This book promotes the development of nontraditional literacies in adult education, especially as these critical literacies relate to global citizenship, equity, and social justice. As this edited collection argues, a rapidly changing global environment and proliferation of new media technologies have greatly expanded the kinds of literacies that one requires in order to be an engaged global citizen. It is imperative for adult educators and learners to understand systems, organizations, and relationships that influence our lives as citizens of the world. By compiling a comprehensive list of foundational, sociocultural, technological and informational, psychosocial and environmental, and social justice literacies, this volume offers readers theoretical foundations, practical strategies, and additional resources.

This book brings together key perspectives from scholars in the Global South and Global North to illustrate diverse ways in which the UN’s Global Citizenship Education (GCED) agenda can promote social justice and be used as a vehicle for negotiating and learning about diverse and shared objectives in education and the global public sphere. Recognizing the historical function of education as a prominent public sphere site, this book addresses questions around how forms of global education can serve as public sphere sites in various contexts today and in the future. Specifically, it questions established notions of education and proposes new interpretations of the relationship between practices of education and the public sphere to meet the needs of our contemporary turbulent era and a post-2020 world. By offering conceptual analyses, examples of policy and educational practices which promote global learning, democratic citizenship, common good, and perspective-taking, the text offers new critical understandings of how GCED can contribute to the public responsibilities and roles of education. Chapters consider examples such as non-formal adult education at the Mexico–US border, teachers’ responsibilities in Japan and Finland, developments in education policy and practices in Brazil, civic religious teachings in Canada, online learning in the United States and China, and support to the participation of women in higher education in Pakistan. Given its unique approach, and the range of case studies it brings together, this book is a timely addition to the literature on education in the global public sphere. It will prove to be an invaluable resource for scholars working at the intersections of global education and transnational education policies, and for teachers involved in global education.

Globalization is changing what citizens need to know and be able to do by interrupting the assumption that the actions of citizens only take place within national borders. If our neighborhoods and nations are affecting and being affected by the world, then our political consciousness must be worldminded. The outcomes of globalization have led educators to rethink what students need to learn and be able to do as citizens in a globally connected world. This volume focuses on research that examines how K-12 teachers and students are currently addressing the challenge of becoming citizens in a globally interconnected world. Although there is an extensive body of literature on citizenship education within national contexts and a growing literature on global education, this volume offers research on the work educators are doing across multiple countries to bring the two fields together to develop global citizens.

This set of essays critically analyze global citizenship by bringing together leading ideas about citizenship and the commons in this time that both needs and resists a global perspective on issues and relations. Education plays a significant role in how we come to address these issues and this volume will contribute to ensuring that equity, global citizenship, and the common wealth provide platforms from which we might engage in transformational, collective work. The authors address the global significance of debates and struggles about belonging and abjection, solidarity and rejection, identification and othering, as well as love and hate. Global citizenship, as a concept and a practice, is now being met with a dangerous call for insularism and a protracted ethno-nationalism based on global economic imperialism, movements for white supremacy and miscegenation, various forms of religious extremism, and identity politics, but which antithetically, also comes from the anti-globalization movement focused on building strong, sustainable communities. We see a taming of citizens that contributes to the taming of what we understand as the public sphere and the commons, the places of cultural, natural, and intellectual resources that are shared and not privately owned. The work of global citizenship education is distinguishable from the processes of a deadly globalization or destruction of the world that responds to the interlocking issues that make life on the planet precarious for human and non-humans everywhere (albeit an unequal precarity). This book is an invitation into a conversation that explores and makes visible some of the hidden chasms of oppression and inequity in the world. It is meant to provoke both argument and activism as we work to secure common spaces that are broadly life-sustaining. Contributors are: Ali A. Abdi, Sung Kyung Ahn, Chouaib El Bouhali, Xochilt Hernández, Carrie Karsgaard, Marlene McKay, Michael O’Sullivan, Christina Palech, Karen Pashby, Karen J. Pheasant-Neganigwane, Thashika Pillay, Ashley Rerrie, Grace J. Rwiza, Toni Samek, Lynette Shultz, Harry Smaller, Crain Soudien, Derek Tannis, and Irene Friesen Wolfstone.

The worldwide appearance and expression of adult education and lifelong learning have changed significantly during the past 20 years. This book explores recent changes in their related national and international policies, how they intersect with developments in higher education and how they may contribute to debates on citizenship and democracy.

This book holds two main concepts: citizenship and adult education, and presents a diverse scope of ideas and experiences from different countries and perspectives in a rich indication to edify liberating practices and researches.