Abstract

Global Citizenship Education is increasingly being adopted by national policymakers in response to the mandates of the international agenda, which recognizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of people on a global scale and advocates for global equality and social justice. Connecting Classrooms Through Global Learning is a global program that promotes educational links between schools in the UK and schools in the Global South to achieve these aims. This thesis explores the paradoxical approaches that underpin the discursive construction of these links. In theory, they advocate reciprocity and equality through a critical and social justice-oriented pedagogy. In practice, they reproduce dominant discourses that marginalize the Global South to serve the UK national interests. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological approach, this thesis investigated the discursive indications of neoliberal, liberal humanist, and neocolonial discourses in these links and their impact on social relations, identities and subjectivities of teachers and students on both sides. Applying a decolonial framework revealed the interplay of these discourses in inculcating identities and enacting social relations that are consistent with the configurations of the global market, the humanist rhetoric of ‘common good’, and the modern/colonial imaginary, but at odds with the Global Citizenship Education pursuit of equality and social justice. While continuing to relegate the Global South ways of knowing and ways of being, binary representations and unequal power relations maintain the hegemony of the UK as a global power at a time marked by post-Brexit national anxieties and economic uncertainties.