One of Durkheim’s conceptual tools was to distinguish between normal and pathological. The formula may seem provocative to our contemporary ears. Normal was understood as synonymous of general: in this frame, crime and suicide are normal. On the other hand, an exceptionally high rate of selfish or anomic suicide would be pathological, as well as sudden variations in these rates. Thus, it becomes possible to develop courses of action.
Can the solution to this pathological situation [indicated by the rise of selfish and anomic suicide] that European societies are going through [at the beginning of the 20th century] come from the old institutions? Could these (state, religion and family) regain their socialising role? Durkheim’s answer is negative. The loss of influence of the three institutions of the family, religion and state is due to their inadequacy to the new conditions of social life; they can no longer effectively play their socialising functions. In a modern society with organic solidarity, socialisation must be made through difference. But the state is too far from the special problems of particular groups to take action in this regard; religious society is no more adapted: its integrating power comes from the fact that it limits the free thought of the individual, which is perfectly contradictory with the movement of modern society; finally, family which is more and more often reduced to the conjugal group, of which we know the weak power of preservation in the matter of suicide, does not allow to hope for a solution. If these institutions can no longer fully play their socialising role in the society with an organic solidarity, we must resolutely turn to the creation of new social forms.
(Steiner, 2018, p. 76)
Among these new social forms, the most salient is that of occupational groups organised on a national basis, likely to provide a moral discipline to the economic activity, which is subject to the pathologies of the division of labour. This course of action is certainly not directly related to the subject we are dealing with here (citizenship education) since it first constitutes a reaction to the deregulation of the economy, generating the amorality of social ties. However, it allows us to reflect on new ways of organising these professional groups that are teacher trainers and teachers in the making, in a context of international division of labour: Europeanisation and globalisation of higher education,
1 Reasoning about the State
The Durkheimian perspective also allows the combination of science and action, by taking into account the evolutions of the state. Indeed, according to Durkheim, if the state is part of the ancient order on which one cannot rely to prevent pathologies of the division of labour, it remains nevertheless a lever of liberation of the individual, in that it makes it possible to go beyond local particularisms while giving free rein to the development of specialised segments in society. In its new form implied by the division of labour, the state can become the place of clarification of the collective consciousness, like a ‘social brain’ envisaged, internally,2 as an organ of social thought. By penetrating ‘the deep layers of society’ and by giving individuals the means to make it more reflective via advice, assemblies and renewed communication processes, the state as a social brain avoids the pathologies of modernity by remaining attentive to new social aspirations, and thus facilitates the development of organic solidarity.
Biological metaphors are by definition limited, but illuminating. The more animals’ bodies are differentiated, the more their brains are developed; the same is true of differentiated societies that require the active presence of the state as an integrating and regulating organ. This biological metaphor also makes it possible to distinguish on the one hand, state administrations, assimilated to the muscular system in charge of movements; and on the other hand, the state per se, in charge of deliberations.
The whole life of the state per se takes place not in external actions, in movements, but in deliberations, that is, in representations. The movements are others, it is administrations of all kinds that are responsible for it. We see the difference between them and the state; this difference is also the one that separates the muscular system from the central nervous system. The state is, rigorously speaking, the very organ of social thought. Under the present conditions, this thought is turned towards a practical and not speculative goal. The state, at least in general, does not think solely to think, to build systems of doctrines, but to direct collective
(Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 106)conduct. Nevertheless, its essential function is to think.
This means that the pluralism of societies requires – at first glance paradoxically – for the state to take an increasingly important place. For by managing to make the “collective psychic life” reflexive in “the whole extent of the social body”, the social brain is animated by a principle of differentiation.
When the state thinks and decides, it should not be said that society thinks and decides through it, but that it thinks and decides for society. It is not a simple instrument of pipelines and concentrations. It is, in a certain sense, the organising centre of the subgroups themselves.
(Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 106)
Therefore, the state exists for society, not the other way round. By emphasising this point, sociology broadens political and legal thinking by re-inscribing freedom in History, including pre-modern (Callegaro, 2018). It is a question of thinking the essential distinction between state and society and their joint dynamics, without reducing the former to a broad administration or to a group of specialised officials (deputies, ministers, rectors, inspectors, etc.). For it is indeed the societal process of the division of labour, accompanied by the various reactions of the social body (anomia, selfishness, deepening of moral individualism, organic solidarity), that makes it possible to situate the place of the state.
Thus, against Habermas who inscribed individualistic morality in the letter of a European constitution, through his famous ‘constitutional patriotism’, the neo-Durkheimian approach anchors the cult of the person in the social aspirations resulting from the division of labour: that which, when properly integrated and regulated, generates new forms of solidarity. Habermas certainly joins Durkheim on the cosmopolitan idea, but the latter anchors it more firmly in the work that societies carry out on themselves. This point is useful to think about citizenship in an international perspective, between national prescriptions, promotion of national values, and aspirations of future teachers via an activity on international awareness, anchored in their practices during their training.
2 Cosmopolitan Patriotism: The Political Purpose of ETS Enlightened by Durkheim
The articulation between theoretical and empirical aspects can therefore be summarised as follows. As citizens, members of modern and differentiated
What broad and precise framework could provide a clear conceptual toolbox with sufficiently fine methodological principles? The challenge is all the more crucial because collecting the material was the result of a compromise between teams from five different countries (Germany, Belgium, United States, France, Israel) whose vocabulary on citizenship is already highly differentiated, for reasons not only academic, but also political and cultural (see Section 3 below).
Exploiting the lines of convergence between a holistic sociology and a republican philosophy allows a revival of sociology through philosophy. The GlobalSense field, relating to citizenship from an international perspective, is a lever to meet this interdisciplinary challenge. In the quotation highlighted at the start of this second part, Durkheim considers cosmopolitan patriotism as a prerequisite for a projection towards the ‘human homeland’. Let us now look at the other side of the coin. As things stand, citizen relates mainly to national patriotism. What is the link between the latter and cosmopolitan patriotism?
This [cosmopolitan] patriotism does not exclude, if need be, any national pride; the collective personality, or the individual personalities, cannot exist without having of themselves, of what they are, a certain feeling, and that feeling is always personal. As long as there are states, there will be social self-esteem, and nothing is more legitimate. But societies can put their self-esteem, not to be the greatest or the wealthiest, but to be the most just, the most organised, to have the best moral constitution.
(Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 133)
The emphasis on feelings, such as national pride, might put off the reader attracted to the cosmopolitan ideal. However, Durkheim does not say that pride would be necessary; he simply does not exclude it. Moreover, the sociologist’s gesture has a philosophical scope that avoids two pitfalls. On the one hand, the Kantian pitfall that anchors morality in the individual and makes the
Durkheim thus joins the neo-republican thought that shows the limits of a disembodied cosmopolitanism without falling back onto nationalist essentialisation (Appiah, 2020). More specifically, the holistic sociology of Durkheim makes it possible to hold a “cosmopolitan patriotism as a civic ideal” (Erez & Laborde, 2020, p. 191) whose elements we will unfold.
The state is therefore primarily, for Durkheim, an organ of thought. As such, it requires the deployment of secondary groups, including professional groups comprising teachers and their trainers. For if the state inevitably exercises a collective force, the latter must be balanced by other forces, including in a confrontational way.
The collective force which is the state, in order to be liberating for the individual, itself needs counterweights; it must be contained by other collective forces, namely by these secondary groups. […] And it is from this conflict of social forces that individual freedoms are born. […] [Secondary groups] do not only serve to settle and administer interests within their jurisdiction. They have a more general role; they are one of the indispensable conditions of individual emancipation.
(Durkheim, 1900/2020, p. 121)
3 GlobalSense, Research and Training in Five Countries
GlobalSense is a research focused on teacher training that allows the elaboration of an original scientific questioning, in the wake of the professor of philosophy and (republican) professor of sociology and professor of education science that was Emile Durkheim. Below are the first milestones of GlobalSense – Developing Global Sensitivity among Student-Teachers.
The investigation focuses on a field that is international in two aspects: on the one hand, because of the countries involved in the research; and on the other hand, because of the very notion that is worked on, namely global citizenship education.
The consortium includes universities from Germany, Belgium, the United States, France and Israel. A description of the six workpackages is attached in the annex. In addition to the bearer (Sébastien Urbanski) and the scientific coordinator (Lucy Bell), the consortium members are: Aviv Cohen, Yifat Kolikant, Julia Resnik, Micah Sapir (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Claudia Bergmueller-Hauptmann, Gregor Lang-Wojtasik, Mirjam Hitzelberger (Weingarten University of Education), Emmanuelle Danblon, Lucie Donckier, Odile Gilon (Free University of Brussels), Tim Patterson, Joseph Eisman (Temple University in Philadelphia), Gaïd Andro, Céline Chauvigné, Pascal Guibert, Tanguy Philippe (Nantes University).
Why is it relevant to study GCE and train secondary school teachers? Let us start with relatively consensual remarks. Like every citizen, (future) teachers and their trainers apprehend issues that potentially have a global aspect: migration, climate change, religions, cultural plurality, terrorism, wars, etc. While liberal countries’ curricular approaches on citizenship education show similarities (attachment to individual freedom, promotion of tolerance, etc.), each state tends to address these ‘global’ themes in a culturally and politically specific perspective. As a result, secondary school teachers and pre-service teachers are invited to follow recommendations that fit a relatively local (national) conception of the type of citizens students are expected to become.
The GlobalSense team acknowledges the complexity that stems from the composite nature of the notion of liberal citizenship itself. Indeed, though it is centred on principles claimed to be universal, it is nevertheless the product of national histories. It is specifically a question of exploring the mutual enshrinements of liberal citizenship and national belonging. Whilst doing so, we must consider that in an increasingly interconnected world, teachers should be able to reflect, in a very practical perspective, on the complex relationships between nation and liberal principles that form the substance of the idea of (possibly global) citizenship, framed increasingly by transnational legal and political regulatory structures.
The project has been to implement, over the course of three years, an interactive training system to enable future secondary school teachers to tackle the following issues:
Different conceptions of citizenship from other countries of the consortium in order to enrich their own;
Though issues relating to citizenship (reception of migrants, acceptance of religious plurality and freedom of conscience, etc.) may seem consensual
within a given country, they can become controversial from a supranational (or even worldwide) point of view; The inherently global nature of issues (such as migration or climate change) raised by the interconnection between countries, which therefore need to be considered from this global perspective;
Students are not necessarily long-time members of the nations in which they are educated and/or sometimes identify with nations different from (or even in conflict with) those where they are educated. The case of Israel, a member of the consortium, is paroxysmal in this regard since it educates students and future teachers of the Palestinian minority (although Israeli) who are part of the experiment.
For each of these components, elements are put in italics in order to suggest the complexity of GCE, which is an umbrella-notion (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, p. 3). In spite of differences of opinion among the consortium members regarding GCE, they do agree that an in abstracto reflection on these issues is insufficient. This is why interactions are organised online (via zooms), then in attendance through the Erasmus+ programme, allowing (mostly secondary) pre-service teachers to work together and reflect on common, or at least co-constructed, lesson plans on citizenship. It also gives teacher trainers the opportunity to consider more reflective ways of working, perhaps distancing themselves from the prescriptions and politico-cultural frameworks to which they are accustomed. The general training system is therefore unanimously approved and can be summarised as follows.
So far, 312 students have participated in the experiment, making it possible to gradually build up our corpus, composed in January 2024 of:
- –106 lesson plans;
- –36 international zoom sessions of two hours each, during which the class sequences are presented to (and discussed by) peers from other countries;
- –13 ex-post group interviews (i.e. focus groups) with 62 pre-service teachers who gave in-depth feedback;
- –151 responses to a preparation questionnaire (prompt) on global citizenship, migration, pre-service teachers’ origin and religion;
- –212 self-reflections in which pre-service teachers explained what they had learnt by taking part in GlobalSense;
- –10 students took part in an on-site exchange (4 pre-service teachers from Nantes met 5 peers in Weingarten, accompanied by an EST Master student from Nantes who interviewed them and observed them during the exchange).
In this book, we concentrate on the analysis of prompts and self-reflections, which allows for a nuanced exploration of the pre-service teachers’ experiences,
Pedagogical design of the GlobalSense training device (Source: GlobalSense)
As for the many differences between members of the consortium, though they sometimes constitute obstacles such as misunderstandings, they also constitute working resources. Indeed, since the GlobalSense project is specifically intended to bring out conceptual, political and educational tensions internationally, not rushing into predetermined definitions has been beneficial. Thereby, we are inspired by Pierre Rosanvallon’s remarks on the link between conceptual analysis and political action. While some lament the lack of a belief in social progress, what we also lack today is a discussion on words. As such, the notion of global citizenship runs the double risk of being reduced to a slogan and a dissolving consensus, due to the avoidance of intellectual deepening of an idea (Rosanvallon, 2006).
In view of this intellectual deepening, here are some questions that cannot be avoided:
Is the question, according to the title of the project submitted to the European Commission, to develop the global sensitivity of teachers in training?
Is it about developing education at the global level (global learning, global education)?
Is citizenship itself global (global citizenship), and therefore requires an ‘education towards’ that citizenship?
Will citizenship become global once citizenship education becomes global?
It is not about splitting hairs, but about generating possible answers. It can also be a case of finding that no answers are given because the questions, for certain members of the consortium, are considered irrelevant due to the country they belong to, their disciplinary anchoring, or their political presuppositions (in the broad sense of the term: liberalism, communitarianism, etc.) For though GlobalSense is a research that takes social phenomena as its object, it is no less positioned in society, just as any social science. Moreover, it claims to meet societal challenges and that is why the demand for reflexivity, via the internal criticism of the consortium, is crucial.
For instance, we saw in the first part of this book the importance of religion in the shaping of political liberalism, if only through the work of John Rawls. It is because liberalism, in many ways, is a solution to the religious wars that tore Europe apart and to the civil war between sects that was threatening the United States, before it was endowed with a constitution placing non-establishment
However, during consortium research meetings, some partners expressed the opinion that they did not consider religion to be a global issue. Nonetheless, according to the Nantes team, article 18 of the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights, which specifically addresses this issue, has a global impact (so much so that alternative declarations have been elaborated, such as the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam), and states and NGO s refer to it to defend causes related to the freedom of citizens. These discussions were informative to understand how each team of researchers perceives the global character of certain topics. An agreement was finally reached between the five countries, but only quite late in the project.
Therefore, the first topic that the student teachers were asked to work on was migration. It was easier for the whole consortium to see it as a global issue, although some members of GlobalSense pointed out that there are many different national ways to promote or prohibit migration, so that we could finally ask ourselves whether there are themes that are more global than others. In fact, this probably depends not on the subjects themselves but on how they are problematised. That being said, it is possible to consider that migration is an important topic to approach in CGE, since it has logically been linked to the issue of borders, which have to be reconsidered in the perspective of a global citizenship.
The consortium includes a continuum between, on the one hand, those who think that the notion of GCE has already been demonstrated; and, on the other hand, those who wish to deploy a real exchange on this subject as a tool for international comparison. Where do these differences stem from? In addition to the obvious different political cultures in the five countries, we must take into account that the Weingarten and Jerusalem teams are far more integrated into the field of education sciences than the Nantes and Brussels’ teams, the latter’s approach being more rooted in the contributory disciplines: history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy. Consequently, the Belgian and the French pre-service teachers’ tend to ask elementary questions – or naive questions depending on the point of view adopted – on the relevance of using the term citizenship, when there is to date no global political community, nor global society, except at the margin for certain specific rights and duties.
4
Though these elementary questions can be perceived as scholastic, the ambiguity, fragility, even the ‘structural theoretical poverty’ of the notion of GCE as recognised by major figures in education sciences means they must be addressed.
The tension between liberal and universal cosmopolitism […] created a fruitful debate about the implication of the global dimension in citizenship education. […] Discussions on cosmopolitanism and its critics, as well as its implications for education policies and practices […] represented a theoretical root for the conceptualization of the subsequent notion of GCE which some have noted has a structural theoretical poverty […] GCE is blamed for its naïve internationalism, aiming at pursuing a vague ‘international awareness’, if not even the expression of a disguised colonialism. Not surprisingly, some scholars have observed that it is unclear whether the very notion of ‘global citizenship’ is a metaphor, a paradox, or simply an oxymoron.
(Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, pp. 9, 17)
This passage contains three crucial elements:
- –The concept of GCE is highly problematic;
- –Debate on this concept is necessary;
- –Terminology may affect educational policies and practices.
These difficult issues are a long-term collective undertaking. To this end, it is useful to provide an overview of recurring criticisms of the expression GCE. They may seem sharp, but the horizon of this enterprise is to overcome these criticisms. And this, for a very simple reason: if we adhere, to some extent, to cosmopolitanism, and perhaps also to the cosmopolitanism sketched by Durkheim and Pettit (the latter is commented below), then why deprive ourselves of a slogan which could, in this perspective, provide a point of support, even because of its popularity in some international academic and political networks, as well as international educational networks?
Let us start with fragilities.
Rather than ‘citizenship’, why is the notion of ‘human rights’ not used? Because defending a specific humanitarian right (right to flee a war, right not to be submerged under water due to climate change) does not equate to treating the recipients of this right as fellow citizens (but as similar persons), let alone grant them citizenship. It is certainly very important that educational approaches to global citizenship address the de facto central issue of migration and hospitality. Nevertheless, hospitality, for
example, is very different from citizenship, and seems to require on the contrary some absence of fellow citizenship to be practised. Does the promotion of global citizenship not involve the risk of serving the interests of globalised capitalism by promoting so called ‘multicultural’, emotional, cognitive and communicative skills as supports for good performance in large transnational companies, thus accentuating inequalities to the detriment of children from working-class backgrounds who remain confined to a national education less in touch with this pseudo-multiculturalism (Dugonjic-Rodwin, 2022)?
If “the goal of equipping learners with the skills to work in a globalised world hides two different perspectives, […] one neoliberal, the other emancipatory” (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, p. 14), then how can neoliberal exploitation be avoided? This is all the more difficult since we know the skill with which the dominant ideology utilises progressive perspectives for its own benefit, including that of researchers through a “trial in provincialism against field surveys and monographs in favour of ‘world’ or ‘global’ approaches, strongly backed up by simple compilation work and second-hand sources through a reformulation of the problems in conceptual canvases simplified and easily transposable in various universes and which are suddenly imposed as real generative grammars of (bad) questions” (Christin & Deschamp, 2016, p. 17).
The implementation of effective, frank, sometimes tense but always warm communication within GlobalSense is therefore a condition of the project. The teacher trainers, who are also researchers, can make an international comparison of their frames of thought, views and practices. They do not hesitate to contradict certain stereotypes that emanate from external visions of their country, and this enables them in turn to better understand the background framing their national or local work practices. Consequently, we have been gradually testing and improving our international cooperation practices, in accordance with the European Commission’s programme Key Action 2 – Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education.
5 Liberal Nationalism and (Liberal) Global Citizenship
This endeavour is in close articulation with the status of collective entities, studied in the first part, because the problem is the one Mauss articulated: nations do not live in an environment superior to themselves despite utopians generally ignoring this point of view according to him. This is why an
Does this mean that Mauss would not be cosmopolitan? The question is not relevant because, contrary to what some proponents of global citizenship education claim, cosmopolitanism (the ancient ideal) and global citizenship (the recent slogan) are a priori two different things. It is nevertheless worth unfolding the proper sociological reason of why Mauss preferred to call himself an internationalist, as we saw in the introduction.
A society is an individual, other societies are other individuals. Between them it is not possible – as long as they remain individualised – to constitute a higher individuality. This observation of fact and common sense is generally lost on utopians […]. If the formation of social groups larger than our great nations still falls entirely within the domain of an idea, and of an ideal, however, the importance and awareness of the relationship phenomena between nations and societies of all kinds have increased to unforeseen degrees. […] And therefore extremely numerous conditions are given for the practical solution to a practical problem to become, if not immediately possible, at least conceivable.
(Mauss, 1953/2013, p. 120)
In other words, what is crucial is the awareness within nations of the phenomena of inter-social relations (that is, between societies). Moreover, it is not certain that the projection towards world citizenship will make it possible to carry out this gesture without reintroducing dubious confusions. Indeed, this projection risks making us believe that the ideal of world citizenship is an individual characteristic. This admittedly is not false: individuals can believe they are citizens of the world, and that all humans are called to be citizens of the world. However, this falls under the moral individualism of which Durkheim, clarified by Dumont, had described the societal emergence.
The risk is, therefore, as we saw in the introduction, to confuse the empirical individual and the moral individual (or value-individual to speak like Dumont).
- –Individuals in the world are all equal in dignity,
- –Which means equality is a characteristic of individuals,
- –Therefore citizenship must be conceivable starting from individuals,
- –Consequently, there is a truly global citizenship that brings people together.
We will see that this bottom line emerges in the nominal-liberalist motif in GCE, challenging the social totalities on the principle of the modern individualist ideology that, nevertheless, gives substance to the idea of GCE. That is why the purpose of this book is to give oneself the means to become better acquainted with “the modern system of ideas and values which we believe to know all about because it is in it that we think and live” (Dumont, 1991, p. 20).
Of course, it would be better for this to mobilise anthropological tools fully. This would have been possible if the GlobalSense consortium had included a country from the Global South. Since this is not the case, we shall confine ourselves here to reviewing the genesis of our liberal ideas, which liberal nationalists highlight: “Liberals take too little account of the process by which societies described today as robustly liberal have precisely become so” (Miller, 2020, p. 35). Liberalism and the national idea, far from being contradictory, call out for each other, giving meaning to the expression liberal nationalism.4 Moreover, it is against this idea combining nationality and citizenship that a neo-liberal conception, ‘earned citizenship’, arises, linked to merit and/or money (purchase of passports, etc.), making citizenship more conditional and increasingly linked to the individual attributes of people, apprehended from an atomistic perspective (Joppke, 2021).
What about the educational field? The valorisation of the national idea in Durkheim’s work is known. But it is worth remembering that John Dewey’s position, a typically liberal author, was quite close to Durkheim’s, modulo school pedagogy, which is not the main object of this section.5 Describing nationalism as a mixture of good and evil, Dewey called for developing its positive aspects in the educational field (moral community, solidarity, inclusion) and for fighting, on the contrary, its illiberal aspects. Thus liberal nationalism, through public school education, could be the ally of internationalism.
We are now faced by the difficulty of developing the good aspect of nationalism without its evil side; of developing a nationalism which is the
(Dewey, 1916, p. 203)friend and not the foe of internationalism. Those concerned with education should withstand popular clamour for a nationalism based on hysterical excitement or mechanical drill, or a combination of the two. We must ask what a real nationalism, a real Americanism, is like. For unless we know our character and purpose we are not likely to be intelligent in our selection of the means to further them. […] To nationalize American education is to use education to promote our national idea – which is the idea of democracy.
This captures the deeply interdisciplinary aspect of our approach. Anthropologists, historians and philosophers can remind sociologists that individualism as a value is the product of particular societies, often nations. If the value given to the individual is obvious, it is precisely because we live in the sort of society where this value has found the conditions for its elaboration, its implementation, its codification in law and its dissemination. The point is emphasised by Durkheim, but more so by Louis Dumont, whose anthropological perspective makes it possible to grasp the specificity of different societies, including ours,6 by avoiding the projection of a particular experience onto the world level. The Dumontian gesture also allows us to grasp the phenomenon of nationalism in a less polemic, less pejorative and more in-depth perspective.
Someone opposes nationalism to individualism, without explanation; undoubtedly, it must be understood that nationalism fits a group feeling that is opposed to ‘individualist’ sentiment. In reality, the nation in the precise, modern sense of the term, and nationalism – distinguished from simple patriotism – have historically been linked to individualism as a value. The nation is precisely the type of global society that corresponds to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does it accompany it historically, but the interdependence between the two is necessary, so that one can say that the nation is the global society composed of people who consider themselves as individuals.
(Dumont, 1991, pp. 21–22)
If we admit these points, then the consequences are crucial. They do not enable us to easily imagine a ‘leap’ towards global citizenship, favoured by organisations of quasi-global influence such as UNESCO. Thus, this book defends the relevance of a debate that consists in enriching the discussions on GCE by integrating a bi-disciplinary approach (sociology and philosophy) to serve ETS, as well as taking seriously the ethical and political, and therefore educational, perspectives of GCE supporters: “The call for GC [global citizenship], beyond the
6 GCE, a Horizon Compatible with Different Ethics
GlobalSense research can therefore deal with several approaches at the political level; but more importantly, taking the variety of approaches seriously is what is most likely to meet the comparative challenge. Indeed, many authors insist that GCE is an ideal and a horizon. Yet, what are the ways to achieve it? They are probably multiple, since each country’s realities on the ground and room for (educational, institutional) manoeuvre are narrow, which cannot fail to question the different versions, or even the merits, of the ideal in sight.
This is why supporters of GCE, aware of the notion’s fragility, fall back on a defensive register to save their approach: “GCE is a key notion as a general horizon or as a psycho-social framework for collectiveness and world consciousness” (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, p. 11). Nevertheless, at the same time, we feel that what is described as a general horizon needs to be delineated. Let us take the spatial metaphor literally. Lost in the desert, should one fix the horizon or rather the next dune? To what extent does the horizon provide me with a reference point? Since the horizon is distant, is it not better to consider a closer reference point, which could be identified by means of critical national-liberal or republican approaches (for instance), materialising steps towards the global level?
However, as mentioned above, some proponents of GCE are quite willing to accept sometimes virulent criticism against the very notion of GC – as being contradictory, vague, utopian, weak, misleading. To respond, they write:
GC does not provide any legal status. Lacking a ‘legal bite’ represents its weakest condition and is a sort of contradiction in terms. […] In our view, however, [GC] is an ethos, an educational paideia, a framing paradigm that embodies new meaning for education and its role in developing knowledge, values, attitudes for securing tolerance, diversity recognition, inclusion, justice and sustainability across the world and in local communities. As such, it requires an ethical status as much as formal membership which may impact legal frameworks.
(Tarozzi & Torres, 2016, p. 14)
From a political philosophy point of view, the clarification is slightly disappointing: we learn that the notion of citizenship actually meant something
In our case, the five countries gathered in GlobalSense represent a small part of the world. Additionally, the central protocol, which consists in studying the ways in which pre-service teachers develop class sequences on citizenship, before discussing them with peers from other countries, does not clearly require registration under the GCE label. The reality is indeed pluri-national because the lesson plans must comply with national or local curriculum. Still, the fact is that as a slogan accompanying globalisation policies, GCE accommodates almost all political perspectives – multiculturalism, republicanism, Marxism, neo-liberalism, interreligious dialogue, etc.
These multiple tones of GCE are part of the broader framework of education policies at an international level, according to “an approach that is individualising, competitive and adaptive, as well as weakly societal” (Malet, 2023, p. 52), via the lexicon of global citizenship, well-being or sustainable development. These are captured not through the lens of the co-operative transnationalism of the 1970s, but under the influence of the current dominant movement of skills that qualify the employability of the individual or even their human capital. The result is “a tacit conception of quality, success and professional and personal realisation” (idem) which requires, in our view, a very Durkheimian vigilance, perceiving in the hyper-individualism one of the main pathologies of division of labour when the state is no longer able to fulfil its integrative and regulatory role. For if moral individualism is an asset to our modern societies, the “disintegration of holistic representation by individualism” (Dumont, 1991, p. 185) is a slippery slope.
7 Giving a Political Meaning to the Knowledge and Values Involved in ‘Educations Toward’
It is possible to orient oneself in this complexity by returning to a model worked on in ETS at the service of the critical thinking of trainers, teachers and students. Firstly, it is important to take into account the more or less important gaps in any curriculum in its six dimensions. These are what is: prescribed,
Since GlobalSense focuses on the pedagogical device, we will focus on the recommended curriculum, the intermediate curriculum and the possible curriculum. The real curriculum is therefore not taken into account (because the pre-service teachers will not be testing their productions in class) and the prescribed curriculum will only be taken into account for comparative purposes: for example by noting that GCE is part of the prescribed curriculum in Germany, but not in France where this education is recommended, at most (very implicitly).
However, we must accurately scrutinise the learning process of teachers in training. The focus will be placed on curriculum guidelines, making it possible to “move from a formal curriculum to a real curriculum by borrowing precise, chosen and conscious goals and values”, knowing that these goals can take political, didactic, strategic and programmatic aspects (Barthes & Lange, 2022a, p. 43). The first two aspects are obvious to the GlobalSense team. Students (pre-service teachers) may view global citizenship as a very clear or very misleading notion, including for political reasons. It is also obvious that pre-service teachers, during their involvement in the international device, adopt various didactic approaches, depending on the country, previous training, etc. Nonetheless, the last two points, strategic and programmatic, are equally important and refer, for example, to how the pre-service teachers in France reconcile the GCE framework with the Moral and civic education framework. In this mobilisation of curriculum guidelines, the GCE slogan is important but it can just as well be a support, as it can be an object of criticism for pre-service teachers and/or their trainers, depending precisely on the purposes and values they adopt in their (future) professional practice.
The goal therefore is not to make pre-service teachers understand what global citizenship a priori stands for. Rather, if we contribute to the establishment of education towards global citizenship, this first requires that we agree on what ‘education towards’ is. However, far from being a way of getting teacher trainers, teachers and students to commit to a vision more or less preconceived by academics within international networks, education towards is, primarily, a means of restoring political sense to educational work. Universities, in particular, have considerable flexibility to welcome themes from the political or social sphere, whose values overwhelm knowledge. Therefore, the GlobalSense consortium, made up of universities, is also an object of study.
(Barthes & Lange, 2022b, pp. 390–391)
What can be done with knowledge over-determined by values imported from the political or social sphere, into disciplinary frameworks, in the recipient universities? […] The weakening of the legitimacy of knowledge in universities creates a space of opportunities in which variable political strategies are expressed that claim to replace, or at least complete and/or reinforce this legitimacy. In any case, it makes it possible to evacuate questions, because it uses scientific knowledge as alibis, which serve to justify good practices that in reality depend on the choice of values […]. The central issue of the search for political meaning, when it comes to striving towards collective and informed ownership of public affairs (in this case, related to curriculum development) involves reflexivity and critical analysis of the meaning of situations rather than individual or collective standardisation. It is a question of fully restoring their function to ETS […] so that they can propose collective scientific practices rather than ones that are only managerial or engineering. To give political meaning supposes to link together, beyond curricular study, the elements in order to understand the interests (divergent or not) which animate the actors of curriculum development.
In short, the critical skills of trainers and pre-service teachers should be given priority, even if this may call into question the validity, operability, timeliness or relevance of the slogan in question (GCE). The interest of curriculum guidelines is also to associate a teaching theme (GCE) with how it can unfold in terms of problematisation, comparison of sources, and validity of the content involved (Barthes, 2022). These tags also have a number of ‘levels’ for comparison purposes. Thus, the pre-service teacher can think at first that being a global citizen is quite an attractive notion (level 1, descriptive), will then try to define the notion, wondering where it comes from (level 2, identification of problems and sources), before questioning whether the sources illustrating this notion are coherent (level 3, sources discussed, deconstruction of demand), and assessing the debates that may arise around the cosmopolitan ideal (level 4, risks and prospective).
Ultimately, it is through these critical questions, potentially carried by pre-service teachers and oriented by conscious political, axiological, programmatic and didactic purposes, that curriculum guidelines make it possible to consider the transition from a recommended curriculum to a real curriculum. This is how we may grasp, on the sociological level, certain aspirations emanating from the social body. In this case, it is a group of pre-service teachers (some in primary but most in secondary), being trained in five different countries.
8
We have situated this work in the field and epistemology of comparative education research. It is based on contextually grounded comparisons: building on academic resources and data collected in the GlobalSense project, the following description centres on the three local (Baden-Württemberg in Germany, Wallonia-Brussels in Belgium and Pennsylvania in the USA) and two national (Israel and France) education and training systems in and for which the GlobalSense pre-service teachers are being trained.
Linking these systems to their political and social contexts, our objective is to enlighten the various contents of citizenship education curricula, as well as the way pre-service teachers are trained, before analysing the data we collected on their representations of GCE before and after taking part in exchanges with peers from the other participating countries, as well as the potential change in their pedagogical practices.
8.1 The German Education System
8.1.1 Governance and Administrative Organisation
The German education system is organised at a federal level by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). It operates under the framework of the German constitution, named the Basic Law (Grundgesetz). The BMBF plays a coordinating and supporting role in education matters. It provides funding for research projects and institutions and sets general educational policy.
The BMBF has seven departments, in addition to the central department that is responsible for administrative tasks:
- –Office 1: Strategies and Policy Issues
- –Office 2: European and international cooperation in education and research
- –Office 3: Vocational Training and Lifelong Learning
- –Office 4: Science
- –Office 5: Key Technologies – Research for Innovation
- –Office 6: Life Sciences – Research for Health
- –Office 7: Provision for the Future – Research on Culture, Basic Science and Sustainability
In spite of the BMBF’s responsibilities, a large part of educational policy in Germany is decided at the state level, strongly limiting the influence of the ministry in educational matters. Each of Germany’s sixteen federal states has its own Ministry of Education or equivalent authority responsible for education policy and legislation within its jurisdiction. These state-level authorities
Education systems, curricula and forms of schools therefore diverge. However, the Standing Conference of Ministers of Education of the Länder (Kulturministerkonferenz [KMK]) ensures the conformity or comparability of education and qualifications. According to the IEA,7 “In 2003, the Standing Conference established national educational standards (Bildungsstandards), which all 16 states have committed to implementing. These educational standards specify the curricular elements for core subjects and serve as binding objectives for all states”. The respective Ministries of Education and Cultural Affairs in each state publish the curricula as compulsory for teachers, but they are formulated in a general way which allows teachers considerable freedom with regard to content, objectives, and teaching methods.
8.1.2 Teacher Training and Employment
Because education is a state matter, each federal state has its own regulations and training concepts, for example regarding the choice and combinations of subjects. However, they all have in common that the teacher training course depends on the type of school chosen, and that each pre-service secondary teacher must study at least two subjects that they will teach later. On top of these, teacher training in Germany includes studying didactic methodology, having pedagogic courses and doing internships in schools. Depending on the state and the university, one can conclude one’s studies with a bachelor’s or master’s degree, or a state examination. The first phase of studies always ends with an internship.
According to Eurydice, “Following successful completion of their preparatory service, newly-qualified teachers can apply for permanent employment at public-sector schools”.8 Teachers are usually employed by the Ministry of Education for the state and, as civil servants, have a job for life after a certain period (verbeamtet). However, this practice depends on the state: in those that used to constitute what was East Germany, teachers are less often beamter and more often employees of the schools.
In GlobalSense, the pre-service teachers in Germany are studying at the Weingarten University of Teacher Education, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Because the teacher training programs vary from one state to another, students at Weingarten plan to pursue their teaching career in the state of Baden-Württemberg.
According to the state government’s website, the state’s Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport is in charge of teacher training.9 The first step to become a teacher is obtaining a university degree, before taking part in a preparatory service (Vorbereitungsdienst) in order to acquire the pedagogical
The GlobalSense pre-service teachers studying in Weingarten University of Education are training to work in primary or secondary schools. During their teacher training course, all students complete educational content (educational science, psychology, sociology, basic questions of education, inclusion and speech training) as well as the two subjects German and mathematics (one of the subjects is in-depth). Pre-service secondary teachers also choose another elective subject (English, Protestant theology/religious education, Islamic theology/religious education, Catholic theology/religious education, Art, Music, Scientific and technical teaching, Social science teaching or Sports), that they will later teach.11
According to the University’s website, for pre-service primary teachers “The bachelor’s degree in primary school teaching prepares [students] optimally for a career in education dealing with children. The course is geared towards the requirements of education and upbringing for the age group of 5 to 12-year-old children, taking into account fundamental aspects of didactics at the primary level and initial lessons”. For pre-service secondary teachers,
With the master’s degree in secondary level 1 teaching and the traineeship, students can qualify to work as secondary level 1 teachers. The bachelor’s and master’s teacher training courses at the Weingarten University of Education are coordinated in such a way that they offer very good conditions for successful pedagogical training. […]. You will gain in-depth knowledge of educational sciences and research methods. Internships and the bachelor’s thesis round off the course.12
Once pre-service teachers have completed their course, they may register on Online Teacher Baden-Württemberg (Lehrer Online Baden-Württemberg), “the internet platform for teachers in Baden-Württemberg with the job advertisement process and modules for hiring and transferring teachers”.
8.1.3 Civic and Citizenship Education in Germany
According to the Federal state’s Interior Ministry,
Since the Federal Republic of Germany was first founded, civic education has evolved into an independent task with two main objectives:
- –
to ensure that individuals have the knowledge and skills they need to form independent opinions and make informed decisions; and - –to enable them to reflect on their own situation, recognise and meet their own responsibilities to society and play an active role in social and political processes.
Civic education in Germany is non-partisan but not impartial; it is grounded in the values and interpretation of democracy found in […] the Basic Law.
According to F. Klaus Koopman,
Most civic education frameworks are based on a broad range of social, economic, and political content covering thematic strands like social relationships, the foundations of democracy, the political system of Germany, economics, the social structure of Germany, how to participate in public policy, the European Union, media, international relations, peace keeping, comparing political systems, environmental problems …
Students of all school types take civic education courses […] lasting 1 or 2 hours a week, starting at grade 5 or 7, depending on the state as well as on the type of school.
In spite of the wide diversity of civic education frameworks, subjects, contents […], there is a general consensus on the main goals of civic education at German schools: Primary goal is to help young people evolving into self-determined, autonomous and critical citizens in a humane and democratic society being able
- –to analyse social and political situations, problems, conflicts
- –to obtain and apply appropriate analytical methods and skills
- –to make informed and reasoned judgements and decisions on social and political issues
- –to recognise and handle constructively and tolerantly controversial issues as well as alternative perspectives and views in a culturally diverse society
- –to participate reflectively and democratically in public policy processes […].
These goals, of course, are normative constructions […]. There is reason enough to assume that the normative goals and concepts are not at all identical with classroom practice.
(Koopman, 2004, p. 2)
8.1.4
In 2007, the Standing Conference of the German Ministers of Education and Culture (KMK) adopted the Curriculum Framework for Education for Sustainable Development. In June 2015, the KMK adopted a new edition of the Framework. According to then Minister of state Brunhild Kurth, in between the two editions, this Framework had
been implemented in many projects of the German federal states, partly supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). […] The Curriculum Framework shall continue to provide conceptual support to the education systems and to the federal states’ development of curricula, to teacher training on all levels, to textbook authors and editors of school supplies.
The Framework is made of six chapters that deal with interconnected yet separate subjects:
- –Chapter 1: Conceptual foundations of the Framework
- –Chapter 2: Basic conditions at schools and educational challenges
- –Chapter 3: Competencies, themes, standards, design of lessons and curricula
- –Chapter 4: Implementation in school subjects and on different education levels
- –Chapter 5: Sustainable Development as task for the whole school
- –Chapter 6: The learning area Global Development in teacher education
Each state adapts the way it applies the curriculum. In the state of Baden-Württemberg, where the Weingarten pre-service teachers are studying, the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport has developed a “Guide for Democracy Education” (Leitfaden Demokratiebildung), which all schools have had to implement since September 2019.13
The aim of the guide is to offer teachers of all subjects and types of schools, from primary school to upper secondary level, reliable guidance for acquiring democracy-related skills in schools and lessons. The guide follows a comprehensive and holistic understanding of democracy education, and views it as a task and added value for everyone involved and all subjects in the school. In the four fields of action of the guide, the interrelationships between the subjects and the guide are presented as examples. This means that the guideline for democracy education does not replace educational plans, but supplements them and in this respect represents an in-depth look. This also applies to the guiding perspectives anchored in the educational plans of general schools, to which the guideline refers as an example. This also makes the added value of
For example, regarding the use of geography to approach democracy education, schools are asked to study historical conditionality of today’s democracies: in order to do so, they are encouraged to review the possibilities of political participation and their formation in the different epochs of history (e.g. Greek Poleis, Roman Republic, Medieval cities, etc.).
The guide must be implemented in all public and private general education and vocational schools in Baden-Württemberg. Training courses, accompanying teaching materials, practical examples and information on possible cooperation partners are developed by the state to provide additional support for schools in implementing the guidelines.
8.2 The Belgium Education System
8.2.1 Governance and Administrative Organisation
Belgium is a federal state
with two kinds of entities: communities, whose constituent element is culture and language, and regions whose determining element is territory. There are three communities, the French Community, the Flemish Community and the German Community. They are administratively divided over the territory into three regions: the Walloon Region, the Flemish Region and the Brussels Capital Region. Belgian federalism is based on two pillars, communities and regions, which cannot be superimposed.
(de Bouttemont, 2004, p. 101)
The School Pact of November 1958 defines two major educational networks: the official network, whose organising power is a legal body governed by public law (one of the three communities, or a province or municipality); and the free network, whose organising power is a legal body governed by private law. The free network is roughly structured as a free confessional network (with a large Catholic majority) and a free non-confessional network (especially present in higher education). A third minority network exists: the private network, whose organising power is a legal body governed by private law, in this case parental authority. The child, in this case, is home-schooled, or sent to a private school chosen by the parents. The first two networks (official and free) are subsidised by the communities.
8.2.2 Teacher Training and Employment
The reform of Initial Teacher Training (Réforme de la Formation Initiale des Enseignants [RFIE]) of September 2023 aims to strengthen teachers’ professional practice and the acquisition of academic skills. This is why, from September 2023, students who begin teacher training (preschool, primary and lower secondary) commit to four years of study, including one year of master’s degree.
To teach in sections 1, 2 and 3, teachers must train in a higher-education college, and obtain a bachelor and their first year of master’s degree specialising in:
- –preschool teaching (section 1), for students who wish to teach in kindergarten and up to the second year of primary school (with pupils from 2½ to 8 years old),
- –primary school teaching (section 2), for students who want to teach from the third year of kindergarten and up to the sixth year of primary school (with pupils from 5 to 12 years old)
- –lower secondary school teaching (section 3), for students who want to teach from the fifth year of primary school to the third year of secondary (with pupils from 11 to 15 years old): teachers must obtain a specific title, the Aggregation of lower secondary education (agrégation de l’enseignement secondaire inférieur, AESI) and choose which subject they will teach (mathematics, arts, humanities, etc.).
To teach in sections 4 or 5, with pupils from the fourth to the sixth year of secondary (aged 15 to 18 years old), teachers must have successfully completed graduate studies (at university, higher education college or college of arts), whatever the field, as well as a master’s degree in a particular subject (ancient Greek and Latin, modern languages, biology, etc.). This master’s degree must be followed by the Aggregation of upper secondary education (Agrégation de l’enseignement secondaire supérieur [AESS]).
More specifically, in the case of GlobalSense, pre-service teachers from Belgium who have taken part in the project are students at the Free University
Once they have the relevant titles, teachers can apply for a position at a specific school, a school board or organising body (responsible for the proper functioning of one or more schools), a school group or an education network (community education or subsidised official education for the official educational networks, and subsidised private education for the free educational network).
8.2.3 Civic and Citizenship Education in Belgium
Each region’s ministry of education is in charge of elaborating a curriculum in civic and citizenship education. Because the pre-service teachers taking part in the project are studying at the Free University of Brussels, to work with secondary students, we will be focusing here on the curriculum of the Wallonia-Brussels federation, which they are training to teach.
According to the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, secondary school students are taught a Philosophy and citizenship course that takes a philosophical approach to the issues and practice of citizenship. This weekly course, that lasts an hour, is based on philosophy, its practices (philosophical debate and discussion, philosophers’ colloquia, reading texts, etc.) and its history, and takes into account the contributions of other disciplines, in particular humanities (humanités), social sciences and history of religions and secularism.
The objectives of the Philosophy and citizenship course are to train students in the various issues of citizenship and to bring them to:
- –recognise the plurality of forms of reasoning, conceptions of the world as well as the plurality of norms and values;
- –be able to argue a position in relation to other possible positions;
- –explain and problematise the broad categories and conceptual oppositions that structure and determine our ways of thinking, most often without our awareness or thought;
- –to think for themselves while developing the share of inventiveness and creativity that is expected of the citizen in a society democratic.
Thus the point is not to train pupils in philosophy in and for itself, but to train them in a philosophical approach to citizenship issues and practices.
Citizenship can be defined positively from a legal and institutional point of view. This implies a certain number of rights: civil rights (freedoms and rights fundamental), political rights (right to vote, right of association, etc.), and
In this sense, if the philosophical approach is at the centre of the learning in the Philosophy and citizenship course, it must be nourished by contributions from other disciplines, giving it an indispensable insight to the challenges of contemporary citizenship: above all humanities, political and social sciences, but also natural and applied sciences, and sciences of religions and secularism.
The Philosophy and citizenship course thus bases citizenship training on a strong and active conception of democracy: democracy refers less to an instituted regime than to the collective capacity of citizens to reflect on principles, modes of operation, and the forms of citizenship.
8.2.4 GCE in Belgium
According to the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, GCE is founded on a series of texts, including Article 7 of the Development Cooperation Act of 19 March 2013 that states: “The Belgian Development Cooperation […] ensures that the Belgian citizen is made aware through information and education of the stakes, the problematic and the achievement of the objectives of development cooperation and international relations”.
Following this, a cooperation agreement was signed in 2017 between the Federal state and the French Community for the framing of Global Citizenship Education. This convention aims to further promote and anchor education for global and inclusive citizenship in francophone schools and more specifically to:
- –foster bridges, mutual knowledge and the exchange of information between actors in global citizenship education and actors in compulsory education;
- –continue and strengthen the recognition of education initiatives for global citizenship and solidarity in schools and promote operational partnerships between actors of education for global citizenship and actors of mandatory education;
- –strengthen the coherence of the policies, strategies and actions proposed by the actors of education for global citizenship and solidarity and the actors
of compulsory education in the field of education for global citizenship and solidarity in schools; - –evaluate policies and strategies for global citizenship and solidarity education and make recommendations.14
Enabel, the Belgian development agency, is in charge of coordinating and implementing the federal GCE program and SDG s, notably through the federal education program for global citizenship named Showing the colours (Annoncer la couleur). The program aims to anchor and strengthen global citizenship education in Belgian education. To this end, it offers strategic support to the education sector, strengthens teaching practices (including teacher training courses recognised by continuing training organisations) and positions itself as a centre of knowledge, innovation and expertise in GCE.
Other actors, private or public, specialised or not, also intervene in schools in education for global citizenship and solidarity: some non-profit organisations and private initiatives of international solidarity, institutional actors such as universities, the Royal Museum of Central Africa, etc.15
Thus, though the curricula do not specifically mention GCE or SDG s, students in Belgium are not only given the tools to approach the question of citizenship in a philosophical way, but also learn about global issues, thanks to the involvement of actors outside the education system.
8.3 The United States of America Education System
8.3.1 Governance and Administrative Organisation
The American education system is highly decentralised.
[The] state involvement in education is a relatively recent phenomenon of the 20th century. Until then, local communities had nearly exclusive control on education and the action of legislators in most cases was limited to extending best practices to the more backward communities.
(Viarengo, 2010, p. 5)
Public education thus involves shared responsibilities and a division of functions among the three levels of government (national, state and local levels). At the national level, the government oversees education issues through the Department of Education. Since the 1950s, the federal government has promoted equal educational opportunity, with the implementation of racial desegregation following the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education. Its official mission being “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and
Since the U.S. Constitution does not refer to federal responsibility for public education, according to the 10th amendment of the Constitution, the states have the main responsibility in matters of public education. Each of their governments has its own branch responsible for public education. In forty-eight states, these branches are overseen by boards of education appointed by the Governor or the public. State Boards set standards, approve the assessment system, set the accountability system and approve both school accreditation and teacher certification. The state superintendent supervises the implementation of the state policy.
Each state can grant authority over education to local units, such as school districts. There are approximately 15,000 school districts in the US, that each gave a school board. These boards have authority on the hiring of schools’ local superintendent and principals, as well as on the supervision of study programs for districts and schools. The local school superintendent designs the district’s educational program and supervises the operation of schools by the principals.
8.3.2 Teacher Training and Employment
The hiring of teachers in the USA is the responsibility of the schools or the district. However, each state’s education branch of government dictates the requirements individuals must meet to be selected as teachers. Furthermore, the national Department of education sets certain standards of qualification for teachers.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) requires that all teachers of core academic subjects (these include English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography) be ‘highly qualified’ as defined by law.
More specifically, teachers are supposed to obtain at least a bachelor’s degree, as well as a teaching license from their state, plus demonstrate expertise in their field. To demonstrate subject knowledge, new elementary school teachers must pass a test for their teaching skills, as well as in the areas of elementary school curricula. New middle and high school teachers must demonstrate expertise in the subjects they teach, either by passing a specified academic subject test or by successfully completing an undergraduate major (or coursework equivalent to an undergraduate major), a graduate degree, or an advanced certification or credentialing.
A common path to a teacher’s credential begins by applying to a four-year teacher education program at an accredited college or university. The typical
Because certification requirements vary by state, subject and grade level, pre-service teachers are trained to work in a specific state: therefore pre-service teachers from Temple University, Philadelphia, tend to become teachers in the state of Pennsylvania. In addition to a bachelor’s degree, teachers in Pennsylvania must have completed a teacher education program that has both regional accreditation and accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE). Having a minimum of 13 weeks of hands-on classroom experience is also required to become a teacher in Pennsylvania.
Furthermore, future Pennsylvania teachers must complete a variety of pedagogical, general skills, and subject-specific exams, such as the Pre-service Academic Performance Assessment (PAPA), Praxis Core exams, and any relevant Praxis subject exams, such as high school history for a person wishing to become a high school history teacher.
More specifically, in the case of GlobalSense (GS), some of the pre-service teachers from Temple University taking part in GS are undergraduates studying for their Bachelor of Science in Education in Secondary Education: Social Studies Education. This training will enable them to “Help high school students develop the global perspectives they need to be good citizens in the 21st century […] and teach students about the global community and how dynamic geopolitical forces impact communities and cultures around the world”.17
Other pre-service teachers taking part in GS are graduates studying for their Master of Education in Secondary Education. With a Master’s degree, the future teachers will work with grades seven to twelve, and “create an informed citizenry with respect for diversity in a democratic society. Focus on critical thinking about curriculum frameworks and materials; curriculum development grounded in teaching for understanding; and sensitivity around areas such as race relations, gender, war and peace, equality of economic and social opportunities, and global interdependence”.18
On top of learning to apply literacy instructional methods for English language learners and to create classroom settings that accommodate special education needs, for instance, pre-service teachers must choose and complete the major coursework requirements in an area of specialisation (economics, geography and urban studies, history, political science or sociology). Pre-service
Furthermore, Temple University prepares the future teachers to successfully complete state certification exams, allowing them to apply for a Pennsylvania Instructional I Teaching Certificate. Public school teachers in the United States are employed by government entities at the state or local level, such as school districts or municipal school systems.
8.3.3 Civic and Citizenship Education in the USA
The civics education curricula vary depending on the state. In a 2018 report on the state of civics education, Sarah Shapiro, a research assistant at the Centre for American Progress and Catherine Brown, who is the Centre’s vice president for education policy, presented the state of high school civics education in the USA. They notably indicated that
State civics curricula are heavy on knowledge but light on building skills and agency for civic engagement. An examination of standards for civics and U.S. government courses found that 32 states and the District of Columbia provide instruction on American democracy and other systems of government, the history of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, an explanation of mechanisms for public participation, and instruction on state and local voting policies. However, no state has experiential learning or local problem-solving components in its civics requirements.
(Shapiro & Brown, 2018, p. 4)
In Act 35 of 2018, the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided that, beginning with the 2020–2021 school year, each school entity:
Shall administer at least once to students during grades seven through twelve a locally developed assessment of United States history, government and civics that includes the nature, purpose, principles and structure of United States constitutional democracy, the principles, operations and documents of United States government and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Following Act 35, in July 2019, the Pennsylvania Department of education established a Civics program, based on three pillars: knowledge, skills and actions.
According to the program,19
The knowledge pillar underscores planned instruction to support student understanding of concepts of the Academic Standards. Assessment focuses on the four critical components of civics education:
- –Principles and Documents of Government
- –Rights and Responsibilities
- –How Government Works
- –International Relationships.
The skills pillar seeks to have students engage in active civic participation: applying the knowledge gained in the first pillar. At the school level, students participate in student council/school governance, extracurricular activities, mock trials and similar simulation activities, service learning, and various clubs and organisations. Opportunities for civil discussions, discourse, and debate also provide opportunities to hone skills. Another important aspect of skills development is the need for tolerance and acceptance of others. Anti-bullying initiatives and programs such as Positive Schoolwide Behaviour Support (PBIS) are critical components in the schoolwide setting.
[Regarding the actions pillar] Responsible and involved citizens take an active role through a myriad of actions and dispositions [such as Acceptance of diversity, Involvement in the community]. By incorporating all three pillars in a civics program, students acquire the knowledge behind the meaning of ‘We the People’. They have an opportunity to operate as a citizen, experience citizenry and understand that the government of the United States is theirs. This encourages each generation to ‘secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity’.
8.3.4 GCE in the USA
However, GCE faces three main obstacles in the US: they are suspected of political bias, are based on different disciplinary areas, and linked to a vague concept. More specifically, Rapoport explains the US politics of trying to control what students are taught:
State legislatures that approve state standards, the principal curricular documents, or State Boards of Education that control textbook adoption, are elected political agencies that have levers to control curricular content. The remnants of the anti-globalist and isolationist tradition in American education can also be found in an opposition to including more non-US-centred content in many social studies or language arts curricula.
(Rapoport, 2021, p. 115)
The result is the absence of a proper, adequate curriculum. […] This is where all inter-and multidisciplinary areas stumble. Most curricula in US schools are designed on a disciplinary basis. […] In this environment, interdisciplinary areas such as human rights education or citizenship education are not particularly welcome in any cluster, which, in turn, makes them unattractive for teacher education programmes.
(Rapoport, 2021, p. 115)
Thirdly, Rapoport (2021) indicates that GCE faces a more normative challenge: global citizenship is criticised for the vagueness of the global citizenship concept.
Despite progress in the development of GCE and global education in general, many educators in the United States are still sceptical about global citizenship-related issues […]. The principal reasons for scepticism are the absence of a global government, the perception of citizenship as a predominantly nation-related phenomenon, lack of exposure to global education courses in teacher education, and a false perception of patriotism. (p. 116)
Here the author mentions two types of reasons that GC remains vague: the lack of a global institutional frame that could give weight to the concept and make it less abstract; the fact that US citizens, including teachers, might not be educated enough on the question of global issues or of patriotism. This listing of obstacles seems to present a vicious circle, where the lack of education on the concept of GC, due in part to politics, makes people suspicious of what they are ignorant of, and therefore they resist it.
In brief, it seems that the curriculum in Pennsylvania is largely centred on national citizenship and, though it might not focus as much as other states’ curricula on knowledge, is still not particularly open to global issues.
8.4 The Israeli Education System
8.4.1 Governance and Administrative Organisation
The Ministry of Education is in charge of public education institutions in Israel. The education system is centralised, and the curriculum is standardised at a national level (Feniger, Shavit, & Caller, 2021). However, the system is divided into three tracks: public secular schools, public religious schools, independent orthodox schools.20 The Arab sector is included in public education but as a
These tracks exist from kindergarten through primary school. Parents have the right to choose, within their residential district, the type of educational institution they prefer for their children.
Since 1953, Israel’s Public Education Act has confirmed the existence of separate education systems between the religious and secular, private and public sectors, but does not officially recognise the Arab-Palestinian education system. To this day, it functions as a separate, subordinate and often discriminated body within the public education system. Most Palestinian and Jewish Israeli students therefore pursue separate school courses until they enter university.
A 2001 report by the Human Rights Watch organisation, based on official statistics as well as on-site visits to twenty-six schools in the two systems and interviews with students, parents, teachers, administrators, and national education authorities, underlines the segregation in the Israeli education system.
Nearly one in four of Israel’s 1.6 million schoolchildren are educated in a public school system wholly separate from the majority. The children in this parallel school system are Israeli citizens of Palestinian Arab origin. Their schools are a world apart in quality from the public schools serving Israel’s majority Jewish population. Often overcrowded and understaffed, poorly built, badly maintained, or simply unavailable, schools for Palestinian Arab children offer fewer facilities and educational opportunities than are offered other Israeli children. […] The Israeli government operates two separate school systems, one for Jewish children and one for Palestinian Arab children. Discrimination against Palestinian Arab children colors every aspect of the two systems.21
This situation of segregation at the detriment of the Palestinian Arabs had been anticipated by Sami Khalil Mar’i in a 1985 essay (Mar’i, 1985).
8.4.2 Teacher Training and Employment
According to IEA’s TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Centre, Initial teacher education takes place in colleges of education and in schools of education at universities. Teacher education in college combines disciplinary and pedagogical content, typically in a four year program, and results in a bachelor’s degree in education and a certificate to teach at the primary or lower secondary level. Since a policy was introduced in 2003, teachers are also required to complete an induction year (their first year of teaching) before they may obtain a teaching license. The teaching certificate program is not designed for one
According to the teacher trainers from HUJI that are members of GlobalSense, most of their Jewish pre-service teachers are training to work in public secular secondary schools, and most of the Arab pre-service teachers will go on to teach in public Arab schools. Some however do go on to teach in private Arab schools, particularly when they themselves are from East Jerusalem or the West Bank. Others still, go on to teach in Jewish state schools. Schools in Israel recruit their own teachers.
8.4.3 Civic and Citizenship Education in Israel
According to Heela Goren (2021),
Israeli citizenship is a contested issue […]. Smooha […] asserts that Israel does not fall under the category of a Western liberal democracy, as it is often perceived or presents itself, but rather, it embodies a model of ethnic democracy, in which the major ethnic or religious group uses state structures and resources to maintain its own interests, sometimes at the expense of minority group rights. […] The tension between the Jewish and democratic definitions of the state is often raised in the public discourse and comprises a particularly potent issue, and competing notions and conceptions of citizenship have been shown by Cohen (2017, 2019) to create ambivalence in Israeli classrooms. (p. 82)
Goren underlines how the Israeli form of citizenship departs from the norm – rights and responsibilities or obligations that reflect a legal mutual bond between a state and its people – particularly with regard to its Arab-Palestinian citizens but also the Orthodox Jewish citizens, since both groups are exempt from military service. Furthermore, the author underscores that Israel diverges from other modern democratic states regarding the process of naturalisation, which is much easier for Jews due to the law of return; consequently, the notion of equality between Israeli citizens is challenged. She further explains that
these issues, of course, also shape the education system and specifically citizenship education in Israel. The state has a divided education system as previously mentioned – but a core curriculum that is uniform throughout the system. This means Arab-Palestinian (and other minority) pupils and Jewish pupils study the same citizenship curriculum in secondary
(Goren, 2021, p. 82)school, a curriculum which is often criticised for focusing heavily on the Jewish narrative.
Therefore, rather than focusing the civics curriculum on universalistic principles, it has incrementally concentrated on the particularistic principles of Jewish nationalism.
Halleli Pinson confirms that Israel’s civic education curricula, in contradiction to a global trend in the Global North, has been moving towards a neo-nationalistic religious discourse. It highlights Jewish aspects of Israel and the power of the government, over the focus on components of democracy such as civil and human rights, the status of the Arab minority, judicial oversight and equal rights (2020). Furthermore, regarding the fact that the curriculum mentions that the state of Israel recognises the right to live in the culture of one’s choosing, the author specifies that this recognition constraints minorities’ culture to a limited sphere:
At first glance, this explanation appears promising as the textbooks seem to relate to ideas that stand at the heart of liberal discussions on the meaning of culture rights. But whereas Kymlicka, for instance, refers to cultural rights in terms of the ability of minority groups to realise their culture both in the private and public spheres […], we can see that the textbook defines cultural rights as, first and foremost, the right of the majority group to shape the public sphere, where the protection of minorities rights is reserved to the possibility they are given to express such rights locally. This distinction, between the majority and the minority collective rights, is actually a complete distortion of the notion of cultural rights, utilised here, in fact, to justify the exclusion of minorities from the public sphere. This quote should also be read in the context of Israel, whereas by and large (with the exception of several mixed cities) the Arab-Palestinians and Jewish citizens live in separated communities and attend separate schools. In other words, what the textbooks actually suggests is that the cultural expression of minorities would be kept within the boundaries of their own communities, and more specifically to Israel, that Palestinians may express their culture in Arab towns and villages but not in the public civic sphere.
(Pinson, 2020, p. 31)
8.4.4 GCE in Israel
In spite of a sectarian education system and more generally, the organisation of the country, Israel wishes to influence GCE. Goren explains that
(Goren, 2021, p. 84)
As a whole, the Israeli education system is open to internationalisation, as can be seen through […] examples pertaining to higher education, its participation in projects led by the EU and other supranational organisations, and its widespread acceptance of international standardised testing through PISA and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
The author goes on to nuance the importance of these involvements:
This same openness does not necessarily apply to GCE or even a looser sense of globalisation or internationalisation of the curriculum, particularly at the primary and secondary school levels. […] Yemini, Bar-Nissan, and Shavit (2014) showed that over the last 20 years, the global contents on the history matriculation exam have, in fact, been pushed aside in favour of more locally-focused issues. This too suggests that the Israeli education system applies a highly selective strategy as to which aspects of the system to internationalise and to what extent. […] Different constructs of GCE are developed under these national conditions in differently constituted local contexts. […] Israel’s socio-political characteristics have oriented the education system inwards, neglecting the global sphere, and only providing pupils with abstract and scattered information about the world. As of yet, GCE is not an officially recognised component of the citizenship education curriculum administered by the Ministry of Education […] The current, right-wing government and the policies enacted by the past three Ministers of Education have clarified through funding and official documents that the education system is first and foremost concerned with the development of (Jewish) pupils’ Jewish identities.
(Goren, 2021, p. 85)
8.5 The French Education System
8.5.1 Governance and Administrative Organisation
Historically, the organisation of the French education system is centralised. From the early 1980s, the state embarked on a vast operation of decentralisation of powers which strengthened the weight of local authorities. Indeed, the decentralisation laws of 2 March 1982, 7 January 1983, 22 July 1983, and 25 January 1985 profoundly transformed the educational landscape, with the primary goal of making the system efficient by adapting it to the needs of each territory. The principle is therefore to give the representatives of the state in the regions and departments the leeway to better respond to local issues, by mobilising more easily the human and budgetary resources at their disposal, adapting
However, the state remains the guarantor of the functioning of the public service and of the coherence of education. As stipulated in the thirteenth paragraph of the preamble to the constitution of 1946, confirmed by the preamble to the constitution of the Fifth Republic, education cannot be totally decentralised: “the organisation of public and secular education at all levels of the state is obligatory”. The definition and implementation of education policy is therefore the responsibility of the government. Within the government, the Minister of National Education and the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation are responsible for educational policy. They guarantee the organisation and content of teaching, the delivery of diplomas, recruitment and personnel management.
It is in the field of school planning that the sharing of competences is best reflected: at a local level, each department (département) and each region (région)22 draw up a provisional investment program that defines notably where a new school (departments are in charge of middle school and regions, of high schools) needs to be opened and how many students it needs to welcome. However, it is up to the regional prefect, responsible for implementing national and policies in the region, to make the final decision to create a college or high school. Finally, it is the decentralised representative of the Ministry of national education at a regional level (rectorat) who decides on the educational structure of the school, while the Ministry itself provides the necessary teachers for the school.
8.5.2 Teacher Training and Employment
To become a statutory schoolteacher, college or high school teacher or senior education advisor (conseiller principal d’éducation [CPE]), it is imperative to have a bachelor’s degree, then study at a teacher training college (Institut national supérieur du professorat et de l’éducation, Inspé) to obtain a master’s degree.
The objective of the teacher training college is to provide a high-level theoretical background, but also to support the entry into the professional world of future teachers through: courses related to the discipline(s) of the future teacher; practice-oriented teaching; many internships in the first year of the Master’s degree, followed by dual training in the second year; some courses shared with all other future education professionals; and a progressive specialisation.
The teacher training college offers a Master’s in professions of teaching, education and training (Master mention métiers de l’enseignement, de l’éducation et
In this Master’s in professions of teaching, education and training, students can choose between four paths:
- –Primary school, to become a school teacher;
- –Secondary school, to teach in middle or high school (excluding aggregation);
- –Secondary school, to become a senior education advisor;
- –Training practices and engineering.
Throughout the Master’s, some lessons are common to all students of the college. These lessons focus notably on the areas of secularism and the values of the Republic, professional gestures related to learning situations, appropriation of transversal educational issues and major societal issues, fight against all discrimination, child psychology, civil service law, sociology of school populations, diversity management, school guidance, learning processes, professional communication (voice, gestures, etc.), management of conflict and violence, etc. The point of all future actors of the educational community following common teachings is to favour a shared culture that enhances the cohesion of education teams on the ground, which is a key factor in student success.
To become civil servants in the public education sector, students must obtain their Master’s degree, but also pass a specific examination, depending on whether they wish to work in primary or secondary education, become a senior education advisor or a pedagogical engineer. Once they have obtained their Master’s degree and passed the examination, candidates must enter their application on a national platform. The Ministry of National Education and Youth then assigns teachers, senior education advisors and pedagogical engineers to schools on the whole national territory.
More specifically, in the case of Nantes students taking part in GS, half are training to become secondary school history and geography teachers; the other half are training to become senior education advisors. Once they finish their training and get the required titles, they will be assigned by the Ministry to schools that need staff, which can be potentially anywhere in France.
8.5.3 Civic and Citizenship Education in France
Due to France’s historical, social and political contexts, ever since the Third Republic (1870–1940), citizenship education has been closely linked to a political regime (the Republic) and to the country’s territory. The issue therefore in
Article L121-4-1 of the French Education code stipulates that
As part of its mission of citizenship education, the public service of education prepares students to live in society and become responsible and free citizens, aware of the principles and rules that underpin democracy. The lessons mentioned in article L. 312-15 and the actions undertaken within the framework of the committee provided for in article L. 421-8 are part of this mission.
The lessons mentioned by article L.312-15 are as follows:
In addition to the teachings contributing to the objectives defined in article L. 131-1-1,24 moral and civic education aims in particular to encourage students to become responsible and free citizens, to form a critical sense and to adopt a thoughtful behaviour, including their use of the internet and online public communication services. This education includes, at all stages of schooling, training in the values of the Republic, the knowledge and respect of the rights of the child enshrined in law or in an international commitment, and the understanding of the concrete situations that undermine it. It provides information on the role of non-governmental organisations working for the protection of children.
According to the Ministry of education’s official bulletin of July 2018, the curricula for moral and civic education in middle school – which is the level that most of the pre-service students from Nantes will be working with – follows three aims. These are: Respecting others, Acquiring and sharing the values of the Republic, Building a civic culture. The specific curriculum for each grade builds on the previous grade’s curriculum. For instance, regarding respect for others, in the equivalent of seventh grade (cinquième), “Notably in
Though the curricula focus mostly on training French republican citizens, and do not explicitly mention GCE, in certain places they do pertain to global issues.
8.5.4 GCE in France
Citizenship education is very much centred on the French state and nation. However, certain parts of the curricula open up to the outside world. Regarding the aim of teaching students to respect others, the ninth grade curriculum references the necessity for students to understand that all human beings have equal dignity: “Civic morality taught at school is closely related to the principles and values of the republican and democratic citizenship. It is based on the awareness of the dignity and integrity of the human person”. In the ninth grade, “In connection with the history program and reinvesting the work done in seventh and eighth grade on respect, tolerance and individual and legal responsibility, students work on antisemitism, racism and xenophobia”.
When it comes to acquiring and sharing the values of the Republic, in the eighth grade (quatrième), “In connection with the history program, students identify the different stages that led to the construction of [the French] democratic state that is part of a democratic European Union”.
Concerning the aim of building a civic culture, seventh grade students are to be made aware “of individual and collective responsibility [that] can work in fruitful links with curricula of geography and life and earth sciences on the theme of development and sustainable development. Discussions and debates are an opportunity to confront arguments and understand ecological issues”.
Only a few points of the curricula encourage students to think outside of the nation and the state. However, the values of the Republic (freedom, equality, fraternity, secularism (liberté, égalité, fraternité, laïcité)), based on article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of human and citizen rights, claim to be universal. In fact, article 1 of the Universal declaration of human and citizen rights is inspired by the former. Therefore, though the Moral and civic education curricula are centred on French citizenship, the values they convey invite the Nation’s citizens to reflect on, and feel concerned by global issues.
…
Might these similarities indicate a tendency towards the forming of global citizens? The moderns are increasingly reticent to the idea of associating the status of citizen to a particular nation, which the GCE slogan expresses in its own way. It incites international cooperation that involves, as initiated in GlobalSense, an international division of labour in the field of citizenship education, which is why we find Durkheim’s work in particular especially useful.
Before further exploring the differences and similarities between the five countries in terms of the governance and organisation of their education and teacher training systems, as well as their curricula, we wish to underline two main points. Firstly, regarding the level of centralisation, the French and Israeli systems are centralised as opposed to the Belgian, German and US, which are decentralised systems. In terms of the countries’ civic and citizenship education curricula, they all contain instructions aimed at students acquiring knowledge and learning to articulate it with skills and/or actions, in order to “realise [their] cultural rights” in Israel, have “an opportunity to operate as a citizen” in the US state of Pennsylvania, and “participate reflectively and democratically in public policy processes” in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Concerning the extent to which the five countries’ curricula include goals to educate students on global issues – despite the fact that most do not so much as mention the terms Global Citizenship Education – we can note that these vary from very little inclination towards the global level (Israel, US) to an explicit influence of GCE objectives as notably specified by the UN (Germany).
Notes
Internal relations within the social body are distinct from the State recognised by external bodies “who provide it with an identity [within the framework] of international relations and foreign affairs [where] governing and governed merge into a unitary entity, in this case the nation” (Kaufmann, 2010, p. 353).
Except for when he grasps it no longer in its ontological but ideological aspect, which is obviously part of social reality.
“Durkheim believes that the moral integration of society precedes the democratic exercise that is absent from school discipline, while Dewey wants to develop the democratic virtues in school since it is democracy that makes society. […] For Durkheim, school must impose rules; for Dewey, school must teach students the art of debate, compromise and decision” (Dubet, 2018, p. 63). These cleavages, according to the author, do not change the fact that the question of institutional and symbolic frameworks of education, posed by Durkheim more than a century ago, still imposes itself on us. It is in this sense that one can always be Durkheimian.
The countries involved in GlobalSense are few and belong to a fairly common cultural area: three European states, the United States (Pennsylvania), and Israel which is in the Middle East, but remains a nation created mainly by settlers on the basis of Zionist ideals elaborated in Europe.
There are thirteen administrative regions in metropolitan France. Each region is made up of a varying number of departments. The teacher-training college of Nantes is situated in the department of Loire-Atlantique, which is part of the region called Pays de la Loire.
According to article L. 131-1-1 of the Education code: “The purpose of the right of the child to education is to guarantee him, on the one hand, the acquisition of the fundamental instruments of knowledge, basic knowledge, elements of general culture and, depending on the choices, vocational and technical training and, on the other hand, education enabling him to develop his personality, his moral sense and his critical mind, to raise his level of initial and continuing training, to integrate himself into social and professional life, to share the values of the Republic and to exercise its citizenship”.