Teaching World Communities as Cultural Translation: A Third Grade Unit of Study

This article bridges scholarship in global education with ele-mentary classroom teaching by presenting a series of lessons that challenge the idea of national culture as fixed and stable. The land we share is most certainly affected by its political borders, but it is also constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations that exist both within and on either side of a border. Yet very often, when teaching about another country, we tend to rely on misappropriated generalizations around food, holidays, and folktales that do not honor how culture moves, changes, and becomes translated by its unique and varied peoples

The Influence of Globally Oriented Teachers’ Positionalities in World History Classrooms

Globally oriented content and perspectives are urgently needed in United States secondary classrooms as the world continues to become more interconnected. U.S. secondary students are typically exposed to global topics in world history courses. There is limited research on the intersection of global education and world history, particularly within empirical studies concerning teachers’ positionalities and practice. This qualitative study explores this gap by asking: How do self-identified globally oriented world history teachers’ positionalities influence their curricular and pedagogical decisions? The sub-questions are: What identities, experiences, and surrounding social structures shape teachers’ understanding of themselves as global educators? Where/when/how do world history teachers position themselves within the knowledge, material, and teaching about the world? This study, utilizing interviews, elicitation tasks (concept mapping, identity card sort, global image ranking), and observations of teaching, investigated eight globally oriented New York City public school world history teachers. Findings suggest reconceptualizing teacher positionalities to include worldviews and place-based experiences abroad in addition to identities, subjectivities, and contexts. These intertwining aspects of world history teachers’ positionalities influenced their practice to teach with a global orientation in a world history classroom. Four worldviews were significant in how these teachers framed the world for themselves and their students: interconnectedness, justice-orientations, cosmopolitanism, and critical perspectives. Place-based experiences abroad were significant aspects to their positionalities in that they gained content knowledge of the place while confronting their social positions and privileges. These engagements contributed to the ways in which they approached their knowledge construction of the world in their approaches to curriculum and teaching. I suggest these aspects of teacher positionalities be integrated into future research in global education and social studies teacher education programs

Global Education in Neoliberal Times: A Comparative Case Study of Two Schools in New York

Preparing students to live in an interconnected world is of central importance in 21st century education. Neoliberal educational contexts, however, thwart efforts to implement more humanistic and critical versions of global education (GE). This comparative case study examines how teachers and administrators enact GE at two schools—one public, the other private—in the New York City metropolitan area. Findings demonstrate the constraints and possibilities of engaging GE in neoliberal educational contexts. Implications for GE scholars and practitioners include study of how wider contextual factors shape GE’s enactment in a neoliberal era