In the West, the teaching of critical thinking, albeit

Important and challenging theoretical debates and questions arising from considerations of the role of citizenship education in the current “global era” are evident in academic literature. Ultimately, our scholarly work must also engage with what happens in our elementary, secondary, and post-secondary classrooms. Much important scholarly attention is being directed to debates about the nature of globalization, and about national and, increasingly, global concepts of citizenship, multiculturalism, and social movements of global resistance. However, much of this work is done outside of a direct engagement with teachers, students, and classroom practices and is consequently left at a level of abstraction that appears disconnected from the day-to-day work of public schooling. Indeed, when working through significant theoretical interjections and conversations that engage with the complexities and possibilities to which we are drawn, we can never forget that the “what” and “how” of teaching and learning, and the values that circulate within classrooms, reflect the global movements of contemporary history and are shaped by a sense that we must take-up global issues. We must, therefore, recognize what Pashby (this issue) refers to as the global imperative that exerts particular pressure on educational theory, practice, policy, and politics. To do this we must struggle with questions of theory that inform our scholarly and our practical work as educators, be that practice in faculties of education or in K to 12 classrooms. This special themed issue presents important questions, concerns, and possibilities that mark both theoretical discourses and classroom practice.

This study examines the little-studied phenomenon of teacher mentoring for global consciousness. It reviews the relationship between secondary school teachers participating in an international service-learning (ISL) project in Nicaragua and an NGO, Canadian Youth Abroad (CYA). CYA facilitates short, but intensive, ISL experiences. The teachers work for a publicly funded Catholic district school board in Ontario, Canada. Teachers who travel to Nicaragua with the students are mentored and accompanied by more experienced peers - "veteran" CYA/ISL teacher-participants. The mentoring process seeks to impart the CYA’s particular transformative values to the new teacher-participants and through them, to their students. These values challenge the dominant charitable "help the poor" model of North-South engagement. The teacher-mentors follow CYA's Freirian pedagogical model that stresses the value of solidarity between Canadian and Nicaraguan participants.

Despite a growing recognition that established notions of democracy, nationhood, citizenship, and ethnicity are giving way to emerging notions of democratic, multicultural, global citizenship, there are few curricular guidelines to achieve this expectation. This is especially the case at the elementary level where there isn't even a consensus that such an approach is appropriate. Faced with this lack of consensus and the resulting lack of curricular leadership and driven by the need to respond to the needs and interests of their students, elementary teachers, influenced by the particularities of their local circumstances, follow their instincts and rely on each other with respect to how to teach what is variously called global education, global citizenship education, or education from a global perspective. Elementary teachers are reshaping the practice of what is referred to in this paper as global (citizenship) education at the classroom level. While such innovations can frequently lead to creative results, they can also result in highly idiosyncratic interpretations of what constitutes the most effective approach to teaching from a global perspective or what constitutes global citizenship. This paper is a case study of the efforts of the staff of one small-town Ontario elementary school to infuse a global perspective throughout the grades from K to 8 and across the curriculum.

Despite the existence of success stories of individual teachers and even school-wide groups of teachers successfully teaching from a global perspective, this paper raises a basic question: to what extent can the average teacher be an agent of change in the tradition of Dewey, Freire, and Giroux? The questioning of this role arises from the observation that many teachers are high achieving graduates of the very school system to which they have returned; and, as a result of spending their formative years in largely untroubled middle-class circumstances, are steeped in the dominant neoliberal ideology and consumer-orientation of the global market society. The author implicitly raises the issue, especially given his concerns about the power of the dominant ideology, as to just how critical and how transformative the actual classroom practice of global education and global citizenship education is or has the potential of being.