Editorial Introduction

Ali A. Abdi and Diane Leard

University of Alberta

The role of education in preserving the rights of people should be seen as fundamental to the constitution of any learning programs that either aim for, or achieve, a more inclusive social development program in all zones of our world. It is with this in mind that citizenship education becomes an important prospect, not only in citizens critically ascertaining their rights and responsibilities in social or state-society locations, but as well in fully exercising those rights and responsibilities, with one main objective being the overall well­being of individuals and groups in specific tempo-spatial realities and relationships. Indeed, as should be understood, all education can be described as citizenship education. It is based on our corresponding understanding, therefore, that we undertook the organization of the international conference Educating for Human Rights and Global Citizenship, where we invited educators, students, and other theorists and practitioners to share with us their analyses and criticisms of the role of education in achieving a global project of active citizenship and human rights. The five articles in this issue of the journal were among the papers presented at that conference, and they were chosen, along with others that are being published in other venues, based on their cogency of the specialized perspectives (vis-à-vis where we are today) in achieving a comprehensive project of educating for human rights and global citizenship.

As things are today in our world, the global citizenship and human rights project is at best fractured and at worst missing from the lives of so many people. In fact despite the claims of democratic citizenship in many zones of the globe, the myriad claims in democratic development may actually yield a world platform where more are subjects of some sort of a governing consortium than real citizens whose basic rights are inviolable and institutionally safeguarded. This is despite the many experiments of state and societal building that have been undertaken in the past 200 years. Even the coercively enduring Westphalian system that has been with us for over 600 years does not seem to guarantee—that is, in more spaces than otherwise—not much more than the cyclical voting circuses that by and large assure the rotating ascendancy of the rule of the elite, who as Ankie Hoogvelt reminded us, have a globally connected agenda that effectively designs and sustains the international status quo. Proactively to relaunch the important project of educating for human rights and global citizenship, therefore, the five articles focus on thematically connected but descriptively and analytically diverse areas of work, which all aim to analyze critically the locations as well as the intersections of education, citizenship, and social well-being.

In the first article, Lynette Shultz looks at the various versions of global education that may be operationalized to achieve global citizenship. In reviewing the literature, she locates “links between citizenship and globalization” complemented by contravening discussions and perspectives that inform citizenship around and within the platforms of a globalized neoliberal context. In discussing these situations and in her attempt to achieve a comparative perspective of three global education policies and their citizenship education possibilities, Shultz frames her analysis around three contrasting approaches to globalization that should inform more deeply about the situation. In the second article, Jennifer Tupper examines the liberal understanding of citizenship as what is found in the social studies curricula in public spaces of learning. Tupper deploys what she terms care-less citizenship as a way of exposing the cluster of deeply entrenched inequities that dot our world. In addition, she speaks about schooling as an important site that actually sustains the rhetoric of citizenship without necessarily changing the situation for the marginalized. As opposed to care-less citizenship, Tupper suggests a more inclusive understanding of citizenship as practically and genuinely focusing on the real and tangible rights of people.

In the third article, Dip Kapoor focuses on how, despite the unconstitutionality of all forms of caste-determined discrimination, gendered, caste-based discriminatory realities still persist in rural India, and looks at the presence of myriad problems that work against legally preventing these types of human rights violations in the world’s most populous democracy. In examining these issues, he draws on the more than a decade-long experiences of a Canadian non-governmental organization that has been involved in collaborative educational and social development projects with peoples from the country’s oppressed lower castes. In dealing with these “gendered caste atrocities” from a human rights-based education, Kapoor notes how there may be cultural and political issues that could limit the desired outcomes, which would speak about creating effective social equity platforms that safeguard the rights of all people irrespective of their ascribed social status. In the fourth article, Ali A. Abdi and the late Lee Ellis look at problems of educational and by extension, social development in the central African country of Zambia with some references to the overall Sub-Saharan African situation. Here some of the main culprits include the elitist, exclusionary policies of the ruling class, the coercive “development” policies of the West, and related forces of globalization. To counterweigh the negative issues discussed in the article, the authors suggest new possibilities of educational realigning that would give citizens their rightful place not only in the national context of Zambia, but also vis-à-vis the rest of the world in the still globalizing spaces of people’s lives. Abdi and Ellis also discuss the work of an important Zambian civil society association called Women for Change, whose work aims to alleviate the myriad livelihood problems facing women and others in the country.

In the fifth and final article, Edward Shizha focuses on the need to incorporate indigenous knowledge into the primary-level science education curriculum in Zimbabwe. As he notes, actual policies of science education and teaching (in all levels of schooling) are mostly, if not exclusively, responsive to Western cultural definitions and imperatives, which would not represent either the historico-social realities or the community-based needs of the people. To analyze and critically locate these issues, he interviews teachers who speak about the difficulties they encounter in their attempts to include some aspects of indigenous knowledge into the science curriculum. With many educators exhibiting negative attitudes toward indigenous knowledge, though, the case for more inclusive learning possibilities may be difficult, and it is based on these and related institutional and systemic realities that Shizha suggests select ways the curriculum could be changed so as to achieve culturally relevant education in Zimbabwean schools. Together the five articles address issues that are all relevant to strengthening active citizenship spaces in our world, and although the topics covered are divergent in how they directly or indirectly deal with the establishment of the more inclusive forums of the case, it should be clear that harnessing all or even partial pointers of the recommendations encoded in these works will definitely enhance the citizenship claims and basic rights of the concerned.

Copyright © AJER, the Faculty of Education, and the University of Alberta, 2007.
Last revised: November 20, 2007

Designed by G.H. Buck