Abstract:
This thesis is an exploratory study of the relationship between global citizenship and literature education from the point of view of students. I employed critical realism as a theoretical foundation to conceptualise both disciplines as specific competencies, which gives me a way to access student perceptions. Inspired by the work of Choo (2013), Nussbaum (2016) and Witte (2008), I have developed a conceptual model of competence indicators, , such as domain-specific knowledge and the willingness to engage with difficult material, that seeks to capture the way global citizenship and literary competence complement one another. This complementarity involves three overarching themes: identity formation (developing agency and emotional maturity), information literacy (learning to critically evaluate information) and extra-territorial orientation (an appreciation for what is physically or figuratively far removed). By means of an exploratory focus group with Year 13 students at a New Zealand girls grammar school, I investigate how students understand and value the complementarity between global citizenship and literary competence. My findings suggest that students understand and value many of the complementary processes between global citizenship and literary competence that have been identified by educationalists, but these processes impact their learning in surprising ways. The participants valued global citizenship and understood it as a broad understanding of the world. They saw works of literature as complex fictional representations of the world. Literaturecan thus serve as an object of inquiry that provides contextual knowledge around students' worldly concerns and allows them to train their information literacy in interpreting that knowledge. It is up to teachers to facilitate engagement with challenging literature and ensure an extra-territorial perspective that increases the scope of student concerns. Literature was able to do this for the participants, simply by requiring a more mentally interactive form of engagement than other media. Furthermore, fiction promoted a personal, yet safe, engagement with different perspectives. The maturity required to successfully engage with a plurality of perspectives is a product of identity formation. For the participants this constituted a combination of developing agency through growing understanding and allowing the insecurities that produce an attitude of self-questioning. Global citizenship and literary competence feed into one another, but aspects of the participants' competence, like communicative ability, did not smoothly transition from an academic to a public context. This limitation is particularly relevant for global citizenship, which involves the capability to take responsible public action.