Toward Glocal Citizenship: Rethinking the Traditions, Goals, and Curricular Themes of International Education

Overview & Synopsis

In a time of rising neoliberalism, assimilationism, xenophobia, economic crisis, and violence, it seems even more relevant for international education to repair polarisation and remedy conflicts and dilemmas. However, international education has been a complex, contested terminology facing conceptual confusion and ideological challenges. Based on existing scholarship on typologies of international education, this study reviewed and analysed literature and curriculum documents across nations and mapped various traditions regarding their goals, themes, and contents. The results synthesised traditions and characteristics of education for international understanding, global citizenship education, humanistic education, competency-based education, and multicultural and comparative education and further discussed the intersection and evolution of each tradition and their curricular space. This study suggested the idea of glocalisation as an ontological and epistemological change and proposed glocalisation as a conceptual and curriculum framework to reconcile ideological dilemmas of cosmopolitanism vs. nationalism and humanism vs. neoliberalism in international education.