Engaging in cross-cultural services : a journey to global citizenship

There are two parts in this paper. The first part is to identify and discuss three pairs of concepts: “National Citizenship and Global Citizenship”, “Legal Citizenship and Moral Citizenship”, and “Moral Citizenship and International / Cross Cultural Service-Learning”. Citizenship involves the concept of rights and responsibilities of a person in a country usually having a legitimate government. However, such “legal contract” between the government and the citizens does not exist in the global perspective. Global citizenship education is more appealing to the people’s inner goodwill with moral values and ethical system for the pursuit of a just and harmonious world for all mankind rather than submission to a legal system. This makes the nurturing of core values of social justice, peace, mutual respect, human rights, tolerance of diversity, and protection of the environment through caring services and experiential learning all the more important to our young generation. In order to develop students’ sense of global citizenship, they have to be engaged in a personalized journey with direct communication and interaction with people from different cultural backgrounds facing challenges that are of global scale. For our young generation, they want to be engaged in the real world. They believe in touching rather than listening. They gain confidence to become a change agent through the service they provide. The second part is to present a few cross-cultural service programmes, as examples to demonstrate how such programmes enhance racial harmony, respect for cultural diversity, and sense of responsibility as a global citizen. This part will include analysis on students’ personal reflection after their participation of various international / cross-cultural service programmes to demonstrate their initial journey to cultivate sense of global citizenship