ABSTRACT
A sociology of education perspective is deployed for analyzing Global Citizenship Education in hard spaces. I juxtapose definitions of hard spaces from the Global North and the Global South with UNESCO data on literacy rates for Rwanda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I outline a four-step method for reading different sources in parallel for culturally sensitive translations. I review (1) a macro-economic perspective, (2) a postcolonial perspective and (3) a dramatized description of local life. The selection of sources contributes with complementary perspectives for informing (4) a secondary analysis of UNESCO data. I demonstrate how a combination of secondary analysis of international survey data and a close reading of local explanations can help to re-conceptualize hard spaces in locally meaningful ways. The thesis is that Global Citizenship Education can be used in education development as a fruitful approach for learning about local challenges and resources. Bridging what is known and proposed in analyses of macro-level data with what is known from socio-cultural analyses of micro-level contexts is important for the promotion of locally relevant practices in the development of education.
