The Silences of Global Citizenship Education: A Concept Fit for Purpose?

Abstract: This article proposes that incorporation of global citizenship education (GCE) into higher education in Ireland has been a double-edged sword.  GCE, previously known as development education (DE) is now included as a core element of initial teacher education (ITE); this recognition has been widely hailed as a positive step.  It has placed GCE firmly on the map of teacher preparation programmes.  However, this article argues that absorption of DE into the academy as ‘GCE’ may have contributed to diluting its critical edge.  Nowhere has this been clearer than in the context of the war on Gaza.  When GCE educators in the higher education sector were most needed to shed light on historical contexts to this conflict, there was mostly silence.  When GCE educators were most needed to provide safe spaces for learning, there was mainly absence.

This article questions the place of GCE in the formal sector, specifically in ITE.  It examines some paradoxes and contradictions within the field, such as the growing discourse around decoloniality against a lack of deep understanding about what such a concept might mean in theory and praxis.  It discusses the confused messages which these contradictions and paradoxes must present to students.  It also points to shafts of light in the sector, with pushback against de-politicisation and deradicalisation becoming more evident in recent months, as the voices of global citizenship educators in ITE have become stronger and more focused in speaking out about genocide, scholasticide and epistimicide in Gaza.

Key words: Global Citizenship Education; Initial Teacher Education; War on Gaza; Decoloniality; The Development and Intercultural Education (DICE) Project.

Introduction

This article proposes that the relatively recent incorporation of development education into higher education in Ireland as global citizenship education (GCE) has been a double-edged sword.  On the one hand it has given recognition to a field that typically occupied the borderlands of formal education and has brought it into mainstream curricula and programmes.  The inclusion of GCE as a core element of initial teacher education (ITE) by the Teaching Council in 2020, for example, was widely hailed as a positive step.  It placed GCE firmly on the map of teacher preparation programmes, with the result that every student teacher in the country now attends modules focused on equity and justice.  The Teaching Council states that GCE ‘aims to empower learners of all ages to assume active roles, both locally and globally, in building more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive and secure societies’ (Teaching Council, 2020: 4), and that it includes ‘Education for Sustainable Development; Wellbeing (personal and community); Social Justice, Interculturalism’ (Ibid.: 14).  GCE is now a central element of teacher education in Ireland, with an examination of social justice, equity, and human rights at the core of student learning.

However, rather than unequivocally celebrating this inclusion, this article proposes that the mainstreaming of development education into higher education as GCE has continued a process of diluting its radical edge and may in fact have accelerated its neutralising as a questioning and critical force in Irish education.  Consequently, it is essential that those of us active in the higher education sector interrogate our work and question any gaps between our purported global justice stance and the realities of the messages we communicate (or not) in our praxis.  In 2011, Issue 12 of this journal was devoted to the theme of the ‘professionalisation and deradicalisation of development education’, with authors pointing to the de-politicisation of the field at that time due to a myriad of factors within the neoliberal political project, and the potential consequences of this process.  Some of the questions that were then asked of development education are particularly relevant today, almost fourteen years later, now that GCE has become formally adopted ‘as the operational context for sector activities’ (Cannon, 2023: 13) and is now the dominant discourse in education, including in ITE.  The questions that need to be asked include: what has the ‘mainstreaming’ of GCE within education meant for the radical origins of the field?  Has it been ‘de-clawed’ (Bryan, 2011), in other words, stripped of its original Freirean development education foundations?  What are the implications of retaining a politically detached stance on crucial issues that the sector is ideally positioned to respond to (Ibid.)?

Silences and absences

This latter question is especially pertinent in the light of the ongoing war on Gaza, arguably the most pressing global justice issue of our time.  Nowhere has the neutralising and de-politicising of GCE in higher education been clearer than in institutional silences around Gaza, particularly in the weeks after 7 October 2023.  At a time when global citizenship educators were most needed to shed light on historical contexts for the conflict, there was silence.  When global educators were needed to provide safe spaces for learning and discussion, there were absences.  These silences and absences were not neutral, nor were they benign in their impact.  On 25 December 2023, Reverend Munther Isaac stated in his Christmas message from Palestine (Isaac, 2023):

“We are tormented by the silence of the world…. The hypocrisy and racism of the western world is transparent and appalling… To our European friends, I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again”.

2024 saw increased numbers of people speaking out about the war on Gaza, with student protests in particular gathering momentum and affecting change.  Likewise, individual staff members, particularly those in Academics for Palestine (2024a), a network of academics ‘set up to help create awareness about issues relating to higher education in Palestine and to build the campaign in Ireland for the academic boycott of Israel’, were active across mainstream and social media.  However, at an institutional level there was mostly ‘neutrality’, in other words, silence.  This article proposes that, given the muted responses to the war on Gaza in higher education, rather than celebrating the mainstreaming of GCE, we should be gravely concerned.  Why did global citizenship educators not lead the way to ‘educate, educate, educate’, as Fatin Al-Tamimi, chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) urged us to do at a Centre for Global Education / Comhlámh webinar in February 2024 (CGE and Comhlámh, 2024).  Is the concept and practice of GCE fit for purpose in the light of its slow and belated response to paving the way for students and staff in higher education institutes (HEIs) to learn about the genocide, scholasticide and epistimicide in Gaza (International Court of Justice, 2024)?  If the mainstreaming of GCE is indeed at the root of this problem, can the field ever recover from this body-blow to its credibility: of criticality (within certain limits), human rights (conditional on geography), decoloniality (as an abstraction rather than as meaningful action)?  Has GCE in HEIs already and permanently severed its connection to its critical and radical past? 

The remainder of this article questions the place of GCE in the higher education sector, specifically in ITE.  It examines some of the paradoxes and contradictions within the field, such as a growing discourse around decoloniality against a lack of deep understanding about what such a concept might mean in theory and in praxis.  It ponders the confused messages which these contradictions and paradoxes must present to students.  It also points to shafts of light in the sector, with pushback against de-politicisation and deradicalisation becoming more evident in recent months, as the voices of global citizenship educators in ITE have become stronger, more united and more focused.  These signs offer hope that global justice education can work to counter official policies of neutrality that have been the evident in the majority of HEIs in Ireland.  It offers hope that GCE can add its voice to civil society outrage in the face of a genocide that in March 2024 had already claimed the deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians, including over 13,000 children, with 80 per cent of the population forcibly displaced: ‘The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come’ (Albanese, 2024: 1).

This article is written from the perspective of my experience in primary ITE in Ireland, where I have worked for twenty years.  During that time, I have been closely involved with the Development Education and Intercultural Education (DICE) Project (DICE, 2024), funded by Irish Aid at the Department of Foreign Affairs, which contributes towards ‘DICE lecturing’ posts in the four State-funded primary ITE sites: Marino Institute of Education, Dublin City University Institute of Education, Mary Immaculate College, and the Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education in Maynooth University.  These lecturing posts constitute the DICE network.  Over the last two decades I have been DICE project coordinator, a member of the management committee, and most recently a DICE lecturer.

It is important to state that I deplore the Hamas killings of 7 October 2023 and am not a supporter of Hamas.  My call for global citizenship educators to raise awareness about the war on Gaza is not to condone the October atrocity; rather it is to emphasise the need to educate about global power structures that have enabled genocide to take place in full view of the world, the disproportionality of the Israeli response, the devastating impact of collective punishment on a captive population, and the historical context that lies behind the occupation of Palestine.  Furthermore, the concept of academic freedom is at the core of the views put forward in this article, drawing from Hodgins and Mannix-McNamara (2021: 12), who state that academic freedom can be understood as:

“the free exchange of ideas through the rights of scholars to pursue research and teaching outside the control of powerful interest groups, including the freedom to pursue subjects based on intellectual interest, without control or censorship”.

Finally, although I welcome the recognition of GCE as a core element of ITE because it ensures that all student teachers receive input on equity and justice in the form of mandatory modules and some specialist electives, the stance that I hold in relation to GCE is largely a ‘sceptical’ one (Cannon, 2023).  I see GCE as ‘a depoliticised concept which lacks the critical edge needed to achieve the kinds of changes necessary in our current global context, and is… supportive of existing dominant systems, such as neoliberalism and Eurocentricity’ (Ibid.: 20).  In fact, the concept that I believe comes closest to capturing the radical edge required for this work is ‘global justice education’, which in a 2020 publication was described as combining ‘“global learning” with “social justice education”, in that it actively seeks to highlight intersectionalities between education about the wider world… with a critical intercultural education in which race is foregrounded and analysed’ (O’Toole, Joseph and Nyaluke, 2020: 11) and which is carried out through a critical and decolonial theoretical lens.

However, this is not simply a re-run of the adjectival debate; the concern is about the potential impact on critical education about global justice matters now that GCE has become part of the mainstream.  Regardless of the conceptual language used, or whether critical voices have been muted or muzzled, the important issue is that change must take place to ensure the credibility of the work in the future.  Individual global citizenship educators must seek out allies and must move forward together in educating about the genocide, epistemicide and scholasticide of the Palestinian people, along with educating about other injustices across the world.  The only way to do this is through the solidarity of networking and by taking an interrogative lens to praxis.

Interrogating praxis

Starting with the latter, i.e. interrogating praxis, an irony of GCE’s largely muted response to the genocide in Gaza has been the increased discourse around decoloniality in HEIs in Ireland in recent years.  Using the term decoloniality in mainstream academia could in itself be perceived as a contradiction in terms.  The body of work underpinning decoloniality draws from the writings of radical scholars; for example, Quijano (2007), Mignolo (2000, 2018), and Walsh (2018), beginning in South America in the 1990s and since then taken up by activists and academics around the world.  At its core is a transformative agenda.  As Walsh states:

“It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and Western modernity” (2018: 17).

The ‘decolonial turn’ thus requires a great deal more than simply reviewing and amending module reading lists.  On overwhelmingly white and settled campuses in Ireland, it calls upon educators to dive deeply into their positionality and praxis; it requires them to begin the work of dismantling their own white privilege and to develop their racial literacy (McGuirk, 2024).  It necessitates educators to call out silences and absences and to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in the face of their potential annihilation within a project of settler colonialism.  At the very least it requires a focus on Palestine in educational content.  Yet the widespread use of the concept of decoloniality in higher education suggests that its transformative underpinnings and potential have become blurred and muffled as it journeys more widely into the neoliberal HEI.  The ‘undoing’ that Walsh refers to, above, is in danger of being completely overlooked.  Indeed, the observations of Fúnez-Flores, Díaz Beltran and Jupp (2022: 3) are particularly prescient; they state that ‘the modern/colonial structure of the neoliberal academy will commodify and reproduce even that which is intended to be subversive and unsettling’.  Attempting to dismantle the master’s house with tools that have been co-opted by the master and re-shaped into blunter instruments will come to naught (Lorde, 1984).  Discussions about decoloniality, in a context of silence about genocide, are empty and meaningless, and ultimately serve to negate the concept itself and render it devoid of meaning.

This article is being written against the backdrop of the Irish government’s recent recognition, along with Norway and Spain, of the State of Palestine, joining another 143 countries who also recognise Palestine.  Now that this move has taken place, and as support for Palestine has itself become ‘mainstreamed’, campuses will hopefully become more favourable spaces for educating about the issues.  However, the silences of the last academic year will leave their mark, not least on students.  Many campuses have hung flags and banners or held vigils in solidarity with people in conflict situations, including the war in Ukraine.  When war began in Gaza in late 2023 there were no flags or banners or vigils.  The message about the relative valuing of human life was communicated very clearly.

In my teaching, students had an opportunity to learn about Palestine in GCE lectures through the input of Trócaire development education officers who shared materials from the Tree of Justice on the Trócaire website, including showing the film: Exploring Global Justice, which contains a segment on Palestine (Trócaire, 2023).   Student teachers also asked for lecturer guidance with placement concerns; if they had children from Palestine in their classes, many of them were unsure how to answer any questions they might be asked.  Attempts at ‘neutrality’ across HEI campuses in Ireland may have eschewed the real-life issues taking place in the world outside, but student teachers did not have the luxury of turning a blind eye.

The DICE Project

When I began working with DICE in 2004, there was an advisory committee composed of representatives from the non-formal sector, including non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs), alongside representatives from the formal sector (there was also a management committee for day-to-day matters, which was located in the host college).  While there were tensions and misunderstandings at times on the advisory committee, most of that was creative tension; there were opportunities to look at matters from fresh perspectives and to work jointly on global justice initiatives and on designing classroom materials.  The advisory committee was disbanded in the late 2000s, to be replaced by a management committee of senior academics in the ITE sites, with an independent chair.  That structure was then disbanded in 2020 and the heads of the colleges/schools of teacher education became the management committee for the project.  Links with the NGDO sector have thus become rather more tenuous over the years and are now in the remit of individual lecturers rather than being formalised through project structures.  From the vantage point of two decades of involvement, I can acknowledge the benefits that the current structure affords: DICE now has formal recognition as a key component of ITE and is no longer on the margins of higher education.  This is consolidated by the inclusion of GCE in the Céim document of 2020 (Teaching Council, 2020), recognising the central role of education about social justice and equity.  However, there are also drawbacks.  As the mainstreaming of GCE is more or less complete, it is plausible that this process has contributed to its commodification and accelerated its de-politicisation.

A potential hope for GCE, including and especially the DICE Project, is to return it to the criticality of its past through increased collaboration with NGDOs, and through amplifying the voices and work of colleagues in and from the global South.  DICE needs to try to maintain its position as a key component of ITE, whilst returning to the borderlands of its origins in order to build on and consolidate its critical edge.  This requires living with the tension of simultaneously holding a number of paradoxes and contradictions, such as being ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the academy.  This is a challenging proposition, yet I believe it is essential to the credibility and ongoing work of the project.  The DICE Project issued statements of solidarity with Gaza on three occasions in April 2024, and an online declaration on social media in May 2024.  Two statements were issued at continuing professional development (CPD) seminars on anti-racism in ITE, held at Maynooth University and DCU (McGuirk and Titley, 2024), followed by an event to mark twenty years of the DICE Project, held in April 2024 in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Iveagh House, Dublin.  At this event, Aoife Titley, DICE lecturer at Maynooth University, and a former DICE coordinator, read a statement of solidarity with Gaza.  It is included here in full (Titley, 2024, on behalf of DICE lecturer network), because it captures the spirit of comradeship and solidarity that GCE needs to espouse, and because it brings critical voices into the heart of the formal sector:

“So, when we think of our values, we think of that intersection point of the personal, the professional and the political.  And that brings us to an issue that is very close to the heart of the DICE network at the moment.

As we sit in this beautiful ballroom in Iveagh House this evening, in our well-funded positions, it is hard not to recognise that the privilege and safety we have in our own teaching and learning institutions does not ring true for our Palestinian colleagues, who are currently enduring genocide, epistemicide and scholasticide.

It is important to acknowledge, that at this stage, every single university campus in Gaza has been partially or totally destroyed by Israel’s bombardment from the air and controlled explosions from the ground.  This deliberate targeting of Gaza’s educational infrastructure is an attack on the creation of knowledge and the cultural heritage of the country and will have educational ramifications for generations to come.

As the rules of modern warfare are being re-written in front of our eyes, and in the words of United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, as Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children (United Nations, 2023), it is a timely reminder for those of us working in global education, why we do the work that we do.  GCE gives us the tools to make sense of the world.  To bring the world into our classrooms and to support our learners in navigating a new global reality rife with crises and complexities.  We agree with Academics for Palestine when they say that the war in Palestine is a defining moral issue of our time (Academics for Palestine, 2024b).  And for so many of our institutions and universities to be effectively silent on this, it makes us even more grateful to have this GCE space where we can meaningfully explore some of the themes of GCE in this context, such as interdependence, critical reflection and informed action.  Solidarity is a verb”.

Moving forward

On 22 May 2024, Caoimhe de Barra, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Irish development agency Trócaire, stated that while Ireland’s recognition of Palestine is very welcome, ‘it will only serve as a symbolic gesture unless it is accompanied by decisive action by Ireland and other member states to help Palestinians realise this right to self-determination’ (Trócaire, 2024).   She reiterated the need for a permanent ceasefire: ‘this is critical to end the untold misery, death and suffering that hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians have endured for over seven months’ (Ibid.).

Just as the Irish government’s recognition of the State of Palestine is not a final destination, nor is DICE’s public declaration of solidarity.  Further action needs to be taken in the next academic year to educate colleagues and students about the issues at hand.  Global justice education, and specifically DICE in the ITE sector, has a responsibility to illuminate the dark spaces of oppression and injustice.  It is, therefore, worth considering a return to the ‘advisory group’ model of the 2000s, where educators and activists in the non-formal and formal sectors could come together to share ideas on practice.  Such a group could run concurrently with the existing management structure.  The expertise of colleagues in NGDOs could inform the work of the DICE network, and vice versa; groups of allies could support each other’s endeavours.  There is strength in numbers.  Also, DICE needs to adopt a ‘Janus’-type approach to its activity; in other words, to hold its place in the mainstream of the formal sector but to keep part of its gaze permanently and critically focused on the frontline of global justice education.  Together with colleagues in the NGDO sector, DICE needs to accelerate its work in bringing an interrogative lens to global crises, including Gaza, so that it can continue to ‘educate, educate, educate’.

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Barbara O’Toole is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Marino Institute of Education (MIE) in Dublin, where she teaches global citizenship education (GCE) on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  She was founder of the Master in Education Studies: Intercultural Education at MIE.  She is co-editor (with Ebun Joseph and David Nyaluke) of Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools: Critical Approaches to Global Justice Education (Routledge, 2020).  Her research interests are in critical interculturalism, decolonial studies, linguistic diversity and GCE.  Barbara was a member of the DICE lecturer network until August 2024.