Digital Media (SAGE), and Knowledge Cultures (Addleton), The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Springer), Open Review of Education Research (T&F). His interests are in philosophy, education and social policy and he has written over eighty books, including most recently: Wittgenstein and Education: Pedagogical Investigations, (2017) with Jeff Stickney, The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of Education (2015), Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy (2015) both with Tina Besley, Education Philosophy and Politics: Selected Works (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; and Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism (2011). He has acted as an advisor to governments and UNESCO on these and related matters in the USA, Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa and the European Union. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010, a Fellow in 2018, and awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.

THE REGIMES OF TRUTH OF (GLOBAL) CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Event cancelled based on UBC recommendations regarding COVID-19.

Public Seminar
Institute for Critical Educational Studies

THE REGIMES OF TRUTH OF (GLOBAL) CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

Marta Estellés, PhD
University of Cantabria (Spain)

Thursday, April 2, 2020
12:30 – 1:30 pm
University of British Columbia, Vancouver — Scarfe 1209

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to briefly problematize current ways of thinking and talking about (global) citizenship education. Citizenship is a process more than it is an attribute, since the concept has incorporated the main characteristics both of the political transformations experienced by the State and of the State’s relations with society. The successive battles for the definition of citizenship have an impact on that institution of socialization that is school. Examining the evolution of curricular prescriptions and orientations is enough to glimpse changes in the languages and frames through which certain relations between the individual, the community, and the State are naturalized.

The results of our research show that the two major cycles of socio-institutional restructuring in Western countries – from the crisis of the nineteenth-century liberal regimes to the present – have imposed different trends in relation to citizenship education in schools. The first cycle reached its culmination with the implementation of Welfare States after the Second World War. It was not a coincidence that the first major defense for democratic citizenship education appeared in this moment, with the reformist impulse that gave rise in 1916 to Social Studies in the US. The recognition of socio-economic rights and the formation of citizenship appeared inextricably linked in the texts of the reform, in an attempt to establish a new “regime of truth” that radically redefined the meaning of education for all, and not only for a privileged minority. This redefinition also implied a criticism of the patriotic and nationalistic purposes of education. This language, however, started to become blurred as neoliberal policies instituted their own frames in the 1980s with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK. Citizenship education began to adopt the rhetoric of accountability with its emphasis on testing, performance levels, skills, etc. and the focus was on promoting responsible and active citizenship that clearly emphasized duties over rights. Thus, it began to be assumed that citizens should be responsible for their own well-being and not the State. Recent discourses on global citizenship education should be seen as heirs of this last redefinition. After all, global citizenship education “aims to empower learners to engage and assume active roles, both locally and globally, to face and resolve global challenges” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 15), assuming that the responsibility of solving those challenges lies with the individuals, not on governments or international organizations.

Marta Estellés, PhD, is Assistant Professor of the Department of Education at the University of Cantabria (Spain). Her research interests include citizenship education, social studies education, curriculum policies and teacher education. She has published several works on the intersectional field of democratic citizenship education and initial teacher education. She is currently working on a research project related to teachers’ political views and behaviors and their attitudes towards including controversial issues in the classroom. She is also part of the Fedicaria collective (http://www.fedicaria.org), which advocates for critical social studies education.

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