Chapter 4: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism and Global Citizenship within Multimodal Digital Literacy Education

The ongoing emergence of global citizenship and flexible identities increases the possibility of a cosmopolitan world. Either within physical communities or through 21st century technologies, cosmopolitanism involves increased engagement in commercial, cultural, and political exchanges across space and time. Various groups may debate the place of cosmopolitan ideals within citizenship education, seeking a return to education that focuses on strictly national citizenship. More recently, however, we see a push toward inclusivity; a type of “both/and” citizenship education that teaches how to be citizens of the nation-state and citizens of the world (Mitchell & Parker, 2008). Interested in how this type of pedagogy is engaged in English education classrooms, we attend to well-intentioned approaches to multimodal literacy development under the framework of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship education (GCE) and address implications and recommendations for how to move beyond some of the innovative, but in some ways stagnant, approaches to integrating multimodal literacy within GCE.