Global Citizenship: A Typology for Distinguishing its Multiple Conceptions

The promotion of 'Global Citizenship' (hereafter GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within which it is appropriated. This paper seeks to clarify this ambiguity by identifying and mapping from the literature the diverse conceptions of GC. We construct a typology to map this diversity and identify two general forms of GC: cosmopolitan-based and advocacy-based. The former incorporates four distinct conceptions of GC, namely the political, moral, economic and cultural; the latter incorporates four other conceptions, namely the social, critical, environmental and spiritual. Subsequently, we briefly illustrate how the typology can be used to evaluate the critical features of a curriculum plan designed to promote GC in England. The typology provides a novel and powerful means to identify and distinguish the key features of the very diverse range of educational policies and programmes that promote GC.