Global citizenship education in Europe: Taking up the (hum)Man in teacher education in England

Abstract

This article explores possibilities for challenging liberal humanism, often expressed through cosmopolitanism, in global citizenship education (GCE) in European contexts, specifically England. Thinking with Sylvia Wynter’s genealogy of the creation and universal imposition of Man as the dominant descriptive statement for the human and Walter Mignolo’s critique of European cosmopolitanism, our research aimed to (1) understand how Euro-western liberal descriptions of humanity account for harmful legacies in GCE and (2) explore the possibilities offered from within this dominant imaginary to work against it and push it towards thinking and doing GCE otherwise. To do this, we “plugged in” Wynter’s concepts of Man1 (the rational subject of the state) and Man2 (the [neo]liberal subject of the nation) to data collected from interviews with pre-service secondary school teachers in the humanities (English, modern foreign language, and history). Through this exercise we noticed discursive mechanisms by which Man sustains liberal humanism across the different disciplines and frames GCE largely through cosmopolitan notions of responsibility towards distant others and cultural competence. Nevertheless, we found the epistemic tools inherited from Man1 and traditionally used in the humanities can offer a starting point for different, albeit limited, engagements in GCE. These tools can be productively used to look for and interrogate tensions and contradictions within the dominant imaginary of Man and learn from perspectives and expressions of the human outside of its dominant descriptive statement. We conclude that Wynter’s “embattled humanism” offers a pedagogical tool for GCE in teacher education and draw implications for further research.