Educators today must be able to respond to the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and to teach all students the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for civic participation in a globalized, pluralist society. While state departments of education and national teacher organizations have begun to adopt global awareness in their teaching standards and evaluation tools, educators need to understand what globally competent teachers actually do in classrooms across subject areas and grade levels. This qualitative, multiple case study explores the signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005) of 10 in-service teachers in one southeastern state who teach for global competence in math, music, science, English, social studies, and language classes across elementary, middle, and high schools. We found three signature pedagogies that characterized globally competent teaching practices across participants: 1) intentional integration of global topics and multiple perspectives into and across the standard curriculum; 2) ongoing authentic engagement with global issues; and 3) connecting teachers’ global experiences, students’ global experiences, and the curriculum. These signature pedagogies provide visions of possibility for concrete practices teachers can adapt to infuse global citizenship education into their own contexts and for policies that school districts and teacher education programs can consider in preparing and supporting teachers in this work.
In recent years, multicultural literature has made its way into language arts education reform documents, onto classrooms shelves, and ultimately into the hands of the diverse student body in the United States. This article documents the experiences of a ninth‐grade class as students read and responded to N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain and related texts. By including multicultural texts in her curriculum, the teacher helped her students respect and understand their own culture and that of others. While the experience enabled minority students to find their voices in the classroom, in some respects it simultaneously stifled the voices of majority students. Although the use of multicultural literature sheds light on the cultures of others and holds up a mirror to students' own culture, it can also reinforce notions of “culturelessness” among white, European American student populations. If multicultural literature is to act as mirror and window for all students, thus leading to a more culturally affirming reality in schools, it is imperative for teachers and students to include “whiteness” in conversations about culture.
This article describes the collaborative work of three teachers—two Arab and one Jewish—as they taught first grade together in a then new bilingual/bicultural school in Israel. The article is based on an ethnographic study the author conducted at the school during the school's first year (1998–1999), examining in particular the interactions between the teachers to determine how working collaboratively inside and outside of the same classroom context influenced each teacher's understandings about themselves and each other as Arab and Jew. Together, these three teachers negotiated their classroom work, entered into planning conversations, held discussions with parents and others, and shared teaching episodes. As they discovered and worked through the dilemmas of this collaborative work, they learned more about themselves as Arab and Jew, ultimately reshaping how they taught their students. As three teachers with different cultural histories, they were forced to reflect on their beliefs and actions from a number of perspectives as they engaged in the work of the school. They began to develop—or further develop in some cases—a critical consciousness in each other's company. This was particularly true for the Jewish teacher who is central in this article. It is her learning—as a member of the culture of power in Israel—that most closely resembles the potential learning that could be realized by today's teaching cohort in the United States if teacher educators create structures and opportunities that enable meaningful cross-cultural learning to take place. The author posits that a more collaborative and cross-cultural model of teaching and teacher learning is worth thinking about as teacher educators work to prepare teachers everywhere, particularly in the United States, to address the needs of the diverse students in today's schools.
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