Searching for Global citizenship education. The Australian Curriculum from the perspective of a systematic analysis

In Australia, the government policy on multiculturalism has intensified recently, over the past decade. This policy carried with it an expansion of cross-curricular initiatives to support global understanding and to prepare young students to actively participate in a democratic society. However, Global citizenship education (GCE) even now occupies a relatively marginal place in numerous school curricula, confused with an international understanding, or a vague sense of global connectivity and belonging. This paper presents a curriculum evaluation model to analyse how GCE is embedded into the current Australian Curriculum (AC), version 8.4, Year 8. The methodology illustrates three phases in exploring the AC: identify key terms in the text, categorize them into four groups, and discover new patterns. The analysis provides a new method to examine the key characteristics of the different curricula that promote (or claim to promote) GCE.