Benevolence, Belonging and the Global Citizen: A Hermeneutic Study of Teacher Education in Post-colonial Pakista

Abstract

This study examines the experience of pre-service teachers in the Punjab region of Pakistan with regard to global citizenship education (GCE) in their pre-service teacher education programs. There are many examples of the one-way transportation of global citizenship curricula designed in the Global North to post-colonial settings that lack intentional consideration of the respective local processes of meaning-making. This research sought to answer the question of how belonging, benevolence, and pre-service teachers’ positioning themselves as global citizens make sense in a national education system affected by colonial legacy. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used, and 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with pre-service teachers from three teacher education institutions in Punjab. The interviews were transcribed with AI-assisted transcription software and analysed in NVivo 15 with AI-supported coding in an iterative interpretive writing process based on van Manen’s approach. Four themes were generated: understanding teaching as a legacy of obligations, ambivalence about global belonging, benevolence as a disposition, and the classroom as a site of quiet resistance. The results show that there is no abstract ideal of global citizenship for pre-service teachers; rather, it involves a sense of tension between being rooted in the local and imported notions of global responsibility. This study contributes to the scholarship on post-colonial teacher education by showing how the element of benevolence that is typically taken for granted within teacher education can also become a “colonial legacy” as an unexamined element in shaping teacher identity in certain ways. The implications for teacher education policy and curriculum design in Pakistan and other post-colonial contexts are discussed.