Chapter 14: Global Citizenship Education: Learning to Be a Part of a World Community

On a Tuesday afternoon, the earth shakes in Haiti. Within hours, images of flattened buildings and buried bodies are broadcast around the world. Relief agencies and governments scramble to respond effectively in the absence of a working infrastructure. Adults and children in distant countries express a range of responses: a desire to help; compassion for the suffering of the Haitian people whose lives were broken by the earthquake; frustration, even anger about the economic/social conditions that enabled such devastation; concern about the long-term development of a country that has struggled for more than 2 centuries with foreign intervention and weak governance.