Abstract
With increasing globalization, the concepts of global citizens as well as Global Citizenship Education (GCE) have gained prominence in the international development discourse. While teacher education is instrumental for GCE, its actual implementation varies, depending on the country and educational context. This thesis explores GCE’s application in South Korea and Norway with regard to elementary school teacher education by examining the structure, teacher professionalism, and contents of GCE pre-service teacher education programs at the university level. A qualitative content analysis is adopted to code, analyze, and compare the curricula documents from two universities from South Korea and Norway, guided by three analytical frameworks that have been developed based on existing theories and suggestions by scholars such as Kerr (1999), Zeichner (1983), Oxley and Morris (2013), and so on. The study reveals that in South Korea, GCE contents are presented as pedagogical and contents knowledge under the domains ‘pedagogy’, ‘subject didactics’, ‘subject contents’, and ‘liberal arts’ and relatively lesser subjects address GCE, treated in individual topics. Conversely, in Norway, aspects of leadership for practical problem-solving are apparent in the content and most subjects integrate GCE contents, mainly under ‘subject didactics’. Teacher professionalism in South Korea reflects the notion of technical teacher professionalism while teacher professionalism in Norway is understood as flexible professionalism. Regarding GCE as a whole in South Korea, moral GCE manifests itself relatively strongly, followed by cultural, competency, social and political GCE in South Korea. Norway, on the other hand, cultural, environmental, social, moral, critical, and spiritual GCE are emphasized in that order. On the basis of these findings, GCE in both countries are discussed within analytical frameworks and each social and educational context. A main argument made is that GCE teacher education requires critical attitudes through communication within real-world. In addition, when it comes to implementation of GCE, it needs flexibility as well as a critical debate between global and local values.