The author has 25 years of experience in higher education leadership, overseeing two campuses and two university systems. He has maintained a strong connection to the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), both philosophically and in practical terms. In this article, the author discusses his experience and feelings on social…

Civic engagement activities are utilized to enhance youth's citizenship skills and content knowledge, and to strengthen the community's status. Post-activity reflections can be utilized to strengthen the benefits of civic engagement activities but are often underutilized. This quasi-experimental study sought to determine the influence of guided…

As people seek out more naturalistic experiences (e.g. camping, visiting National and State Parks, etc.), it is increasingly important for students to leave our classrooms with an understanding of and relationship to nature. The NGSS exposes students to environmental problems of today and works toward the EPA's description of environmental…

Civic and political engagement is woven into the fabric of higher education and many higher education institutions have intentionally incorporated this in their mission statements. Civic engagement often refers to passive activities like community service, partnership, and reciprocity with others in society while political engagement refers to…

Social studies education research lauds the importance of schools as spaces to practice democratic values while also largely ignoring the agency youth exercise to shape their lives in the present. This article explores how young people organize and enact democratic practices within youth-mediated contexts in schools by examining the pedagogy of…

Given the seemingly ever-increasing scholarly production about the ideas and ideals of global citizenship education (GCE), it is not surprising those discussions started to gain influence in teacher education (TE) debates. In this study, we examine the discourses that tacitly shape the meanings of GCE within the contemporary academic literature on…

This paper compares state-led approaches to global citizenship education, driven by the concerns of national security, with the kinds of citizenship formation transnational youth acquire through their experiences in transnational social fields. I show that these transnational experiences--particularly their relationships with loved ones in their…

A civic perspective that shifts social loyalties from an exclusively national concern to international problem solving--global citizenship--is an approach that may help humanity meet the challenges of the 21st century. Young people who adopt a global citizen identity during their higher education experience may become leaders who seek…

Two year colleges are often characterized as America's "democracy colleges" implying a difficult to implement dual mission of democratizing education for all, and advancing the democratic purpose of civic engagement. Although such goals may be explicit in a college's mission statement, how faculty or their deans receive that mission is…

States need education to raise not only citizens but also good citizens. Changes in the concept of citizenship from the past to the present have also been reflected in civic education. While in ancient Greece, the good citizen was identified with being virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, with the emergence of nation-states, the good citizen is now…

In this essay, I highlight two ways in which the coronavirus pandemic has influenced the teaching and learning of social studies. First, despite its marginalization and under-investment nationally, the crisis highlighted the significance of social studies by serving as a refuge for youth and families to navigate and better understand this…

Crowley and Swan (2018) proposed a categorisation of economic citizenship, in which they extend earlier work to include a new type, the discerning economic citizen. I argue that the discerning economic citizen is not a distinct type from the other three (the personally responsible economic citizen, the participatory economic citizen, and the…

As educators around the world pursue the noble goal of supporting students' development as global citizens, we must carefully consider the methods we use to achieve such transformation of education.

Liberal education is under severe attack from critics who assert that it does not provide adequate preparation for contemporary life. To address these concerns I propose new approaches to liberal learning based on two principles: (1) We should teach students how to transform thinking into effective action and (2) The ability to connect thought to…

Caribbean nations are amongst those considered the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. This necessitates climate change education (CCE) to enhance the mitigation and adaptation capacities of the region's populace. CCE is necessary at all levels of the education system, from pre-primary through to the tertiary level. To facilitate this,…