Please read the extract and discuss. ? Introduce the task by giving a very brief summary of the extract. ? Which issues does it raise? (Look for at least 4) ? Relate the content to your experience/understanding – ownership of your writing. ? Select one issue you may discuss in detail. ? Why did you choose this? ? Find references to support your choice (further investigation needed at this stage!!) ? Conclusion – what did you learn? The extract starts here and continues to the end of the second page: The Global Citizen Convergence around global markets has led to international conventions by which states have set common standards on fundamental human rights, including the status of women and of refugees, health and safety, employment and other measures of progress. Emerging from this new world order is a yearning for the Global Citizen: a responsible and responsive person who has been educated to owe allegiance to the world as much as to the nation state into which they were born. These citizens demonstrate this cosmopolitan loyalty by being actively concerned for the fate of all humanity, and they uphold the ideals of peace, justice, respect and sustainability as ways to achieve a better future for everyone. You may consider yourself to be such a mortal, ‘bound to other human beings by ties of recognition and concern’. With this level of concern comes a sense of complicity, culpability and responsibility for the state of the world. It has been argued that it is wrong to burden schoolchildren with such depressing truths, particularly as education for global citizenship is made to carry a range of ideas that may be innovative but are not necessarily connected (Young 2004). Yet there is a growing international consensus that education must be directed to encourage a global ethic among young people. Such an ethic would require all of us to recognise a duty to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of all other human beings through an early understanding of the new realities of unprecedented global change (Dower 2003; Claire 2001). A study across nine nations of what policy-makers judged such change to require of people by the year 2020, showed consensus around certain essential citizen characteristics: • cooperation; • tolerance; • a willingness to resolve conflict non-violently; • a willingness to modify lifestyle habits to safeguard the environment and • a readiness to defend human rights. The appetite to engage in politics at local, national and international levels was deemed essential (Cogan and Derricott 2000). Oxfam (1997) has gone further, requiring the Global Citizen to be ‘outraged by social injustice’, infused with ‘a belief that we can make a difference’ and hence be ‘willing to act in order to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place’. The momentum within world events may be advancing nations and individuals fitfully towards a wider sense of community and social cohesion, despite setbacks such as the rejection of a European constitution by the citizens of European Union member states. As nations shoulder their responsibility to uphold democracy, to combat terrorism and to find greater economic harmony, their peoples can be seen taking on this mantle of global citizenship, working for world peace, sustenance and sustainability in a multi-ethnic, multicultural world where national boundaries no longer offer define their total reality. Many of these advances have been denied to Majority World countries, this being the term favoured by Oxfam to more fairly characterise ‘those countries described as developing’ (Young and Commins 2002). Dogged as they are by poverty, injustice and disease, these nations have little real influence over superpowers ready to act against the wishes of the United Nations, an organisation which stands as the only approximation of a world government upon which the concept of a world citizenry must in some way depend. Pause for thought: the characteristics of the global citizen A survey of any group or gathering of students will show that many locate their origins in other countries. We treat this difference as a source of pride in ourselves. As never before, we live and work alongside people from all over the world. Indeed the added value that students and academics from the ‘South’ bring to learning communities is recognised in the recruitment policies of most universities (Khamis 2005). We can plot the significance of every decision each of us makes as consumers. We travel where we wish as of right. Our culture is shaped by global influences. It is a truism to say we become global citizens the moment we surf the web to find similarities or differences with our counterparts abroad, the moment we step on other soil.