The (Im)possibility of Global Citizenship Education in School Geography

Abstract

Despite increasing concerns about the politics of curriculum for certain ideologies of global citizenship, there is scant literature focusing on critical understandings of school geography in relation to global citizenship (GC). This article examines the complicit relationship between dominant discourses of GC and South Korean curriculum policy and world geography textbooks. The language of global others is analyzed via postcolonial and post-structural thinking. Four themes of modernity, dichotomization, discrimination, and objectification emerge. This article articulates the ways in which these link closely to Western discourses of GC by legitimating certain types of geographical thinking while obscuring others.

Keywords:

• School geography
• global citizenship
• world geography textbook
• deconstruction
• curriculum policy

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Christine Winter and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 The Blue House is located in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. It is the executive office and official residence of the South Korean President.

2 According to a conventional wisdom, knowledge, as a truth, reflects the causal facts of the world, while power is a sovereign or episodic term. Foucault (1977) denies this separation. To him, power is a system of associations that pervades the social body, becoming manifest in human interaction. As such, knowledge is already the product of power (Allen 2014). By using the hybrid term ‘power/knowledge’, Foucault describes that it determines “what will be known, rather than assuming that individual thinkers develop ideas and knowledge” (Ball 2013, 13). In his works, Foucault uncovers to what extent some knowledge is complicit with the power of certain interest groups and as such has exercised unequal power dynamics in history (Geerlings and Lundberg 2018).

3 Since 1946, the national curriculum has been revised ten times by the Ministry of Education. It legally serves as a key guideline on educational orientations, educational objectives, selection of the learning experience, organization of the learning experience and evaluation in school geography (National Curriculum Information Center 2019). In spite of a small 20-page booklet (World Geography), it becomes key criteria on which geography teachers decide what to teach and how in the classroom.

4 The world geography textbook by Wi et al. (2014) is T1; Kim et al. (2014) is T2, and Kwon et al. (2014) is T3. They were developed by three different groups of academic geographers and school geography teachers. Legally, they can be used at schools only after passing the national school textbook inspection by the Ministry of Education. The national curriculum policy is key criteria for this process. The three textbooks analyzed had been used in high schools nationwide from March 2014 to February 2019.

5 In findings, I intentionally used a certain writing strategy of shifting back and forth: i.e., placing some empirical examples from the sample documents, alongside corresponding evidences for my criticisms against the examples. The intended organization is not simply to reaffirm the latter critics’ arguments, nor any attempt to generalize my empirical cases. Rather, like other deconstructive works (Winter 2011, 2018) by showing internal illogicalities around geographical language, I thrust the reader to consider how the geography curriculum can close down Western hegemonic discourses of GC by legitimating certain types of power/geographical knowledge and obscuring others unfairly.