Children As World Citizens: Diversity, Pluralistic Citizenship, and Belonging in the O Mundo Picture Book Project

Processes of migration, European integration, globalization, and decolonization pose new challenges for citizenship education, i.e. the preparation for active participation in democratic communities. Ongoing debates about the meanings of belonging in a globalizing Europe are transforming citizenship from an exclusive node of identification with the nation-state into a multi-dimensional identification process with socio-spatial communities at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of global society. The contributions to this roundtable all discuss specific cases of childhood heritage practices with a view to gain greater clarity about the ways in which they may provide citizenship education with suitable content while navigating their way around the pitfalls of nationalism and universalism. Children's fictions, we argue, are eminently suitable for socializing children into the paradoxical European project of creating unity in diversity.