Citizenship education and music education: exploring the crossroads between globalisation and localisation in Taiwan

In recent decades, the goals of education worldwide have included preparing students for the changing role of citizenship in a globally integrated world. With particular reference to Taiwan’s education, this paper will adopt a qualitative content analysis of official documents, selected music textbooks, and other relevant literatures to demonstrate the transmission of music cultures and extra-musical learning of song singing in Taiwan as it relates to citizenship in the local-global context. Despite the inclusion of traditional Chinese music and other world music in the school curriculum, music education for citizenship has placed more emphasis on the Taiwanese-centred narrative in line with the shifting cross-strait relationship between Taiwan and Mainland China. Given this complex context of the dynamics of local and global citizenship, songs from both local and foreign literatures have been selected for the learning of love, religion, and multiple relationships with family, friends, schoolmates, the local community, and the planet to demonstrate the development of citizenship education in a liberal and communitarian construction in the music curriculum.