Global citizenship education as awareness, responsibility, and participation

This chapter argues that one way to capture the essence of global citizenship education (GCE) is to think of three key elements - awareness, responsibility, and participation. Helping young people gain a better understanding of the world and the key issues facing communities at all levels, in turn, can encourage individuals to develop a greater sense of responsibility for helping to solve the world’s biggest problems and to participate in voluntary organizations working to address these problems. Fostering awareness, responsibility, and participation cuts across local and global contexts - global citizenship need not require international travel and can emerge and be sustained simply through efforts to improve the quality of life in one’s immediate communities and cultivate shared senses of belonging and mutual trust within local spheres. In this regard, the inter-related elements of awareness, responsibility, and participation remind us that global citizenship need not require any kind of formal membership status beyond nation-states - let alone a “world passport” - but, in fact, actually exists and continues to thrive in local and national political spaces even as the world draws itself closer together at faster and faster rates of speed and also amid the current resurgence of nativist political sentiments across Europe and North America.