By: Jillian M. Kneeland, member, NCTE’s Committee on Global Citizenship
“Global citizenship goes way deeper than that. It goes into who you are as a person and where you want to be and, you know, how you progress as yourself and grow into yourself.”
—Sunflower, 11th grade student, Canal Academy
The sun beat down, cutting through the thick presence of humidity in the air to induce soft but noticeable beads of sweat that glistened on my forehead as I completed the short walk from the parking lot to the entrance of Canal Academy (CA).
To my back was the Panama Canal, known as the world’s “eighth wonder,” living up to its nickname with a radiation of bright, blue water banked by lush green and topped with sea vessels overflowing with diversely colored shipping containers. Ahead of me were the doors to the high school building, where dark-blue uniformed students funneled past me, hustling forward to get to class on time.
As a literacy scholar and forever English teacher, I was returning to the school I had taught at before leaving to pursue my doctorate and to collaborate with a former colleague and friend to conduct my dissertation research. I had decided to explore global citizenship education (GCE) as a concept for my research.
Like many schools, Canal Academy is an American curriculum international school ideologically committed to global citizenship in its mission and value statement. While incorporating GCE in the mission and vision statements of a school might help establish a broader school culture of inclusivity and empathy, these statements often have little effect, if any, on the everyday interactions of educating and learning between teachers and students. It is through curriculum and instruction that values and dispositions such as those informing global citizenship might be considered with more intention. The questions remained: What is global citizenship, who decides, and can it mean more than one thing?
I realized one place to explore such an interaction was in the literacy classroom, a space where shared discourse, written reflection, and the reading and discussion of literature might leverage GCE as more intimately connected to student experience and wisdom. Considering the premise in literacy research that advocates for the transformative power of story (Ching 2005; Connors & Rish 2015; Ginsberg & Glenn 2020), I envisioned the secondary literacy classroom as holding the potential to invite students to explore their relationship to global citizenship by drawing on their experiential wisdom (i.e., the stories of themselves) through their reading of literature (i.e., the stories of others).
I spent seven weeks attending class meetings at Canal Academy in the spring of 2025 as a classroom observer, at once collecting data as a researcher and participating in the experience as a co-teacher and thought partner with the teacher and the students. As teacher collaborators, we drew from Andreotti’s 2006 recommendations for moving GCE from the “soft” to the “critical.” We found that students resisted soft GCE, interrogated the ways we tried to make global citizenship education more critical, and embraced multimodal literacy assessments in how they encouraged self-expression and inclusion. To understand what global citizenship means to students, researchers and educators must recognize that students do not passively receive one specific narrative of global citizenship; rather, they actively resist and reshape these narratives in ways that reflect their lived experiences.
The findings revealed that GCE cannot be a static, pre-defined framework imposed on students, but must instead emerge from their negotiations of values, culture, and representation. Through discussions, debates, and personal reflections, students questioned the very premise of global citizenship, pushing beyond institutional framings to consider how race, privilege, and belonging shape one’s ability to participate globally. Their critical inquiries shed light on the tensions between the institutional ideal of a neutral global citizen and their own national affiliations.
I can recommend Andreotti’s framework to guide teachers in their curricular design when wanting to explicitly include more critical GCE in their classrooms. Guided by suggestions from the framework, students focused on themselves and their personal relationships with globality through daily conversations to reveal that global citizenship was not a fixed, universal concept, but rather a diverse and evolving practice of questioning, listening, and reflecting. A dialogic space, self-selection of texts, and community-designed, multimodal assessments cultivated in students’ feelings of inclusion in their learning and challenged some of their dominant perceptions of difference to make room for us to learn from their critical wonderings. A critical framework may support teachers, educational researchers, and school communities by initiating dialogue about the tensions that exist between student voices and the presumptions of institutional and conceptual GCE.
Jillian is a recent graduate of an Education and Literacy Studies PhD program at the University of Colorado, Boulder School of Education. She is an instructor and field coach in the Secondary Humanities teacher education program, and she taught secondary English for many years at international schools, including in the UK, Turkey, and Panama.
The Committee on Global Citizenship works to identify and address issues of broad concern to NCTE members interested in promoting global citizenship and connections across global contexts within the Council and within members’ teaching contexts.
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.