Preparing for life in the global village: producing global citizen subjects in UK schools

Abstract

The practice of educating young people for global citizenship has garnered a great deal of attention in recent years. Whilst much of the research in this field has focused on pedagogical or curriculum matters, a small body of work has attempted to explore it in a broader sense: viewing it as a process involving the production of global citizen subjectivity. This paper adds to this growing body of research by offering a detailed discursive analysis of empirical data generated in fieldwork in two UK schools. Global travel will be identified as a key practice which was utilised by the students in these schools and it will be used as an interpretive lens through which to further explore their production of successful, mobile, global citizen subjectivities. The paper will argue that this was a dynamic process: negotiated across multiple spaces and through a range of complex and contradictory images and representations. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the practice of school travel and how it might effectively be focused upon in future research.