Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, internationalisation and global citizenship have become buzz words in higher education, which are commonly found in university mission statements and policy documents around the world (Green, 2012; Kraska et al., 2018). Internationalisation, in the context of higher education, is ‘the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education’ (Knight, 2012: 29). The global dimension is about global networks and flows of information, goods and people across countries and regions (Giddens and Sutton, 2017). Internationalisation and globalisation are intertwined. In higher education, internationalisation, in relation to globalisation, entails greater student and staff mobility across national borders and between universities (often in the form of exchange programmes), internationalisation of the curriculum and international research partnerships between institutions (Bourn, 2011; Yemini, 2017). The rationale for embracing internationalisation by universities seems partly to be driven by the quest for interconnectivity and the cooperative benefits of exchanging and sharing or pooling knowledge, services and sometimes resources (Kraska et al., 2018). Some argue that internationalisation and international cooperation in higher education can promote a more democratic, just and equal world (Carr et al., 2014). There are other motivations, however – some of which are less altruistic. Internationalisation is often driven by commercial interests (Haigh, 2014). For example, there is international competition among universities for the recruitment of foreign students from wealthier countries to generate revenue and boost the international reputation of universities, which is linked to the global rankings of universities.

Under pressure to internationalise, many higher education institutions have introduced education about global citizenship (Kraska et al., 2018). Yemini (2015: 21), for example, views internationalisation as ‘a process of encouraging integration of multicultural, multilingual, and global dimensions within the education system, with the aim of instilling in learners a sense of global citizenship’.

While acknowledging that global citizenship education is a highly contested concept with multiple and even contradictory meanings, we find Kraska et al.’s (2018) general definition helpful as a starting point. Kraska et al. (2018: 87) define global citizenship as ‘an awareness of self, the world and one’s position within it’. This awareness may lead to a sense of responsibility for the world and may result in calls to bring about change (Kraska et al., 2018).

The notion of global citizenship is therefore largely about identity, including values. It refers to a social identity that transcends national borders, without necessarily rejecting nationality or other local identities. The value priorities and responsibilities of those who self-identify as global citizens are often shaped by their felt sense of belonging to humanity.

With the launch in 2012 of the Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), the United Nations has been at the forefront of promoting global citizenship in educational institutions (VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). In particular, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has championed global citizenship education (VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). Therefore, it is not surprising that universities around the world are increasingly using the language of global citizenship or global citizenship education and teaching courses on the topic (Franch, 2019a).

Amid the debates on the meanings of global citizenship education, competing perspectives have emerged since the early 2000s. There are some variations in the precise classification of the main perspectives on global citizenship education (see Franch, 2019a; Kraska et al., 2018; Shultz, 2007; VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). Shultz’s (2007) typology includes neoliberal, radical and transformational; Franch (2019a) uses a typology that includes liberal, progressive and critical; and Kraska et al.’s (2018) typology includes neoliberal, liberal humanistic and critical. Pashby et al. (2021) similarly refer to three major discursive orientations in their heuristic typology: neoliberal, liberal and critical. Our reading of the above literature shows that there are overlaps and convergences in the classification categories, but this more complex discussion is beyond the scope of this article (see Pashby et al., 2021). The radical and progressive approaches are similar and they overlap somewhat with humanistic approaches; critical and transformational also converge. We have opted to use Kraska et al.’s (2018) distinction between the three perspectives of neoliberal, liberal humanist and critical. The neoliberal perspective on global citizenship education constructs global citizens as economically competitive individuals who acquire global and intercultural competences to compete favourably in a global market economy according to principles of liberal transnational trade (Kraska et al., 2018; VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). In the neoliberal version, global citizenship education is a qualification related to economic global citizenship, and a discourse that responds to the technical–economic instrumentalist agenda of global citizenship education (Franch, 2019a; Marshall, 2011; Oxley and Morris, 2013). The liberal humanistic perspective constructs global citizens as individuals who are able to understand, engage critically and prosper in an increasingly complex world guided by human rights, justice, cohesiveness and responsibilities to promote sustainable development anywhere around the world (Kraska et al., 2018; Sant et al., 2018; VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). Initially, the global citizenship education debates gravitated towards neoliberal and humanistic perspectives. However, more recently, and especially since the mid-2010s, a third perspective has emerged to challenge the other two perspectives, while also building on humanistic views of global citizenship education. This is the critical approach, which constructs global citizens as people who develop a critical awareness of global injustices and work in solidarity with others to change the world in ways that support diversities (languages, knowledges and interpretations) in non-prescriptive ways (Bosio, 2023; Kraska et al., 2018; VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). Franch (2020) describes applications of critical approaches in educational institutions as experimental. Given the topic of this article, we reiterate that the neoliberal and humanist perspectives on global citizenship education prescribe certain values, whereas the critical perspective adopts an approach to global citizenship education that resists prescribing values and facilitates students figuring this out for themselves through democratic dialogical processes.

Numerous authors who adopt a critical perspective, including Akkari and Maleq (2020), de Oliveira Andreotti and de Souza (2012) and VanderDussen Toukan (2018), have interrogated the role played by global institutions, such as UNESCO, in defining and imposing a global framework for global citizenship education and its overarching purpose. (In their defence, there is some evidence that UNESCO is beginning to respond to this criticism, to the extent that Akkari and Maleq [2020: 209] described them recently as ‘midway between an instrumental and a critical approach’.) De Oliveira Andreotti and de Souza (2012), VanderDussen Toukan (2018) and Akkari and Maleq (2020) are among scholars that have raised critical questions about the nature of the constructs of global citizenship education that are being mobilised by these international agencies, and whose interests they really serve. The global citizen is constructed by these international agencies as a specifically positioned subject that has the ability to act in the global arena to ‘make a better world for, rather than with, Others’ (Jefferess, 2008: 28). International agencies, such as UNESCO, tend to propagate a form of global citizenship education that (perhaps inadvertently) perpetuates Eurocentric conceptualisations of terms such as humanity, the common good, human rights, justice and peace (Jefferess, 2008; Nygren et al., 2020; VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). For example, the document Global Citizenship Education: Topics and learning objectives produced by UNESCO (2015) discusses ‘shared values’ that students need to thrive as global citizens, which suggests that those who identify with global citizenship prioritise certain universal values. In other words, UNESCO promotes value homogeneity. Consequently, VanderDussen Toukan (2018: 56) recommends that ‘UNESCO’s indirect authority warrants an in-depth study of the allocation of values that it assigns to the conceptualization and implementation of global citizenship education’. Similarly, questions about prescription and the authoritative allocation of values ought to be asked of global citizenship education at educational institutions around the world, irrespective of their ideological motivations.

Whether the motivations are based on idealism or instrumentalism, educational institutions as socialising agencies are incubators of global citizens that have historically promoted certain values and global convergences in identity (Franch, 2020). Socialisation entails processes by which human beings are induced to adopt certain behaviours, norms and values (Outhwaite, 2006: 638). Giddens and Sutton (2017) define socialisation at educational institutions as ‘secondary’, as a distinction from the family-based ‘primary’ form. The problem with homogenising processes in education institutions is that they deny Otherness(es) or trivialise differences (Tarozzi and Torres, 2016). It would appear that both the neoliberal and humanistic perspectives are especially guilty of promoting homogeneity in their global citizenship education – although this could be unintentional.

Bosio and Waghid (2023: 285), who adopt a critical approach and critical pedagogy (associated with the work of Paulo Freire), attempt to counter the homogeneity of values in their discussion of democratic global citizenship education informed by value pluralism. Value pluralism refers to ‘the notion that there are several types of knowledge and values that are of equal importance for student development yet overlap [or compete] within their shared context … [and include] critical engagement with non-Western oriented theory systems and non-English speaking scholars’ understandings of knowledge and values’ (Bosio and Waghid, 2023: 285). We will return to value pluralism later.

The questions raised by the above-mentioned scholars from a critical perspective about the homogeneity of values and the trivialising of difference remind us of Castells’s (2010) counterargument about an emerging global citizenship and shared values. Based on empirical observations, Castells (2010: xxxvi) concludes that the ‘networks are global, but the narratives, values, and interests are diverse, and globally produced and distributed, albeit asymmetrically, around the world … We are not sharing a global culture. Rather, we are learning the culture of sharing our global diversity.’

The above discussion of debates in the literature about global values in global citizenship education has prompted us to ask the following questions: To what extent are university students across the world becoming global citizens that share value priorities? If there are shared values among students across the world, then do they tend to identify with the global rights and responsibilities model or the global competitiveness model? Which of the above perspectives best describes the patterns among university students’ value priorities from across the world? Answering these questions contributes to debates about the nature and purpose of global citizenship education.

One way to test whether the assumption of the homogeneity of values in historically dominant approaches to global citizenship education in universities worldwide matches empirical evidence is to measure students’ value priorities to assess the extent to which they converge as either global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness. To this end, we have used a subset of student data generated by the World Values Survey (WVS). In this article, we draw on Schwartz’s (1992, 2009, 2012) theory of human values, which informs the WVS, and the relevant data, to answer our research questions.

This article reports on our research. First, we clarify the research focus, define key concepts and introduce Schwartz’s theory of human values. Then, we describe our methodology and report the data-based findings. Finally, we discuss key findings, pose critical questions and draw some conclusions.

The WVS is a cross-national longitudinal survey, which explores people’s values and how they change over time. It is a unique source of data, which is freely available if one wants to research values across the world. The global nature and size of the WVS are obvious benefits for researchers who study people’s values.

Nevertheless, any analysis of WVS data is confronted with common problems associated with using secondary data (Boslaugh, 2007; MacInnes, 2017). One such problem is that researchers sometimes have to settle for using proxy variables in the secondary data to measure the variables in which they are interested. In our study, we used Schwartz’s personal values to measure global citizenship values among students. We had to consider whether among Schwartz’s 10 personal values (included in the WVS) there are values that align well with two key concepts in our research, namely global rights and responsibilities, and global competitiveness; in other words, that these values are good proxies for our concepts. At a conceptual level, Table 2 demonstrates that Schwartz’s values Universalism and Benevolence can together serve as a reasonably good proxy for global rights and responsibilities; and Schwartz’s values Power and Achievement can together serve as a reasonable proxy for global competitiveness. For example, the concept of global rights and responsibilities incorporates notions of social justice, equality, common good and democracy, which are largely found in Schwartz’s conceptualisation of the values Universalism and Benevolence. We recognise that these measurement proxies are not perfect matches for our two concepts, but they work sufficiently well for our purposes.

Another limitation of this study is that the data are somewhat dated. As we explained above, we had to use data from the WVS6, which was collected between 2010 and 2014. Disappointingly, the WVS7 did not include Schwartz’s 10 values. We acknowledge that this is a limitation, but we do not think more up-to-date data would have revealed global patterns that are significantly different to those found in this study.

Notwithstanding these limitations, we are convinced that the advantages of using the WVS data far outweigh any disadvantages.

The results reported above, based on the 2014 WVS data, show that (1) neither the global rights and responsibilities nor the global competitiveness models of value priorities are dominant among students and (2) students grouped according to the continents where they live do not share a common set of values. Our finding that value priorities of university students across the world are not homogeneous confirms the critical perspective’s value pluralism (Bosio and Waghid, 2023) and Castells’s (2010) research-based observation that networks are global, but that values are diverse. The significance of this finding is that it supports value pluralism. In the context of this article, value pluralism refers to different types of values (and knowledge) that are equally important for student development, and which may compete or overlap in any given context (Bosio and Waghid, 2023). Value pluralism challenges value homogeneity in the constructions of global citizenship and what constitutes global citizenship education.

While neoliberal and humanist approaches to global citizenship education have historically dominated, in the past decade, critical approaches have emerged from the shadows to challenge these dominant discourses in global citizenship education (Franch, 2019a). As critical approaches have gained traction, prominent scholars of global citizenship such as Akkari and Maleq (2020), Andreotti (2015), Bosio and Waghid (2023), Davies et al. (2018), Franch (2019a), Tarozzi and Torres (2016) and Sant et al. (2018) have convincingly argued that global citizenship education must embrace the challenge of reconceptualising global citizenship from the perspectives of those who are marginalised in ways that stop trivialising difference by affirming the plurality of values, culture and epistemological knowledge – especially from the Global South. ‘From a critical postcolonial perspective, global citizenship education can bring to the fore non-dominant knowledges and values, facilitate critical analysis of taken-for-granted concepts and universal values such as human rights, peace and sustainable development’ (Sant et al., 2018: 18). Tarozzi and Torres (2016: 17–18) are wary of the imposition of a universal idea of global citizenship, and they warn against forms of global citizenship education that ‘claim the dream of a shared humanity … by enhancing human rights and global values … conceived as a universalistic moral direction, unable to manage diversity, difference and otherness, which are key notions of the contemporary social world’. Tarozzi and Torres (2016) and De Oliveira Andreotti and De Souza (2012) have long cautioned that neglecting the development of critical analysis (or what Freire (1973) calls critical consciousness) in global citizenship education can result in practices that unintentionally reproduce and reinforce Western-centric and paternalistic approaches, which trivialise value differences and ignore global inequalities. International agencies such as UNESCO have promoted global citizenship education that emphasises universality and equality for all, but they have tended to neglect pluralism and difference (VanderDussen Toukan, 2018). These observations prompt a number of critical questions, which deserve further research attention: (1)

Franch (2019b: 10) asks: ‘By whom and for whom is GCE [global citizenship education] being developed?’ Global citizenship as an outcome needs to be problematised, because it assumes that what constitutes good global citizenship is already defined, and is not an open-ended question.

One practical response to these questions from the critical perspective is found in the recent work of Bosio and Waghid (2023) and Bosio (2023). Bosio and Waghid (2023) argue strongly for a form of value pluralism that they see as most consistent with democratisation of global citizenship education. The democratisation of global citizenship education actively resists the temptation to tell students what global citizens should be, what the best practices in global citizenship education are and prescribing a ready-made global citizenship education toolkit (Andreotti, 2006). Dialogic methods are at the pedagogical centre of critical approaches to the democratisation of global citizenship education, which explore theory systems that take seriously the experiences of the Other, including non-English speaking Indigenous understandings of knowledge and values (Bosio and Waghid, 2023). These dialectic methods are informed by Paulo Freire’s critical consciousness (Bosio, 2023). Through reflexive dialogic methods, democratic pluralistic global citizenship education can become a transformational social pedagogy that is deeply democratic in the ways that it facilitates students’ critical examination of their society and global systems to then debate future alternatives that they can begin to work towards. This approach to global citizenship education ‘values others more for their differences than their similarities’ (Bosio, 2023: 178). Bosio (2023: 178) explains practically how this reflexive dialogue includes:

Importantly, this critical approach to global citizenship education facilitates students’ own articulations while they dialogue respectfully with the ‘Other’ about what for them are priorities and why (Bosio, 2023).

As universities across the world respond to the pressure to internationalise and offer global citizenship education, robust debates about how global citizenship and global citizenship education are conceptualised, and for what purpose, have emerged. One key debate is about how universities overtly or covertly orient their students around particular global citizenship values, and whether one of the purposes of global citizenship education is to promote the homogeneity of values – which is prescriptive and downplays difference – or value pluralism – which is open-ended and affirms difference.

Historically, neoliberal and humanist approaches have dominated global citizenship education. Both approaches have tended to prescribe particular sets of values in their conceptualisations of global citizenship. The neoliberal model of global competitiveness promotes the values of Achievement and Power; and the humanistic model of global humanism promotes the values of Benevolence and Universalism. Many universities across the world have historically adopted one or other approach to global citizenship education, and have socialised their students according to corresponding values. Embedded in these discourses is the implication that global citizenship is emerging among students, accompanied by a convergence in values among students. Recently, the critical perspective has emerged to challenge these two dominant approaches to global citizenship education. Scholars from a critical perspective argue against the prescription of certain values (or the homogeneity of values) in global citizenship education, which trivialises difference, and for value pluralism, which is open-ended. Ideological positions aside, in our assessment, what is centrally important in this debate is whether students’ own value priorities support values convergence/homogeneity (irrespective of the model) or values difference/pluralism. We have argued in this article that empirical evidence about students’ values from across the world contributes to the debate, and that this dimension has been neglected in the literature.

In our study, we proceeded to test for the homogeneity of values versus the plurality of values among students, to demonstrate which of the three perspectives corresponds best with the actual patterns in the value priorities among students from across the world. Using data from the WVS6, we found that there is no clear evidence of students’ values converging in the form of either of the two historically dominant models, namely global rights and responsibilities or global competitiveness. While our results do not support either of the historical models, they do show significant differences in students’ values across continents. There could be other explanations for these differences, which deserves further research. Despite the need for further research and the above-mentioned limitations of our study, we argue that our findings support value pluralism among students from across the world, which is promoted by the critical perspective.

This prompted us to ask critical questions about the assumptions underlying global citizenship, and the possible intended or unintended Western biases and value prescriptions present in global citizenship education at universities. The most recent literature on global citizenship education from a critical perspective (for example, Bosio, 2023; Bosio and Waghid, 2023) has drawn on Freirean critical pedagogy to develop innovative ways of working with the reality of value pluralism and difference among students across the world. Bosio (2023), for example, advocates for the use of dialogic methods in global citizenship education to create opportunities among students for multiple global citizen selves to be conceptualised and informed by different epistemologies and ontological traditions from across the world. Global citizenship education based on Freirean pedagogy and dialectic methods seems to be best suited to the reality of value pluralism and difference among students from across the world, and to working against epistemic violence.