Cultivating critical global citizenship education through defamiliarisation and collaborative online international learning

Abstract

This study employed Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional approach to critical discourse analysis to investigate the potential of defamiliarisation, supported by collaborative online international learning, to help pre-service teachers in South Africa and Germany challenge neoliberalism and promote critical global citizenship. A group of pre-service teachers in South Africa and Germany (N = 54) were prompted to critically analyse capitalism’s global influence and articulate their ideas using creative illustrations inspired by the short online film Marx and I. The resulting artwork of a sub-sample of the South African student teachers (n = 7) shows their individual and collective reflections on global injustice, capitalism and human rights abuses, while that of the German student teachers (n = 7) emphasises the refugee crisis in Europe, environmental degradation and social exclusion. The research highlights the usefulness of defamiliarisation in producing context-specific criticisms and transforming student teachers’ perceptions of global socio-political environments. The authors found that defamiliarisation promotes a transdisciplinary approach to teacher education and is valuable for contesting neoliberal beliefs and prevailing narratives, thereby encouraging student teachers’ critical engagement with global challenges.