Learning to Be a Global Citizen: Policy, Curricula and the Role of the Teacher.

Australian schools are increasingly multicultural, with student diversity reflecting processes of migration and globalisation. This has led to an imagining of possibilities, and resultant educational interest in the concept of global citizenship, which offers a conceptual response to the transnationalising orientations and aspirations of students and school culture. The paper will investigate the concept of global citizenship, and in particular, will examine the role of policy, programs, schools and teachers in enhancing student insights on the issue. The phenomenon of global citizenship will be explored within an interpretivist paradigm (Weber, 1978), and will focus on the enactment of classroom discourse in order to understand how reflective school programs and practices are in informing global citizenship education. Few studies have investigated the roles that classroom discourse and the recognition of the cultural and linguistic resources students bring to their learning can play in promoting global mindedness in their students. As such, this paper aims to illuminate the complexities around young people’s understandings of global citizenship and consider the role of teachers and schools in developing global mindedness against national agendas.