Leveraging Online Teaching and Learning to Foster Critical Global Citizenship Education: Higher Education Faculty’s Perceptions and Practices from Japan

Abstract

This study investigates how eight higher education (HE) faculties located in Japan perceive and implement Global Citizenship Education (GCE) as a critically oriented pedagogy in the online course ‘Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education’. The main instruments of the study were questionnaires and interviews. The data collected were scrutinised with the use of the grounded theory and constant comparative method. Four notions of GCE surfaced from the data. According to the HE faculty, a critically oriented GCE should: (a) develop students’ empathetic identification, (b) cultivate students’ critical agency, (c) foster students’ self-confidence and inclusive mindset and (d) encourage students’ community participation. Building on the findings, this article concludes by advancing a proposal for a critical pedagogical framework for GCE online teaching and learning in Japanese HE.