Expressions of global citizenship education in Chinese higher education
Keywords: Teaching and Learning
Chinese Higher Education
Arts-Based Methods
Chinese Universities
Global Citizenship Education
Ethnography

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) focuses on cultivating in young people the inner aspirations and contextually situated behavioural orientations to contribute to a just and interdependent planetary civilization. Yet promotion of GCE’s grand and normative narratives of a ‘shared future’ can be critiqued as defined by a privileged few, dominated by Anglophone and Global North framings, and could also become enmeshed with political agendas of the state. The Chinese educational context presents a meaningful and curious site to explore the notion of GCE due to the context’s history, cultural symbols, civilizational dynamics, grassroots movements, societal relationships and philosophical underpinnings, embodied by different actors and artefacts in Chinese higher education. This context enables exploration of the rich possibilities of a culturally rooted GCE, attuned also to the country’s contemporary societal questions, as well as of the nationalism and patriotism potentially enmeshed in higher education’s compulsory political, ideological and moral education courses.
In this study, I explore the expression of GCE in Chinese higher education on non-compulsory topical courses at one university site, which was engaged in vibrant citizenship and moral education activity. I further investigate how teachers and students practice and understand GCE in these topical courses and their wider learning environments. Adopting a remote ethnographic approach to conduct the study, I enrolled as a ‘remote participant observer’ and ‘collaborative learner’ on two topical courses over a 6-month period at the University: ‘Citizenship Education’ and ‘Moral Education’. Through these courses, I gathered pedagogical artefacts including student and teacher PowerPoint presentations, syllabi, student drawings,photographs, screenshots of learning environments, ran participant mediated remote ethnographic tours, and conducted semi-structured interviews with 4 teachers and 9 students in order to unfold the different layers of meaning within their views on and practices of GCE.
Drawing on ethnographic descriptions and the complementary data, I developed four prevalent themes which enable a closer reading of GCE’s particular expression among a community of citizenship learners: encounter, embody, empower and enact. These four themes foreground the intellectual and social situatedness of GCE in the lives of teachers and students, the prevalent philosophers and philosophies encountered which inform their perspectives, and the creative, brave and innovative approaches teachers and students take in the classroom and their wider learning environments. Though ambiguities persist concerning GCE meanings in Chinese higher education, I found teachers and students committed to speaking on GCE related topics, drawing connections between its ideals and the wider societal forces they discerned in their lives. In articulating the rich descriptions of classroom practices as well as teachers’ and students’ understandings of GCE, I attempt to offer an empowered account of GCE’s rooted expression in a Chinese university, thus adding further cross-cultural depth to empirical scholarship of GCE.