Korean Educational Development Institute(KEDI)

The practices and challenges of global citizenship education in South Korean schools

In a world with growing uncertainties and interdependency brought on by global climate change, infectious diseases, violent Islamism and other international conflicts and transnational issues, global citizenship education has become one of the most crucial educational agenda in the international community. This is evidenced by the inclusion of global citizenship among the Sustainable Development Goals announced by the UN in 2015. The 2015 World Education Forum held in South Korea prompted policy makers to pay more attention to global citizenship education as a way to educate ‘global citizens with the wisdom of living together.’ However despite the abundance of political discourses on the topic, academia and education professionals have not agreed on a concept of global citizenship education (Rizvi, 2008, 2009; Oxley & Morris, 2013), this fact being the cause of considerable confusion and uncertainty around the notion. Therefore, most previous studies on global citizenship education focus on abstract and general discussions around the concept (Rho, 2001; Pak, 2013), or explore the issue on a national level or from a lifelong education perspective (Sung, 2010; Kang et al., 2010; Schattle, 2015).