Enacting Critical Citizenship: An Intersectional Approach to Global Citizenship Education

Abstract

Global citizenship is a popular concept that was fully embraced by UNESCO in 2015 with a framework for Global Citizenship Education (GCE). This pedagogical guidance can be characterized as transformative since it aims to foster reflective citizens who contribute to building a more inclusive, just, and peaceful world. Thus, GCE allows educators to take a critical approach to their teaching, hereby articulating a clear social justice orientation towards citizenship education. However, recent studies indicate that most interpretations and thus implementations of GCE do not translate into a social action approach. Therefore, this article conceptualizes an intersectional approach to GCE, to make a critical approach of GCE more likely by practitioners. Intersectionality was developed by Black feminists in the US, to highlight structural oppressions and privileges on the basis of analytical categories. Intersectionality, furthermore, allows for opportunities to recognize resilience and resistance in marginalized communities. Therefore, an intersectional approach to GCE would develop sensibilities among students to understand global structures of oppression and domination on the basis of analytical categories like race, gender, and class. This knowledge would lead to an awareness of one’s own complicity and shared responsibility, resulting in deliberations and eventually political actions. The overall aim is to provide practitioners with a concrete suggestion of a critical interpretation of GCE, to show its potential as a social justice-orientated framework for educators in especially continental Europe.