ABSTRACT
Global Citizenship Education (GCE) with its plural coinciding and conflicting models has led us to explore the possibilities of practical-ness of GCE within environmental pedagogies and of the “hard-ness” of GC/E practice and research within India. By deconstructing various understandings and practices, grounded in the voices of the participants in India, we analyze how GCE models in India coincide or conflict within some key Indian epistemologies and social structures keeping in mind strong hegemonic and neoliberal trends in the country. We use our previous research on Freirean-based ecopedagogy to uncover the im/practicalities of GC/E (Global Citizenship and its Education) in connection with environmental pedagogies within educational research and practice. Education towards praxis—to end social and environmental violence—grounds the analysis, from various spheres of citizenship (e.g. the pluralized citizenships) from local to global to planetary, with the chapter focusing on how global citizenship (and its education) de-/aligns and contests with local to national citizenships within India.
We argue that for GC/E to be successful in India, the “C” in GCE must be taught with non-Western epistemological understandings. GCE must be woven with ecopedagogy to deepened and widened critical understandings of socio-environmental connections to “unveil” the effects, causes and underlying politics of social oppressions. So in the case of India, a shift towards critical GCEs, as a critical pedagogy that counters hegemony, has the potential to counter narrow, shallow, soft and/or neoliberal models of GC/E which are ineffective and largely oppressive by ignoring contexts with dominant ideologies as unproblematized.
