Global Education

Global education has been gaining increasing prominence in K12 and higher education policy and curriculum in response to a world in which our geopolitical, environmental, and economic fates are increasingly interconnected. It focuses on knowledge of global issues, on understanding the world through interrelated systems, and on multiple perspectives and cultures. Young people learn about global issues from the cultural curriculum of television, movies, newspapers, and magazines; from social and religious groups, friends, and family; from their work environments and schools; and from a range of explicit formal curriculum in school. The related but distinct fields of social studies, science, literature, environmental education, multicultural education, critical theory, peace education, education for human rights, and development education all include theorists and organizations who call for globally focused curricula. Global education can both globalize a single curriculum subject area and it can also serve as an interdisciplinary integrated curriculum synthesizing elements of various curriculum subject areas such as history, economics, geography, the arts and literature, and science. To add further complexity, corporations, pundits, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations also weigh in on the question of what a global education should entail. Thus, global education includes a wide range of approaches and theoretical understandings of the political, educational, moral, imaginative, technical, and economic issues at stake.

Curriculum studies not only explores the complexity of global education as a field that can be understood through global issues, systems, and cultures, but also much more broadly explores the conceptions of knowledge, culture, power, and citizenship in use in various global education curriculum discourses—the different imaginaries that can be found in curriculum. Further, global curriculum is understood to include not just theories and the explicit and formal curriculum, but also the implicit messages of the hidden and null curriculum and the broadly available cultural curriculum.

Global education in this current era of urgency and contentment includes diverse curricula that can be categorized into at least seven general types. Most typical are approaches that do not question unequal global power relations but explore culture as a monolithic and even as a [Page 409]commodity or a tool. These include disciplinary global education, pluralistic global education, and neoliberal global education. In contrast, liberal cosmopolitan global education, environmental global education, critical global education, and peace-oriented global education all offer critiques of global power and transnational capitalism and more exploratory and poststructural ideas about culture. As is detailed below, these approaches have very different origins and some distinctive aims (see Table 1), and they developed with different justifications and core concepts as is detailed below.