Research Log 1

Myers, John. To benefit the world by whatever means possible’: adolescents’ constructed meanings for global citizenship. 36. British Educational Research Journal, 2010. 483.


John Mayers article is a report on a research leaded by him in which 77 students are the sample of an experiment that has as its finality to indentify patterns of student’s thoughts about global citizenship and its complexities; how students understand the relationship of national and global citizenship. Mayers used data collected from online discussion boars, written essays and 20 interviews.
It is said that the focus of the research was not in the acceptance or not of a global citizenship but on the meaning of this topic to all the students studied. It is pointed that all the researches done before did not examine the relationship between adolescents and the global citizenship; everything written by many scholars are related to the adolescents increasing responsibilities in this globalised world but not in how this generation of adolescents interact with this theme. I like how the author puts the globalization as a challenger to the national citizenship, and he indentifies one of the challenges as the increase of individuals taking on global affiliations that extend beyond a single nation. It is obviously noticeable that in the today’s world we are much closer to each other than we were 100 years ago. As I said in my issue paper the technology has put us much closer, and after the Great War 2 the world pass through a re-organization process in which the creation of the United Nations, for example, was one of the main global affiliations mentioned by Mayers.
It is also mentioned in the article that the global citizenship process is sometimes covered by the education provided in the schools when we are still young. The fixation in a national patriotism builds individuals that will have a pre-concept about anything that comes from beyond the national frontiers. It is not the case of some countries such as England and Canada which they have the global citizenship as part of the school curriculum. This makes me believe that the world citizenship process is irreversible even though some cultures refuse it drastically. For example generation Y, the same generation studied by Mayers, shows strong signs that they will be carrying the global unification flag. Adolescents have a more opened mind than their parents and grandparents, and the contact that they have today with different cultures is greater than ever, especially because of the creation of internet and development of airplanes.
I chose this article because it talks exactly about the theme I picked for my research paper which is the World Citizenship. The article explores this theme in a more specific form, it does not covers the relationship of all the population with the global citizenship but specifically the adolescents that are the future of our world and the main responsible for a possible world unification in the near future.