ANTI-OPPRESSIVE GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION THEORY AND PRACTICE IN PRE-SERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION

Pre-service teacher-educators are tasked with teaching not only important content, but also the realities of complex local and global social justice issues that impact their students and those students’ future students. To address the colonial roots of development (Arshad-Ayaz, Andreotti, and Sutherland, 2017; Pashby, 2015), which promotes a lens of ‘helping’ and projects aiming to civilise the ‘Other’ (Andreotti, 2006), I share the theory and practice of an anti-oppressive global citizenship education (GCE), which I utilise in a teacher-education programme in Japan. I borrow Andreotti’s theorisations and combine terminology from Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) to understand an anti-oppressive GCE, which not only understands the complexities and fluidity of societies, but also uncovers the systemic oppression that organises societies. Foundational terminology is explained to understand systemic oppression and constitutive subjectivities (Coloma, 2008), and this theory is used to explain several anti-oppressive GCE practices which promote self-reflexivity and go beyond inclusion for pre-service teacher-educators. In this new COVID-19 era where injustices are magnified, this anti-oppressive GCE encourages teacher-educators to go back to the basics to understand their role in systemic oppression, as well as their role in dismantling it.