Global Citizenship as a Feminist Pedagogical Tool

Participating in higher education in an era of globalisation places students and faculty within a complex landscape that both compels them to engage with intercultural knowledge and simultaneously pulls them towards neoliberal configurations of education. Over the past several decades there has been a concerted effort to globalise the classroom and integrate 'the global' into pedagogical practices. Such an educational approach must be met with interpretation and negotiation as students and faculty confront global capitalism and hegemonic ideologies that reinforce hierarchies of power and domination as they play out in the academy. Within this difficult and often paradoxical context, transformative notions of global citizenship as a pedagogical tool can provide a path forward for students and teachers in the Women's Studies classroom to deepen and complicate their understanding of 'the global,' challenge normative moves to internationalise or globalise the curriculum, and work toward social change.This paper is a collaborative effort between teacher and student. Robin was a student in several of Tanya's Women's Studies classes at San Jose State University, California, and served as the SJSU Women's Studies Program intern for several years. Together, teacher and student explore notions of global citizenship and its use as a pedagogical tool to expand understandings of gender in a global context in the Women's Studies classroom. This article is rooted in the experiential knowledge that Tanya and Robin cultivated by participating in feminist learning processes. We aim to share practical strategies and outcomes of course design and implementation based on transformative notions of global citizenship, in particular Ikeda's (2001) three characteristics of a global citizen outlined below.While notions of global citizenship vary in terms of theory and practice, normative imaginings of global citizenship emphasise its link to 'national and global competitiveness, efficiency, consumption, and productive citizenship' (Roman 2003: 269). Hegemonic understandings of global citizenship in educational terms are viewed as part of a project to 'produce the right subjectivities for a new universal economic order' and as something that frames education as 'solely subordinate to the economy' (Andreotti 2010: 239). For these reasons one may be wary of using global citizenship as a pedagogical tool in the Women's Studies classroom, a place that has its roots in seeing the academy as a place for social change.However, challenges to normative configurations of global citizenship abound and include the idea of educating oneself and others based on and with the aim of peace, embodying an ethic of care, acting from motivation based on global concerns, and acknowledging global interdependence (Noddings 2005: 3-4). These characteristics align easily with established feminist pedagogical approaches. As Peggy McIntosh (2005: 25) explains, many of the qualities that are essential to global citizenship are gender-related. In other words, they are qualities that have been traditionally delegated to and rewarded in women. McIntosh (2005: 23) states that 'the idea of a global citizen [is associated] with habits of mind, heart, body, and soul that have to do with working for and preserving a network of relationship and connection across lines of difference', thereby challenging the historically exclusionary nature of citizenship and its neoliberal underpinnings for women and other marginalised groups.In the context of the classroom, global citizenship can be seen as a step towards what Daisaku Ikeda (2001: 99) calls, 'people-centered education'. It is closely linked to the notion that education should be concerned with enabling individuals and communities to develop the capacity to 'find meaning, to enhance one's own existence and contribute to the well-being of others, under any circumstance' (2001: 100). Unlike conventional notions of citizenship, global citizenship as it is used for the purposes of this article is not contingent upon nation of birth. …