Development education and the scandal of the human: the grammar of silence and erasure

Abstract

A common aim of global citizenship education (hereafter GCE) is to enable students to focus on shared contemporary matters of significant global concern. Despite such an important aim, we argue that the dominant assumption of the global citizen as White, Western and liberal (perceived as universal) within global citizenship education produces harmful silences and erasures which marginalise the Other. This article is presented in four sections. We begin by articulating some of the silences and erasures that are enacted by curricula and policy practices of GCE by adopting a social cartography (Paulston, 2009) as a heuristic to map various orientations to global citizenship education. In doing so, we highlight its inherent silences, tensions and contradictions. A second section addresses some of the key sites in which mainstream approaches to GCE enact silences and absences by their sole focus on soft, rather than critical, approaches to global citizenship education (Andreotti, 2006), where the liberal subject is regarded as the global citizen with a consequent muting of the experience of the Other. In the third section, we draw on Wynter’s work on the historicisation of what it means to be human. Wynter’s concept of ‘Man’ (2003), as a genre of being human (White, Western and Imperial), enables us to excavate violence regarding other modes of being human within global citizenship curricula practices and discourses. A final section unpacks some of the ways in which we, as three teacher educators, respond to these silences and erasures in global citizenship curricula practices and policies.