Chapter 4: The C3 Framework and Representation of Global Citizenship in State Standards

Social studies education professionals agree that citizenship education is the primary purpose of social studies instruction. This also includes global and international aspects of citizenship education (National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS], 2001). Due to the schools’ potential to be aligned with transnational efforts in promoting global civility (Reimers, 2006) and despite a number of obstacles, some institutional, some subjective, global citizenship education (GCE) is gaining ground in the U.S. classrooms (Gaudelli, 2016; Harshman, 2015; Rapoport, 2015). Nonetheless, many practitioners remain mostly unaware of the content, purposes, and methods of GCE (Gallavan, 2008; Merryfield, 2000). Overall passive and in many cases skeptical attitudes to global citizenship and related concepts eventually have resulted in neglect of or ignoring GCE in many U.S. schools. The recent call for greater emphasis on global perspective and global studies in the social studies classroom (NCSS, 2016) is reflective of the genuine concern among scholars and classroom teachers. The growing amount of research, particularly comparative research, demonstrates that the development of democratic understanding needs to be expanded to encompass attention to global issues, controversial issues, human rights violation, problems in multicultural societies not only in national but also in global and international settings and contexts (Hahn, 1998; Myers, 2016). Furthermore, because the U.S. 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). Recent almost universal exclusion of the concept of global citizenship from state standards (Rapoport, 2009) is also explained as an echo of the American exceptionalism, when curriculum developers follow traditionalist and nativist politicians who oppose to teach U.S. students responsibility for people in other parts of the world (Beltramo & Dutcheon, 2013).