Global Citizenship and Social Education: A Historical Case Study

Global Citizenship and Social Education: A Historical Case Study

This article revisits findings from a historical content analysis examining the pedagogy of Social Education, the practitioner journal for the National Council of the Social Studies. I argue that as Social Education may extend nationalist and neoliberal discourses of global citizenship education, global educators must employ critical lenses in order to disrupt these discourses that dominate teaching about the world in secondary education. Using China as a reference point, the paper focuses primarily on how Social Education works pedagogically to explain and/or extend difference, and considers the foundations of how we come to be and act as global citizens within the context of learning about China in the United States.