This research study examined how faculty understand the term global citizenship, and the ways in which their understanding of this term provides meaning for their work. Higher education institutions in the U.S. are increasingly shaped by a globalized perspective. College graduates are now expected to have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to enter a workplace shaped by globalization. Colleges and universities have responded to this need through a process of internationalization, however these efforts are often sporadic and uncoordinated in practice (Hudzik, 2015). A growing number of colleges and universities have started using the term global citizenship to help provide direction for campus internationalization. Rather than having a fixed or stable meaning, global citizenship is a contested term that is understood in many different ways (Gaudelli, 2016; Lapayese, 2003; Schattle, 2009). This presents a challenge for college campuses who are appropriating the term for institutional practice even while the meaning is debated. Deardorff (2009) has argued that faculty play a crucial, yet overlooked, role in the development of internationalization and global learning on college campuses. She states that faculty across academic disciplines must be given the opportunity to contribute to institutional questions of internationalization. This is especially important in the process of internationalizing the curriculum. This research used a case study methodology to explore faculty understanding of global citizenship at a single institution in the U.S. The setting was a faith-based liberal arts college with a long established tradition of global learning and preparing students for engaged citizenship in the world. Tully’s (2014) framework for understanding global citizenship was used as a basis for examining how faculty understood global citizenship. The findings from this study affirm the wide range of understanding attributed to the concept of global citizenship. The faculty participants understood global citizenship along a continuum of meaning rather than within fixed categories. Some faculty fully embraced global citizenship, while others were skeptical of the term or rejected it entirely. As a result, the ways in which global citizenship had meaning for faculty work also varied. Themes emerged regarding the ways in which global citizenship had meaning in the areas of curriculum, as part of shaping institutional identity, and the position of global citizenship as a disputed term in this particular case. The ways in which faculty came to understand global citizenship was also examined, with their personal background, their academic department, and colleagues within the college emerging as most influential. The study concludes with implications for practice, including recommendations for integrating global citizenship within a liberal arts college.
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