ABSTRACT
We argue that broadening students’ horizons through a curriculum that fully embeds ‘diverse cultural capital’ helps ensure that our young people become informed global citizens. To this end, we explore models of citizenship within the curriculum that actively develop knowledge and skills and incorporate cultural capital. We propose strengthening the National Curriculum Citizenship model so that it places critical literacy skills at its core, thus enabling students to become more questioning of the knowledge they learn and forensically being able to distinguish between fake news and authentic information
Our students live in a multicultural pluralistic society, and the curriculum should be a reflection of this. We question the ‘mosaic of knowledge’ that students learn; how it is selected and by whom. The appreciation of ‘cultural knowledge’ is dependent on all students being receptive to learning about a culture, that possibly some cannot relate to.
This cannot be divorced from structured opportunities for learning about global citizenship, through students appreciating their own heritage cultures and those of others. This is especially important at a point where the UK has reached a historic watershed, post departure from the European Union. Forging new relations with countries world- wide is now an economic imperative.
