Keywords

10.1 Globalization, Global Citizenship, and Global Citizenship Education: Introduction

  • In fact it was an intentional decision made back in 2000 when we were not allowed to use the word global.

  • Were not allowed? – I thought I misheard Charles.

  • Correct. We were not allowed, – Charles was one of education specialists, whom I interviewed for my research on how educators conceptualize globalization and global citizenship. After 10 years, as a social studies teacher, he now worked as Social Studies Coordinator in the State Department of Education and as such was familiar with revision and adoption of State Academic Standards in Social Studies – Educational round table said, “No that’s too divisive a word.” Charles went on. Connotations of one order of black helicopters, Black Hawk down, Somalia 1993… we don’t want to get involved in that they said, so we use the word international.

The attitude toward globalization, global citizenship, and global citizenship education in the United States is complicated. Besides the general reasons that will be discussed further in this chapter, such as terminological vagueness, or lack of curricular support, advance of global education, and global citizenship education in the United States, have faced very specific challenges that are largely the result of political history and long-lasting debates about the place and role of the United States in the world. The ever contested and debated concepts of globalization, citizenship, and education on American soil, fertilized by isolationism, exceptionalism, decentralism, and individualism, acquired new nuances and meanings. We now all know that the world is going to be “far more equal, far more active and energetic” (Zakaria, 2005, p. 92). We also know that the forthcoming and imminent equality, activism, and energy are going to challenge our traditional perceptions of the world. Global processes in economy, science, and technology have provided a tremendous impulse to changes in values, customs, and more. Regardless of how positively or negatively globalization is seen throughout the world, it has already started to change the world, and these changes are irreversible. Economically, scientifically, and technologically, the United States has more or less, and I would argue more than less, succeeded in meeting the challenges of globalization. But is the nation prepared to face the inevitable moral, ideological, and political changes that go hand in hand with the changes in global economies? Even more importantly, are US schools preparing students morally, politically, and ideologically to become citizens of a future world that is going to be more equal, active, and dynamic than this one? The future world is not only a world of common markets of goods, capital, or labor. It is also a world of common values, a world of tolerance, a world of multiple identities and loyalties, and a world of shared responsibilities. Speaking of the effect of globalization on education, Carnoy (1999) noted that “globalization has a profound effect on education at many different levels, and will have even greater effect in the future, as nations, regions, and localities fully comprehend the fundamental role educational institutions have, not only in transmitting skills needed in the global economy, but in reintegrating individuals into new communities built around information and knowledge” (p. 14). The first decade of the twenty-first century that was full of hopes, as well as disappointments, demonstrated that citizenship education, particularly in regard to its global dimension, faces multiple contextual, methodological, curricular, and even semantic challenges. This chapter discusses the major obstacles to global and global citizenship education in US schools and how curricular documents, namely, state social studies academic standards, address such concepts as globalization and global citizenship.

Schools play a key role in citizenship education and, therefore, are one of the critical providers of global citizenship education. Due to the schools’ potential to be aligned with transnational efforts in promoting global civility (Reimers, 2006), the role of curricula, teachers, or school administrators can hardly be overstated. Nonetheless, as research demonstrates, teachers are mostly oblivious to the purposes, methods, and content of global citizenship education (Gallavan, 2008; Gaudelli, 2009; Myers, 2006; Rapoport, 2010; Robbins, Francis, & Elliot, 2003; Yamashita, 2006). Overall passive and, in many cases, skeptical attitudes to global citizenship and related concepts eventually have resulted in neglect of global citizenship education in many US schools. The growing amount of research, particularly comparative research, demonstrated that “the traditional notion of developing democratic understanding needs to be expanded to encompass attention to decision making, controversial issues, and civic action set in multicultural and global contexts” (Hahn, 2001, p. 21). Furthermore, because the US education system has not yet overcome the stigma of globalization as being anti-American, “the reality of the U.S. education system at best approximates the goal of developing national citizens with some relativistic understanding and awareness of the rest of the world” (Myers, 2006, p. 389).

Since the 1990s, much of the world – particularly developing countries – has viewed globalization as a new hegemonic endeavor and as a new attempt of “encroaching imperialism” of the West, particularly the United States, to recolonize the world. In our metaphorically determined world, globalization for many in developing countries has become a symbol of poverty, injustice, and cultural degradation and so has the United States that epitomizes this global phenomenon (Lal, 2004; Stromquist, 2009). Gradually, globalization has become synonymous to Americanization. Like all paradigmatic changes of such scale, globalization is a very controversial and ambiguous process that has both advantages and disadvantages. Questionable international policy of the United States, immediately linked by some shrewd politicians to the outcomes of globalization, also contributed to the negative image of both the United States and globalization. Ironically, in the United States, where the traditions of isolationism are still strong, globalization is perceived by many, mostly in conservative circles, as a conspiracy launched by some mythical world government, usually personified by the United Nations, against core American values. Myers (2006) noted that the paradox of globalization in the United States is that we fear the same threat that the rest of the world blames us for: that globalization “is causing us to lose our national identity and the ‘American way of life,’ and that regional free-trade pacts are eliminating local jobs” (p. 371). As a result, the complex, ambiguous, controversial, and provocative concepts of globalization and global citizenship are either ignored in many US schools or presented solely through the economic interdependence framework.

Many obstacles to global citizenship and global citizenship education, such as its anti-Western stigma or an alleged threat of international organizations like the United Nations, are the result of general ideological and cultural realities and tensions in the society. Together with pro-global forces, these extra-systemic contextual elements are a part of a macrosystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) that directly influences education. However, a number of intro-systemic factors within education potentially hold back the development of global and global citizenship education in schools. The intra-educational factors that will be described further, along with those mentioned before, are detrimental to global education and global citizenship education. The consequences of those factors are the lack of global- and global citizenship-related courses or topics in preservice teacher preparation, insufficient curricular and methodological guidance, lack of interest in and sometimes intentional ignoring of global education among legislators, and absence of citizenship-related topics at global-themed teacher professional development seminars.

In the following sections, I will address some intra-systemic factors that negatively impact the development of global and global citizenship education in the United States. In particular, I will describe to what extent the lack of curricular guidance contributes to the neglect of those concepts in the social studies classroom.

10.2 Conceptual Vagueness and Ambiguity

Globalization and global citizenship in particular have become a subject of intense theoretical debates only fairly recently (Armstrong, 2006, Banks, 2004; Heater, 1999; Noddings, 2005; Wood, 2008). Although in very general terms global citizenship means belonging to a global community, every next step in the deconstruction of this term raises questions. What is globalization? What is citizenship? Does a global community really exist? How inclusive should global citizenship be? Is global citizenship regulated? Who or what determines its boundaries? How devastating will the impact of global citizenship be on national or local citizenship if we accept it? These and many other questions challenge our routine understanding of citizenship, a construct that since the very inception of nations several centuries ago has been regarded mostly as a nation-state-related concept (Davies, Evans, & Reid, 2005; Delanty, 2002). As such, citizenship has been presented, taught, and negotiated among groups and individuals. The difficulty of conceptualizing global citizenship becomes even more apparent if we consider that the key components of this construct, global and citizenship, are both contestant concepts that spark vigorous debates.

As an increasingly contested construct, citizenship is placed at the center of political, ideological, and cultural debates because citizenship is seen as a virtue that can be actively practiced by society members to resist increasing political apathy and indifference among voters. Citizenship is a multifaceted multifunctional construct that is difficult to define in a traditional manner. Marshall’s (1950) theory of historical progression of citizenship has been challenged by a rising number of competing models (Carter, 2006). Citizenship is increasingly seen as a measure that helps exercise individual rights against markets or government and as a means of minority struggle to achieve desirable equality and status. Political scientists and theorists usually conceptualize and interpret citizenship through various discourses when the model of citizenship is determined by both context and involved agents (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006). Until recently, at least one aspect of citizenship was almost universally accepted: citizenship has been interpreted through an individual relationship with a nation-state when loyalty to the state and building a common identity were at the core of citizenship education (Lawson & Scott, 2002). To be a citizen implied that a person, at a minimum, had a number of responsibilities to the state and to other members of the community and, at the same time, enjoyed rights that the state awarded him or her as compensation for fulfilling their responsibilities. However, the areas of rights, responsibilities, duties, or privileges are expanding and multiplying under the pressure of globalization and unification, so that an individual’s expectation of loyalty, commitment, and belonging is no longer limited to a living place or nation but also comes from a sense of belonging to a more expanded community, to the world (McIntosh, 2005). This expanded model of citizenship has come to be seen as an umbrella model for several sub-models: global citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, supranational citizenship, or transnational citizenship.

The rapid changes in theorizing about citizenship and globalization, significant conceptual shifts in citizenship, and global paradigms along with cyclical alterations in educational policies and expectations resulted in the situation when classroom teachers do not know much about noneconomic aspects of globalization and global citizenship (Gallavan, 2008; Robbins et al., 2003) or simply ignore these constructs as white noise (Rapoport, 2010). Neither teacher education programs nor professional development courses are of much help due to the increasing pressure of accountability, testing, or marginalization of social sciences in the curriculum. As a consequence, such concepts as globalization, global ethics, or global citizenship remain vague and ambiguous for many education practitioners who try to avoid using terms they do not fully comprehend.

10.3 Traditionalistic Approach to Citizenship and Focus on National History Education in Public Schools

The major goal of public education is creating citizens. Thus, citizenship education is in the core of public schooling. Since the time when nationalism played a critical role in unifying new nations, nationality and citizenship have been virtually synonymous terms (Davies et al., 2005; Heater, 1999). As a result, the socially constructed symbiosis of citizenship and national identity has influenced state-supported citizenship education in the most profound way. School curricula, particularly in public schools, reflect, produce, and reinforce the dominant version of citizenship in a given society. Needless to say, the dominant version of citizenship is national citizenship, which determines membership in the nation and the relationship between the government and the individual. The history of citizenship in the United States has been closely intertwined with the history of education and the development of public schooling. From the beginning, schools were expected to prepare future loyal citizens who would identify themselves with the nation (Graham, 2005; Reimers, 2006; Reuben, 2005). The new nation, as all new nations, needed legitimation that could be easily achieved, at least for its own citizens, through indoctrination in nationalism and patriotism. The public school system was a perfect means for achieving this goal.

For centuries, the development of national citizenship and national identity has been the essence of school curricula in the United States, particularly in such areas as history, social studies, or literacy. Historians of education and curricular reform demonstrated that public schools were a robust component of nationalization. Nationalism and allegiance to the nation-state were a product of mandatory public schooling and its corresponding core curriculum (Bohan, 2005; Cremin, 1988; Tyack, 1974). As a result, the never-ending process of nation building has been cited as justification for concentrating on national citizenship at the expense of developing within the students a broader and more comprehensive picture of the world.

Although global contexts have always been present to a varying degrees in public school curricula and even considering growing interest in such subjects as world history or world geography (Cavanagh, 2007), the traditionalistic, nation-centered citizenship approach dominates curricula (Myers, 2006; Reimers, 2006). It is also true that numerous attempts have been made to introduce international and global themes to students for the last several decades, and many of those attempts have been successful. However, the general direction of citizenship education, the conceptualization of citizenship in its legalistic form as a strictly nation-state-related construct, has not significantly changed. There is not much evidence that teacher education programs are successful in challenging preservice teachers’ beliefs about citizenship despite a growing number of college courses in global and multicultural education (Gallavan, 2008; Robbins, et al., 2003). New teachers normally return to classrooms with an unchallenged legalistic concept of citizenship securely tied to their previously constructed ideas of state and nation. And the circle starts all over again. No wonder that, for teachers, citizenship is by definition a state-related concept (Parker, Ninimiya, & Cogan, 1999).

The notoriously familiar fear of globalization as a threat to national US American identity is translated by some historians and social studies educators into an appeal to concentrate efforts on national history education. Johann Neem (2011) stated that “by emphasizing the teaching of national history, Americans hope to sustain, or, in the case of immigrants, create, a common identity that connects past events that took place in a particular geography with the present generation (p. 48). However, ignoring moral or cultural aspects of globalization and focusing on its economic side, Neem accuses globalization and global identities of destroying citizens’ shared inheritance in order to liberate individuals from national responsibilities. Standish (2012) expresses skepticism about teaching world history in part because “the motivation for teaching world history and world geography has more to do with instilling a relativistic, nonjudgmental disposition which discourages children from the critical engagement with both subject content and morality” (p. 85).

Although the idea of global identity development is gaining popularity among educators, it would be unrealistic to expect public schools to shift focus from a tradition of developing national identity. Some will even argue that it is detrimental for our identities to be globalized (Burack, 2003; Neem, 2011). Ironically, the opponents of global education, who express concern about the predominance of world history or world geography in school curricula at the expense of national history, know very well that national history narratives often “undergo a few distortions in the service of national identity” (Dillon, 2011, n/p).

10.4 Lack of Disciplinary Heritage

Very few people question whether citizenship education should be a part of the public school curriculum. Even the contemporary “social studies wars” are more about the place of history education and methods of teaching citizenship than debates about the importance of citizenship education itself (Evans, 2004; Leming, Ellington, & Porter-Magee, 2003). As part of a broad socialization process, citizenship education is a multicomponent system that involves a number of agencies – the government, community, media, parents, peers, and school – which all play a role in socializing a child and in turning a child into a responsible and informed citizen. Public schools, unlike other agencies, were created specifically for the purpose of educating citizens. Therefore, it follows that the public school system is best equipped to provide the conditions, space, and guidance for developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to educate globally minded citizens. Public education can play the leading role in this process, as school is designed to reflect on and to react to emerging challenges, particularly cultural, social, or ideological. School remains the core element of the citizenship education network. But the school curriculum, which is a set of ideas, texts, practices, and pedagogies, usually focuses on the disciplines. Global citizenship education, as an inherently multi- and interdisciplinary area, lacks what Gaudelli (2009) called “disciplinary heritage” (p. 78). A global citizenship paradigm, as well as a nonlegalistic concept of citizenship, has not secured its place in school curricula in the United States because it does not fit into any specific class.

Such an “unfixed” status of citizenship education (Reid, Gill, & Sears, 2010) presents a serious challenge. When educators discuss programmatic challenges related to the introduction of ideas of global citizenship in the curriculum, they usually focus on two approaches. One approach is to design stand-alone courses, such as international relations, world/global/international studies, or international perspectives. Undoubtedly, these courses provide frameworks for teaching globalization and global citizenship. However, such courses are vulnerable; they depend on teachers’ mobility, students’ interests, ideological and cultural environments, and most often on funding opportunities. Furthermore, budget cuts and excessive focus on testing make such elective courses almost nonexistent in low-income communities (Thornton, 2005).

Another approach to teaching global citizenship is to incorporate elements of global citizenship models into existing courses, social studies courses in particular (Collins, 2008; Noddings, 2005; Smith & Fairman, 2005; Thornton, 2005). This approach has both positive and negative consequences. The positive effect of curriculum integration is related to the fact that teachers have an opportunity to discuss elements of global citizenship in various disciplinary contexts, thus using the content and framework of every course to raise issues related to global citizenship. The possible negative effect of curriculum integration, on the other hand, is that the discipline-based approach narrows a school’s capacities to present any model of citizenship in its entirety. Ostensibly, global citizenship education is usually conceptualized within the frameworks of international education, global education (Davies et al., 2005), multicultural education (Banks, 2004; Dunn, 2002), peace education (Smith & Fairman, 2005), human rights education (Gaudelli & Fernekes, 2004; Osler & Starkey, 2010), or economics education. None of these approaches, with the possible exception of economics education, has yet secured a position in school curricula. Thus, global citizenship education, if taught as one of the topics within these frameworks, would become even more secondary. Curricular documents are usually vague about topics of globalization- and global citizenship-related issues. The lack of epistemic and disciplinary heritage (Gaudelli, 2009) is an additional obstacle to curriculum integration and negatively affects global citizenship education.

10.5 Patriotism as a Framework of Citizenship Education

Another controversy that haunts global education and global citizenship education is the fear that they undermine patriotism toward the state. This is particularly true in the United States where, on the one hand, schooling disproportionately favors national identity over learning about the world and, on the other hand, teachers were occasionally accused of being unpatriotic when they promoted critical discussion of government policy (Loewen, 1995; Myers, 2006; White & Openshaw, 2002). Patriotism has long been one of the major components of citizenship education. Samuel Chester Parker, Dean of the University of Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century, reported that, prior to the 1880s, patriotism was the purpose of teaching history in schools (Bohan, 2005). Moreover, patriotism is sometimes viewed by many, including many educators, as the centerpiece of citizenship and, thus, the main purpose of citizenship education (Finn, 2007; Fonte, 1996; Ravitch, 2006). Patriotism is usually described as a special affinity one has toward their country, a “sense of positive identification with and feelings of affective attachment to one’s country” (Schatz, Staub, & Levine, 1999, p. 53), “the civic devotion toward the state as a political entity…while expressing commitment toward it” (Kashti, 1997, p. 152), or “a kind of psychological disposition underlying the specific feelings, attitudes, and forms of behavior focused on one’s country” (Reykowski, 1997, p. 108).

Social constructs such as patriotism are vulnerable because they only exist in human consciousness and not in the physical world; therefore, if one is to feel patriotic, one must be regularly reminded of it. As Johnson (1997) put it, “Patriots are manufactured by the system of which they are members” (p. 79). If nationalism was formed and supported through the development and propagation of national myths, metaphoric symbols, rituals, and ceremonies, then patriotism that Kashti (1997) called “state nationalism” (p. 155) is the purposeful exploitation of individuals’ “primordial link to territory and society” (Janowitz, 1983). Because this process involves the initiation, development, interpretation, negotiation, and reevaluation of the “collective system of meanings” (Reykowski, 1997, p. 109), control over the means of socialization, of which education is the most significant component, is crucial. This explains why in many countries, particularly in those where governments experience minimal or no civic control, those in power are so careful and particular about the systemic approach to promoting patriotism or, in other words, centrally controlled patriotic education.

In most cases, patriotism is conceptualized in its traditional meaning. However, the traditional meaning of patriotism has been challenged more and more often (Apple, 2002; Branson, 2002; Merry, 2009; Nussbaum, 1994), and the idea of patriotism as a more inclusive construct, particularly in regard to multicultural and intercultural discourses, is becoming more acceptable. “A useful definition of patriotism,” noted Ahmad and Szpara (2005), “should not hinge on the legal status in a polity but embrace citizens’ allegiance to universal human values, democratic ideals, and the human rights and dignity of all people in the world” (p. 10).

10.6 Lack of Curricular Pressure

Administrative or curricular pressure as an incentive to introduce globalization or global citizenship in schools seems controversial and potentially discouraging. One of the most comprehensive studies of teachers’ perceptions of and roles in global citizenship education, the report Global Citizenship Education: The Needs of Teachers and Learners (Davies, Harber, & Yamashita, 2005), clearly demonstrates that the national curriculum was seen by teachers in England as an obstacle to the creativity and flexibility that are necessary to teach global citizenship. “The pressure of educational system, such as curriculum expectations, standards and requirements like tests and exams” (p. 29) are mentioned among the factors that inhibit Canadian teachers’ abilities to educate for global citizenship (Evans, Ingram, MacDonald, & Weber, 2009). Rigid formal curricula stifle teachers’ ability to teach global citizenship. There is other empirical evidence that citizenship education in general suffers from overreaching standardization and accountability policies (McEachorn, 2010; VanFossen & McGrew, 2008). Obviously, in practitioners’ opinions, the already rigid curriculum prevents teachers from including global citizenship topics into their instruction. However, if we look at what exactly teachers specifically complain about, we will notice some nuances. Teachers interviewed for the Global Citizenship Education report (Davies et al., 2005) saw the national curriculum as a potential barrier to a global citizenship program because it was too Eurocentric, because the bulk of the resources went to core areas, and because testing further shifted the focus to core activities. Teachers here demonstrated a legitimate expectation from a curriculum to guide what content to teach. For example, Ontario teachers who were determined to make global education a priority, as reported by Schweisfurth (2006), found curriculum guidelines very helpful; they were able to creatively adjust curriculum requirements to justify their approaches to global education. Considering the problems that global citizenship education encounters in schools mentioned earlier (conceptual vagueness, dominant role of national citizenship, pressure of uncritically interpreted patriotism, and curricular insecurity), it is not surprising that many teachers who want to teach and believe they know how to teach global citizenship need some sort of institutionalization and formal programmatic justification of their interest and intent. Particularly because the concept of global citizenship is still ideologically and politically contested and not uniformly accepted, teachers need a curricular incentive to teach global citizenship-related ideas. Research (Bottery, 2006; Engler & Hunt, 2004; Reimers, 2006) clearly indicates that education practitioners, even those who are genuinely committed to teaching from a global perspective, need clear and straightforward curricular guidance to justify their initial interest in teaching about global citizenship. The absence of such unambiguous guidance only sends mixed messages and undermines teachers’ motivation to engage students in this most useful and necessary endeavor.

One of the most powerful tools in curriculum development and curricular guidance is state standards. Since the mid-1990s, voluntary national and, later, state standards in various areas of education, including social studies, have defined what students should be taught and what they should know (Finn & Kanstoroom, 2001). Academic standards, both national and state, have played a controversial but important role in educational reforms in the United States. The standardization movement in education has resulted in the development of national and state content and performance standards that describe what a student should know and be able to do at a certain grade level. Standards are an instrument of public control of education. As such, they have supporters and opponents. The twofold purpose of standards, as the major curricular guidance tool and as a basis of assessment, is the source of constant criticism. Although standards only set specific goals and are not prescriptive regarding how to achieve those goals, school administrators and classroom teachers complain that standards stifle creativity, do not allow to expand curricula beyond an approved set of topics, and make teachers teach to the test. On the positive side, voluntary national standards and state academic standards are tools for curricular guidance. Despite their relative rigidity due to the complex revision process, state standards can serve as a reliable indicator of curriculum content changes in various states. Thus, it has become possible to determine the general direction of content development in various areas of education by analyzing the state standards. The most recent initiative in the academic standards reform movement in the United States was an attempt to develop rigorous content academic standards common for all states. The Common Core Initiative was launched in 2009, and new standards in language arts and mathematics were released in the summer of 2010. In 2014, 44 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia adopted the common core standards. However, social studies is not a part of common core initiative yet. It should be noted that common core standards are in the center of fierce political debates and, in the opinion of some researchers, proved unable to address the problems of rigidity, inflexibility, and prescriptiveness of their individual state standards (Ravitch, 2014).

Research shows that such concepts as globalization and global or world citizenship are still rarely mentioned in states’ content standards. The conceptual content analysis of social studies academic or content standards of all 50 states (Luciano Beltramo & Duncheon, 2013; Rapoport, 2009) demonstrated that the term globalization was mentioned in the standards of 15 states: Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia. The term global citizen was used in the standards of only two states: Maryland and Mississippi. The terms and concepts that are semantically related to globalization are present almost in all state standards for social studies. They are (in parentheses are abbreviations of states): global interdependence of economies, global connections, global interactions, interconnected world (CO and GA), global interdependence of places (DE), global community, international interdependence (IN), tightly interrelated world (IL), human interdependence (MD), interdependence within global communities (MI), connected and interdependent world (MN), global understanding (NE), interdependent increasingly connected world (NH), interrelationship (NM), interdependence of global economy (OR), effects of economic, geographic, and political interactions (SC), worldwide economic interdependence (SC), constantly changing, increasingly complex world (SD), global trade interdependence (UT), global cooperation among groups and governments (VT), networks of economic interdependence (VA and VT), and increasingly culturally diverse and interconnected world (WV). The terms semantically related to global citizenship that were used in the social studies standards of other states are: informed, responsible, and participating citizens at the…international level (AL, MS, and MO), responsible citizens and active participants in…global society (AL), global stewardship (AK), members of the world community (AZ, NH, and OH), citizen in an interdependent world (KS), citizens and participants in an increasingly connected world economy (KY), citizen of the world (MD and WV), Americans as citizens of a global community (MS), economic citizen in a global economy (MT), capable citizens in a culturally diverse and interdependent world (NE), and productive, informed citizens in a global society (NV).

The development and implementation of state content standards possess their own dynamics that explain, in part, why standards lag behind real life. This is particularly the case in social studies education where, in comparison with other areas of education, the rapidly changing world dictates its own pace. This can be one of the possible explanations of the fact that social studies standards of only 15 states contain the term globalization. However, even in the 15 cases where globalization is presented, it is predominantly used as an economic concept (e.g., globalization of economy, business globalization, globalization of trade) ignoring or leaving its omnipotent and ubiquitous influence on all sides of human activity unnoticed and therefore untaught (Bottery, 2006; Waters, 1995).

The case of global citizenship is even more complex. This concept is only mentioned in the standards of two states. Although the terms related to global citizenship (e.g., citizen of the world, world citizen, cosmopolitan) existed long before the term globalization, the reasons that were presented earlier in this chapter have all prevented this concept from appearing in state standards. Standard developers and state boards of education faced a dilemma. On the one hand, life persistently required that the concept that would embrace new approaches to values education, human rights education, the role of international NGOs, or global government be presented in curricular documents, while on the other hand, traditionalism and political relativism cautioned social studies educators not to move too fast. The tragedy of September 11, which could have helped social studies educators demonstrate the deficiency of narrowly understood allegiances, was sometimes used as a pretext for unleashing ultrapatriotic hysteria with hardly predictable outcomes. It can be assumed that under these circumstances in the first years after the tragic attack, the developers of social studies standards experienced tremendous political and ideological pressures to nicely avoid the suspicious ideas of global citizenship and thus concentrate on more “patriotic” themes.

As a result, the term (and concept) global citizenship is only mentioned in the standards of two states although attempts to conceptualize civic commitments that transcend national boundaries are made in the social studies standards (civics and government standards in particular) of many other states. The use of such surrogates as “informed, responsible, and participating citizens at the…international level,” “responsible citizens and active participants in…global society,” “productive, informed citizens in a global society,” or “capable citizens in a culturally diverse and interdependent world,” although ambiguous and sometimes shift the focus, can be interpreted as an invitation to teachers to use the term citizen at their discretion. Considering the tenacity of the existing traditions and ideological dogmas, there should be little doubt about how the majority of practitioners will construe such terms. Mixed messages like these in a prescriptive curricular document eventually turn into neglect of a very important concept in the classroom.

Conversely, it should be noted that, despite their vagueness and ambiguity, the terms mentioned provide classroom teachers with at least some guidelines regarding global citizenship education, unlike the social studies standards of those states where this concept is not introduced at all in any form. This does not necessarily mean, however, that teachers ignore global or global citizenship education in those states. But it does mean that teachers lack curricular justification and support if they decide to include elements of global or global citizenship education in their curricula. It also means that, under the pressure of omnipresent and omnipotent accountability, which as many practitioners know, usually implies that what is not tested is not taught, topics related to global citizenship are buried under more “necessary” materials.

10.7 Conclusion

The changing nature of citizenship and the postmodernist approach to contextualize citizenship through discursive practices together with obscurity of globalization and its ambiguous impact on society could serve as an exceptional material for deliberations, discussions, debates, or any other active techniques in the classroom. However, in the time of marginalized social science education (VanFossen & McGrew, 2008) and pressing accountability, very few schools or teachers can afford these topics in their curricula. Absence of some type of curricular pressure either from programmatic documents or from the community discourages teachers from taking additional proactive steps to teach about globalization or global citizenship.

Carnoy (1999) noted: “How the meaning of citizenship is interpreted by a state is critical for educators, particularly in public education. Globalization redefines citizenship because it expands and stretches the boundaries of space and time and redefines individual’s relationship to them” (p. 76). The lack of the terms that define the rapidly developing phenomenon of globalization and global citizenship in state curricular documents can negatively impact an important area of civic education. Despite the existing criticism, content standards have become an inseparable part of the educational process. They are critical in curriculum development, and they also provide in-service and preservice teachers with curricular and content guidance. The nature and logic of content standards require that they should work for the future. Taking into account the dynamics of standards revision, it is crucial that their developers, in cooperation with teachers and scholars, consider and discuss changes regarding the introduction of emerging social phenomena related to rapidly globalized world.