Chapter 6: Global Citizenship Education: Classroom Teachers’ Perspectives and Approaches

For the last several decades the focus of discussion about Global Citizenship Education (GCE) has visibly shifted from almost universal skepticism and denial to debates about the ways to incorporate GCE frameworks into curricula. Considering the importance of teacher agency in conditioning and sustaining discourses to discuss aspects of global citizenship, more attention should be paid to teachers’ conceptualization of global citizenship and their pedagogical choices to teach global citizenship as they understand it. This chapter presents an empirical study that explored teachers’ perspectives on global citizenship and their attempts to introduce elements of global citizenship in the classroom. The data were collected through interviews and observations. The study demonstrates that teachers are confused about the ideas of global citizenship and its elements that eventually make them feel insecure and uncomfortable to teach about global citizenship. At the same time, teachers in the study were actively seeking means to convey their interpretations of global citizenship and global citizenship-related concepts through the frameworks of their subjects.