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Protestant Evangelical Schools and Global Citizenship Education

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Part of the book series: International Handbooks of Religion and Education ((IHRE,volume 6))

Abstract

Although Protestant Evangelical schools may not be vastly different in many ways from any other educational institutions emanating from the globalized Western cultural model, the way that Protestant schools engage with certain elements of an expanding global culture—especially some of its core tensions between particularism and universalism, and secularism and religion—does demonstrate important differences. One arena in which these differences emerge is what has become known as “global citizenship education.” This chapter examines Evangelical schools’ engagement with global citizenship education through the use of the International Baccalaureate curriculum. Protestant Evangelical education is historically associated with the expansion of a (Westernized) global culture through the missionary movement, and while clearly still steeped in Western modernity and a carrier of at least some of its myths, its engagement with global citizenship education works as a force of resistance to particular elements of the standard narrative of modernity (e.g., secularism, relativism, and universalism as against particularism). In this, they seem to be taking a path of “multiple modernities,” resisting some elements of the dominant narrative while embracing others. Protestant education, just as it has in the past, will no doubt continue to influence the development of a world society, or global culture, along these more complicated trajectories of resistance and embrace.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quotations in this section, unless otherwise noted, are from interview data.

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Correspondence to Jeffrey S. Dill .

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Dill, J.S. (2012). Protestant Evangelical Schools and Global Citizenship Education. In: Jeynes, W., Robinson, D. (eds) International Handbook of Protestant Education. International Handbooks of Religion and Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2387-0_34

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