Global citizenship education in Asia: Moving towards decolonization

Global citizenship education (GCE) is an educational paradigm that is both ubiquitous and contested. Education reform efforts have reflected curricular and cultural perspectives of dominant national identities and competitiveness in the global market. In various Asian societies, legacies of colonial rule, depoliticized approaches to civic education, and persistent social inequalities further complicate the nature of schooling, teaching, and how students build an understanding of their roles as members of the global community. This chapter provides key findings from literature and case studies to identify classroom practices that support more critical, democratic, and cosmopolitan forms of GCE in Asian societies. In particular, it points to the ways educators in some Asian contexts are able to enact issues-based civic education to address challenges that confront Asian societies, such as the hegemony of neoliberal and nationalistic forms of education and the plight of marginalized communities (e.g., indigenous communities, LGBTQ youth, and migrant workers in the global economy). In a previous analysis, the chapter authors drew on Asian frames of reference and principles of inter-referencing to identify interpretivist, narrative, and critical influences on GCE policies, perceptions, and practices. This chapter builds on the previous analysis by proposing an analytical framework for classroom enactments of GCE based on the notion of deimperialization and a decolonial approach to civic education focused on perspective, purpose, and power. In doing so, the authors seek to shift points of reference and illuminate grounded, often overlooked perspectives, and suggest more transformative conceptions of curriculum and classroom practice for GCE in Asian societies.