Global citizenship values among students: testing the thesis with World Values Survey data

Jacques P De Wet; Johann Bacher; Daniela Wetzelhuetter; Chigozie Nnebedum; Jacques P De Wet; Johann Bacher; Daniela Wetzelhuetter; Chigozie Nnebedum

doi:10.14324/IJDEGL.16.1.02

Introduction

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.

Research focus and human values

Research focus

This article uses empirical data from the WVS to test the extent to which university students across the world share value priorities (that is, the homogeneity of values) that are associated with being global citizens. We were open to the possibility that if students across the world do not share a common set of value priorities – however they are defined – then we would need to pose a different set of questions; in particular, questions that challenge the historically dominant perspectives on global citizenship and global citizenship education that seem to promote value homogeneity. For example, if students across the world do not share value priorities, then what are the consequences for global citizenship, and what further questions are we prompted to ask about the kinds of global citizenship discourses propagated by universities? At the end of this article, we will return to these important questions, informed by our empirical findings about students’ values in relation to the assumptions about the inevitability of global citizenship.

We now introduce Schwartz’s (1992, 2009, 2012) theory of human values, which informs the items about values used in the WVS, which are the source of the data for this study.

Schwartz’s theory of basic human values and Portrait Values Questionnaire items used in the WVS

Schwartz’s theory of basic human values has been used in studies across the world (Cieciuch et al., 2013; Schwartz 1992, 1994). In his theory of basic values, Schwartz (1992, 2009) defines values as beliefs and desirable goals, which serve as guiding principles in people’s lives. He identifies 10 distinct motivational value orientations and shows how they relate to each other – some are compatible and some are in conflict. The structure of these values reflects relations of divergence and congruence among values, and not their relative importance (Schwartz, 2009). Schwartz et al. (2012) refined the theory of basic values by increasing the number of values from 10 to 19, mostly by splitting some values into two subcategories, but this is not yet widely used, and it is not used in the WVS. We also did not use the refined version. Table 1 summarises the ten value orientations, their definitions and exemplary values. For a more detailed discussion, see Schwartz (2009).

Table 1

Schwartz’s (1992) ten values

Value type	Definition	Exemplary values
Power	Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources	Social power, authority, wealth
Achievement	Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards	Success, ability, ambition
Hedonism	Pleasure and personal gratification	Pleasure, fun, fulfilment
Stimulation	Excitement, novelty and challenge in life	Excitement, variety
Self-direction	Independent thought and action, creating, exploring	Creativity, curiosity, freedom
Universalism	Understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection for all people and nature	Social justice, equality, awareness
Benevolence	Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one has frequent personal contact	Kindness, support, honesty, forgiveness
Tradition	Respect, commitment towards, and acceptance of, the customs and ideas that culture or religion provide	Deference, devotion, tolerance
Conformity	Restraint of actions, inclinations and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms	Courtesy, obedience, honour
Security	Safety, harmony and stability of society, of relationships and of self	Social order, organisation

Schwartz (2009) argues that these values are universal, but individuals and groups differ in the relative importance they attribute to these value priorities. Schwartz’s theory clusters the ten value types into four value domains, as follows:

Self-direction, Stimulation and Hedonism share the same motivational goal, which is Openness to Change.
Benevolence and Universalism are motivated by Self-transcendence.
Conformity, Tradition and Security are motivated by Conservation.
Power, Achievement and Hedonism are motivated by Self-enhancement.

Figure 1 shows how Schwartz (2009) organises the structure of his theory as a two-dimensional model, which includes the ten values and the four value domains. Hedonism includes aspects of both Openness to Change and Self-enhancement, hence its position in Figure 1 on the borderline that separates these two domains.

Figure 1

Location of global rights and responsibilities and global competitiveness in Schwartz’s two-dimensional model (Source: adapted from Schwartz, 2012: 9)

The relations between Schwartz’s value types are best represented as a circle divided into sectors, which reveals a pattern of compatibilities and conflicts. For example, values such as Achievement and Power are usually compatible; however, the pursuit of Achievement values tends to conflict with the pursuit of Benevolence (Schwartz, 2009). In the circular diagram, Schwartz (2012: 10) emphasises how the values represent a motivational continuum: ‘The closer any two values in either direction around the circle, the more similar their underlying motivations; the more distant, the more antagonistic their motivations.’

Schwartz has developed different instruments to measure the 10 human value orientations and the ways people think about values. Among these measurement instruments, the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) 21 is widely used. A shortened version known as the PVQ10, which includes 10 items, representing each of Schwartz’s 10 values, is incorporated into the WVS. The PVQ21 contains 21 items or portraits. Each item or portrait describes a particular goal, aspiration or wish which refers to a single underlying value (Schwartz, 2009). For example, the first item in the female version of the questionnaire contains the following two statements: ‘Thinking up new ideas and being creative is important to her. She likes to do things in her own original way.’ These two statements describe a person who values Self-direction. The first statement describes the importance of a valued goal to the person. The second statement describes the person’s feelings about the goal. Each respondent is asked the extent to which she is like the person described in a portrait by ticking the number that best represents her position on a Likert scale of 1–6 (where 1 is very much like me and 6 is not like me at all). In the WVS (Wave 6, 2010–14) these two separate PVQ statements about Self-direction have been condensed into a single two-part statement (see Inglehart et al., 2014). The same applies to all the PVQ twin statements for the other 9 values which are included in the WVS. Conceptually, this does not change anything. The above-mentioned two statements about Self-direction read as follows in the WVS: ‘It is important to this person to think up new ideas and be creative; to do things one’s own way.’ Consequently, only 10 items are normally used in the WVS, as opposed to the 21 PVQ items that operationalise Schwartz’s 10 values (see Inglehart et al., 2014). (Occasionally for cultural reasons, and to improve comprehension, the WVS questionnaires include a second item which also measures Benevolence [see Inglehart et al., 2014].) The 6-point Likert scale response categories in the WVS are the same as in the PVQ. Furthermore, in the WVS, the statements are gender neutral.

Global citizenship values

Previously, we discussed three dominant perspectives of global citizenship education (neoliberal, humanistic and critical). While there are three perspectives, we argue that there are two dominant sets of values in global citizenship education, which are prescribed. One set of neoliberal values is associated with global competitiveness, and the other set of humanistic values is associated with global rights and responsibilities. One could argue that the critical perspective advocates for social justice and change as value priorities, but a Freirean critical pedagogy does not prescribe values, and leaves these decisions up to students themselves to figure out (see Bosio, 2023).

In Table 2, we translate the literature-based terms used to describe models of global citizenship into Schwartz’s values.

Table 2

Terms that describe global citizenship translated into Schwartz’s values and domains

Perspectives and sources	Terms linked to global citizenship	Equivalent Schwartz values	Schwartz’s higher order domain
Neoliberal perspective Sources: Andreotti (2014); Bourn (2015); Camicia and Franklin (2011); Gaudelli (2009); Israel (2012); Oxley and Morris (2013); Sant et al. (2018); Shultz (2007); Stein (2015)	global entrepreneurship global competitiveness, skills and knowledge of the global economy competence in intercultural understanding and communication cosmopolitan capital (that is, culturally flexible and able to take advantage of the global processes)	Power Achievement	Self-enhancement
Liberal humanist perspective Sources: Andreotti (2014); Gaudelli (2009); Marshall (2011); Oxley and Morris (2013); Roth (2007); Stein (2015); Weenink (2008)	global democracy social justice human rights, civic responsibilities, equality/equity sustainability diversity, complex knowledge common good dialogue cohesiveness global outlook	Universalism and/or Benevolence	Self-transcendence

Note: The critical perspective, informed by Freirean critical pedagogy, is not included in this table because it opposes the prescription of particular values.

According to Schwartz’s theory, Universalism and Benevolence, which are associated with the global rights and responsibilities model and are in the Self-transcendence domain, are the polar opposite to Power and Achievement, which are associated with the global competitiveness model and are in the Self-enhancement domain.

Theoretically, what this means is that within the global rights and responsibilities model, students prefer values associated with Self-transcendence, and within the global competitiveness model, students prefer values associated with Self-enhancement. This is diagrammatically depicted in Figure 1, which is an adapted version of Schwartz’s two-dimensional model.

We now turn our attention to empirically testing our three propositions:

The humanistic global rights and responsibilities model of global citizenship is supported if students across the world prioritise the values Benevolence and Universalism above Achievement and Power, as well as all the other value types.
The neoliberal global competitiveness model of global citizenship is supported if students across the world prioritise Achievement and Power above Benevolence and Universalism, as well as the other value types.
Value pluralism, which is promoted by the critical perspective, is supported if the value priorities among students across global regions are different.

We proceeded to test these propositions statistically using the WVS data for students included in Wave 6.

Data, variables and methods of analysis

Data and variables

Wave 6 of the World Values Survey (WVS6) was used as the data set for this study (Inglehart et al., 2014). The WVS6 includes 89,565 respondents from 60 countries. Unfortunately, it was not possible to use the more recent WVS7, because it does not contain Schwartz’s PVQ (PVQ10) items, which are central to our research. (We have been led to believe that Wave 8 [2024–6] of the World Values Survey will once again include Schwartz’s Portrait Values Survey items, but this is yet to be confirmed.)

In our analysis, we selected from the WVS6 data set under the variable ‘Main Activity’ all the respondents who indicated that they were students. For this population:

Students made up 7.2 per cent of the total sample population (that is, 6,427 respondents)
Female students made up 46.7 per cent of the respondents
The percentages of students according to their continental location is as follows:
- ▪
  36.7 per cent from Asia
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  32.7 per cent from Africa
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  14.5 per cent from Europe
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  7.5 per cent from South America
- ▪
  7.0 per cent from North America
- ▪
  1.4 per cent from Oceania.
The average student’s age was 22.2 years old.

Schwartz´s PVQ10 was used to measure the values of respondents. PVQ10 contains one item for each value type (see Inglehart et al., 2014).

Methods of analysis

We tested for the convergence of students’ values either as global rights and responsibilities with a preference for Universalism and Benevolence (Proposition 1) or as global competitiveness with a preference for Power and Achievement (Proposition 2) by performing a t-test for dependent paired samples on a subset of relevant data taken from the WVS6 data set.

To test further for significant differences among the students, we compared the value preferences of continental groupings within the sample of 6,427 students by using either the t-test or Analysis of Variance for independent samples. If the assumption of a homogeneous global student model (either Proposition 1 or Proposition 2) fits the data, we would expect no significant differences between the groupings for each of these variables. However, if the critical perspective’s value pluralism is correct, we would expect differences between students grouped according to their continents, which is used as proxy for local conditions.

For all statistical analyses, the PVQ-items were mean-centered using the formula:

P V Q i j c = P V Q i j − P V Q ¯ i +

where $P V Q i j$ is the response of person $i$ to PVQ-item $j$ and $P V Q ¯ i + = ∑ j = 1 10 P V Q i j / 10$ is the average of responses of person $i$ in all 10 PVQ-items. A positive value for a mean-centered PVQ-item indicates a positive preference, and a higher positive value indicates a stronger preference. A similar logic applies to a negative value, which indicates a negative or weaker preference.

The benefit of mean-centering is that the preferences are measured for each respondent, but individual response biases or tendencies such as acquiescence response styles (see Rammstedt et al., 2017), which distort the results, are cancelled out. This is applicable in our research because response-styles correlate with cultural differences (Rammstedt et al., 2017; Schwartz, 1994), and hence with differences based on continental location. Schwartz (1994) elaborates further on his use of mean-centering in cross-cultural values research. In the various significance tests, a p-value of 0.05 was used as the significant level.

Limitations

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.

Results

Value preferences of students

Table 3 reports the value preferences of students for Schwartz’s items included in the WVS6. In relation to Propositions 1 and 2, with regard to the emergence of global citizenship values, the statistical results show that there is no clear evidence that either the global rights and responsibilities model or the global competitiveness model exists among students included in WVS6.

Table 3

Value preferences of students for Schwartz’s items

Schwartz’s items included in the WVS6	Mean-centered/mean values $(P V Q ¯ c)$
Schwartz’s items included in the WVS6	Mean-centered/mean values $(P V Q ¯ c)$	Security: Living in secure surroundings is important to this person; to avoid anything that might be dangerous.	0.35
Benevolence: It is important to this person to do something for the good of society.	0.27
Self-direction: It is important to this person to think up new ideas and be creative; to do things one’s own way.	0.26
Achievement: Being very successful is important to this person; to have people recognise one’s achievements.	0.22
Conformity: It is important to this person to always behave properly; to avoid doing anything people would say is wrong.	0.13
Universalism: Looking after the environment is important to this person; to care for nature and save life resources.	0.06
Tradition: Tradition is important to this person; to follow the customs handed down by one’s religion or family.	−0.04
Hedonism: It is important to this person to have a good time; to ‘spoil’ oneself.	−0.15
Stimulation: Adventure and taking risks are important to this person; to have an exciting life.	−0.40
Power: It is important to this person to be rich; to have a lot of money and expensive things.	−0.69

Notes: WVS6, only students, weighted data n = 6,161 to 6,339; calculations by the authors.

Unexpectedly, Security is prioritised by students from across the world above all other values. The second-highest value priority is Benevolence. Table 4 shows that the difference between the second-ranked item, Benevolence, and the first-ranked item, Security, is statistically significant (t-value = 4.598; p-value 0.001). On the one hand, this finding contradicts Proposition 1, because Benevolence (or Universalism) is not ranked first. On the other, it does lend some support to the global rights and responsibilities model among students prima facie, because Security does not belong to the global competitiveness model. The value priority thereafter is Self-direction, and this is followed by Achievement. The latter is from the global competitive model. The difference between Benevolence and Achievement is not significant (t-value = 2.573, p-value = 0.005); therefore, from a statistical perspective, one cannot conclude that there is a preference for Benevolence over Achievement. Furthermore, Universalism is ranked sixth, and significantly lower than Achievement (t-value = 8.132, p-value 0.001). This result lends some support for the global competitiveness model. Finally, Power is ranked last, and its value is significantly lower than Universalism (t-value = 29.850, p-value 0.001), which somewhat supports the humanistic global rights and responsibilities model.

Table 4

Pairwise t-tests for students’ value preferences

Item 1	Item 2	n	t-value	p-value (two-sided)	p-Value (one-sided)
Security	Benevolence	6,128	4.589	0.001	0.001
Benevolence	Achievement	6,120	2.573	0.010	0.005
Achievement	Universalism	6,281	8.132	0.001	0.001
Universalism	Power	6,286	29.850	0.001	0.001

Notes: WVS6, only students, weighted data, n = 6.128 to 6.286. To avoid excessive multiple testing, we tested only the differences which were relevant to our propositions about global citizenship values. In addition, we tested for the difference between the first- and the second-ranked items to assess whether Security is preferred more than Benevolence.

In summary, one might be tempted to argue that because Benevolence is ranked higher than Achievement, and Universalism – although lower than Achievement – is higher than Power, there is some weak support for the global rights and responsibilities model among students. However, because Benevolence and Universalism are not both ranked higher than Achievement and Power – or vice versa – there is no clear statistical evidence that supports either the global rights and responsibilities model or the global competitiveness model.

Differences across global regions

Table 5 shows the analysis of differences in students’ value priorities according to the continents where they are located. The results are:

In North America, students prioritise in order of preference: Benevolence ( $P V Q ¯ c$ = 0.83), Security ( $P V Q ¯ c$ = 0.71), Achievement ( $P V Q ¯ c$ = 0.56), followed by Conformity ( $P V Q ¯ c$ = 0.42). All the other values are negative, and these are not included in the analysis.
In South America, students prioritise in order of preference: Security (0.52), Self-direction (0.44), Benevolence (0.38), Universalism (0.31), Hedonism (0.18) and Achievement (0.06).
In Africa, students prioritise in order of preference: Security (0.40), Self-direction (0.25), Conformity (0.21), Achievement (0.20), Benevolence (0.17) and Tradition (0.05).
In Asia, students prioritise in order of preference: Security (0.30), Self-direction (0.22), Achievement (0.22), Benevolence (0.25), Conformity (0.12), Universalism (0.11) and Tradition (0.06).
In Europe, students prioritise in order of preference: Self-direction (0.47), Hedonism (0.30), Achievement (0.20) and Benevolence (0.16), Universalism (0.07) and Security (0.07).

While Security is clearly a priority among students from most continents, it is not strictly relevant to our immediate research focus. Benevolence and Achievement, which are important in our research, both occur repeatedly among the top values of students, but there is no consistent pattern across the continents. These results show that there is no homogeneity or even convergence among the value priorities of students across different continents.

Table 5

Value preferences of students by continent measured using mean-centering ( $P V Q ¯ c$ )

Schwartz’s items	Africa	Asia	Europe	South America	North America	Oceania	ETA-squared	F-value
Security	0.40	0.30	0.07	0.52	0.71	0.33	0.023	30.084
Self-direction	0.25	0.22	0.47	0.44	−0.19	0.53	0.021	26.564
Achievement	0.20	0.22	0.20	0.06	0.56	0.13	0.010	12.826
Conformity	0.21	0.12	-0.06	-0.05	0.42	0.03	0.013	16.863
Benevolence	0.17	0.25	0.16	0.38	0.83	0.74	0.033	41.999
Tradition	0.05	0.06	−0.27	−0.24	−0.26	−0.17	0.014	17.779
Universalism	−0.04	0.11	0.07	0.31	−0.12	0.37	0.011	13.483
Stimulation	−0.39	−0.42	−0.22	−0.38	−0.79	−0.12	0.010	12.44
Power	−0.48	−0.74	−0.71	−1.24	−0.65	−1.27	0.024	30.883
Hedonism	−0.37	−0.12	0.30	0.18	−0.51	−0.56	0.042	55.732

Note: We have excluded Oceania from the analysis because the size of the sample is too small. We are also not interested in any negative values.

Discussion

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.
(2)
How can global citizenship education and global citizenship discourses take diversity seriously? Along with Pashby (2011: 439), we ask: How can global diversity in values and orientations create the opportunity for multiple global citizen selves to be conceptualised and informed by different epistemologies and ontological traditions from across the world that challenge Western humanism and neoliberalism, which have tended to dominate the meanings of global citizenship?
(3)
How can the diversity of values among students from across the world inform the process of decolonising global citizenship education, so that it does not orient students around normative Western ideals of democracy, freedom, rights and justice that are presented as universal, but rather stimulates dialogical engagement across the world for ‘ethical ways of seeing, knowing and relating to others “in context“’ (Andreotti 2010: 234)?

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:

interactive introspection by which educators encourage learners to speak about their needs and values as viewed interactively through the prism of the topics discussed with their peers … [in order to] critically examine the assumptions underlying their actions and the impact of those actions (praxis) … [which] fosters students’ ability to examine systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against these systems (critical consciousness).

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).

Concluding remarks

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.

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Research ethics statement

The article analyses open-access secondary data downloaded from the World Values Survey website. The WVS6 data was subject to ethics clearance. No additional research ethics clearance was required.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the authors during peer review of this article have been made. The authors declare no further conflicts with this article.

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