In support of sustainable development, the United Nations (UN) launched its Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) with the aims of accelerating progress towards universal access to education, good quality learning and the fostering of global citizenship. This paper explores how and to what extent Stoic virtue ethics and critical Freirean…

While the loss of space for critical engagement has been a primary focus for critics of the neo-liberal transformation of higher education, the recasting of the relationship between education and economy has not meant the death of critical thinking. Instead, I argue that critical thinking has emerged as a binding point in higher education…

This article addresses how teachers conceptualize and attempt to develop citizens within the context of market-based reforms. Findings are based on a qualitative case study of Teach For America teachers at a Knowledge is Power Program charter school in New Orleans. Using Westheimer and Kahne's taxonomy of citizenship, I provide evidence that…

Intergovernmental organizations (IOs) increasingly promote global citizenship education (GCE) and related topics. This paper analyses the body of scholarship on GCE that focuses on teachers and interprets the development of environment-related education (ERE) within the GCE discourse. Using a novel, data-rich methodology employing Natural Language…

In recent decades, formal programmes for Mexican civic education have slowly shifted from an emphasis on national identity and solidarity through assimilation to a multicultural (if not intercultural) emphasis on forms of democratic membership and participation. Yet such advances in educational policy and curricula are limited and sometimes…

The purpose of the study is to find out the themes of Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the Pre-Service Teacher Education Curriculum (Elementary). Target 4.7 of Sustainable Development Goals stresses upon learners to get the knowledge, skills, competencies and values related to GCED and ESD.…

Using the global discourse of human rights as a basis, the purpose of this article is to analyse how education for citizenship and human rights has been implemented in Spain in recent years. In addition, discourse analysis and the theory of social movements have been used to study the mobilisation that arose against this instruction, showing how…

In this article, I pose the question of what constructs of 'global citizenship education' are being mobilized by key international actors. I undertake a comparative analysis of three key United Nations (UN) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) documents that have emerged in the past 5 years to frame the…

This paper looks at how cosmopolitanism is practised amongst Singaporeans who have experienced Singapore's education reform in the 1990s. Cosmopolitanism in Singapore is tied to state-intervention with a national orientation. To complement Singapore's push towards cosmopolitanism, the education reform in the 1990s promoted the idea of a national…

This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on…

Government agencies and civil society organisations in nation-states and areas affected by conflict strive to develop citizenship education programmes to empower children as agents of change. However, the pedagogical culture within these contexts demands that children memorise information provided by higher authorities and avoid sensitive and…

Civic education has always been an ancillary subject in the Italian school system. Introduced at the end of the 1950s as a sort of appendage to the history programs, it has recently been subject to multiple reforms although little or nothing has changed in reality. The analysis of a sample of civic education textbooks in use in schools explains…

This chapter describes the uncomfortable marriage between political science and civic education and calls for a reformulation of how we engage students in the wicked problems of democracy.

This qualitative study examines the experiences of 22 newly qualified teachers of Ethiopian origin who tried to integrate into the formal educational system in Israel after completing their graduation. Despite the revolutionary change in Ethiopian educators' inclusion since the 2000s, their number remains low and the difficulty of integrating…

In the history of South African education there have been three contrasting attempts to incorporate learners into the authority structures of schools, namely: "boy-government" (prefect system), "student-government" (Student Representative Councils (SRCs)) and "learner-government" (Representative Councils of Learners…