Table Of ContentA volume in
Research in Social Education
Merry M. Merryfield, Series Editor
2
Research in Social Education
Merry M. Merryfield, Series Editor
Critical Issues in Social Studies Research for the 21st Century
Edited by William B. Stanley
Critical Issues in Social Studies Teacher Education
Edited by Susan Adler
Critical Race Theory Perspectives on the Social Studies: The Profession, Policies, and Curriculum
Edited by Gloria Ladson-Billings
Education for Democracy: Contexts, Curricula, Assessments
Edited by Walter C. Parker
Research Methods in Social Studies Education: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives
Edited by Keith C. Barton
Social Education in Asia: Critical Issues and Multiple Perspectives
Edited by David L. Grossman and Joe Tin-Yau Lo
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Critical Global Perspectives
Rethinking Knowledge about Global Societies
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Binaya Subedi
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Critical global perspectives : rethinking knowledge about global societies /
edited by Binaya Subedi.
p. cm. -- (Research in social education)
Includes bibliographical references.
9781607523888
1. Education--Social aspects. 2. Education and globalization. 3.
Education--Cross-cultural studies. 4. Multicultural education--Moral and
ethical aspects. I. Subedi, Binaya.
LC191.C68 2010
370.116--dc22
2009047644
Copyright © 2010 Information Age Publishing Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise,
without written permission from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
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Table of Contents
Research in Social Education
Title Page
Copyright Page
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 2 - [HOW] DO WE TEACH ABOUT WOMEN OF THE WORLD IN TEACHER
EDUCATION?
CHAPTER 3 - “ICKITY-ACKITY OPEN SESAME”
CHAPTER 4 - POWER, SPACE, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF DIFFERENCE
CHAPTER 5 - DECONSTRUCTING EURO-CENTRIC MYTHS ABOUT MUSLIM WOMEN
CHAPTER 6 - THE CURRICULUM OF GLOBALIZATION
CHAPTER 7 - TEACHER PREPARATION FOR GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES PEDAGOGY
CHAPTER 8 - SEEKING A CURRICULAR SOUL
CHAPTER 9 - EDUCATION FOR A GLOBAL ERA
CHAPTER 10 - UNLEARNING THE SILENCE IN THE CURRICULUM
CHAPTER 11 - TRAVEL DIALOGUES OF/TO THE OTHER
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Reading the World Through Critical Global Perspectives
Binaya Subedi
Ohio State University
The primary purpose of this book is to invite educators to (re) think what it means to critically conceptualize
knowledge about the world. In other words, imagining curriculum in a critical way means decolonizing
mainstream knowledge about global societies. Such an approach reevaluates how we have come to know the
world and asks us to consider the socio-political context in which we have come to understand what
constitutes an ethical global imagination. A critical reading of the world calls for the need to examine
alternative ways of knowing and teaching about the world: a pedagogy that recognizes how diverse subjects
have come to view the world. A critical question this book raises is: What are the radical ways of
reconceptualizing curriculum knowledge about global societies so that we can become accountable to the
different ways people have come to experience the world? Another question the book raises is: How do we
engage with complexities surrounding social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, in
the global contexts? Analyzing global issues and events through the prism of social difference opens up spaces
to advocate a transformative framework for a global education curriculum. Transformative in the sense that
such a curriculum asks students to challenge stereotypes and engages students in advocating changes within
local/global contexts.
In an attempt to expand what constitutes legitimate knowledge to be learned within the social studies
(Ross, 2006), a curriculum based on critical global perspective advocates four interrelated interventions. First,
it argues that educators need to look at the historical factors that have influenced how we have come to
understand the contemporary unequal global formations. In the context of social studies curriculum, such a
perspective demands that we look at the colonial or the imperial discourses that have shaped knowledge about
non-Western societies (Merryfield, 2001). By doing so, it highlights how discourses on race, class, gender,
religion, and so on, have always been part of the colonial or neo-colonial imagination (Mohanty, 2004; Rhee,
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2006). Indeed, the legacy of imperialism continues to shape the nature of knowledge students in U.S. schools
learn about the world. This legacy has “left us with liabilities of an educational nature. Imperialism afforded
lessons in how to divide the world” (Willinsky, 1998, p. 13). The historical construction of knowledge about
the Third World has always been imbricated in power and racial discourses (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997;
Spivak, 1988). As Said (1979) described in his work Orientalism, in the Western imagination, the Third
World has been historically represented “by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it,
by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3). Said went on to argue that Eurocentric academic writings had “a
certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a
manifestly different (or alternate and novel) world” (p. 12).
Second, a critical global perspective advocates the value of going beyond the nation-state-centered approach
to teaching about topics such as history, politics, culture, and so on. It calls for the need to develop curriculum
that accounts for transnational formations: an intervention that asks us to go beyond issues that are confined
within national borders. Such a practice recognizes the complicated ways the local is connected to the global
and vice versa and cautions against creating a hierarchy between national and global issues (Coloma, 2008;
Daza, 2008). It also suggests the need to critically examine the pitfalls of forming dichotomies between the
local (or the national) and the global or the center and the periphery. In schools, students are inundated with
center/periphery representations based on dominant ideas that the Western society “eternally advances,
progresses, modernizes” and “the rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates” (Blaut, 1993, p. 1).
Binary oppositions create superior/inferior or civilized/uncivilized ways of looking at cultural practices and do
not reveal the complexities of experiences that are connected to issues of power and privilege.
Third, a curriculum based on critical global perspectives asks that we be ethically accountable for the ways
we have imagined global societies so that our ways of “including” do not end up excluding the global Other.
The idea of “inclusion” in a critical sense demands that we become responsible to how we have theorized or
conceptualized local–global relationships. Sadly, “even with the best of intentions, as we will see, it is all too
easy to slip into colonizing and stereotyped ways of doing education” (Crocco, Chapter 2, this volume). Thus,
the inclusion of critical global perspective is about being reflexive on how we have included the Other so that
the very act of inclusion does not appropriate global cultures, histories, and experiences to further claim the
superiority of specific national/cultural ways of being. It asks that the act of being globally conscious is about
unlearning what we have learned before and is about coming to terms with knowledge that is difficult to
understand (Kumashiro, 2004; Subreenduth, 2006). It is about recognizing that “our knowledge is imperfect,
provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence” (Appiah, 2006, p. 144). Thus, educators may
greatly benefit by analyzing self–Other relationships that are always embedded within power relationships
(Alcoff, 1991; Fine, 1994). Such an orientation invites us to be reflexive about our own subjectivities and how
we are implicated (in different ways) in the contemporary unequal global conditions.
Lastly, a curriculum that values a critical global perspective includes knowledge that has been historically
marginalized. It places emphasis on articulating worldviews through “subaltern knowledge,” the kinds of
knowledge that has been viewed as unworthy to be learned in schools. The value of learning marginalized
experiences, histories, and cultures is particularly significant, considering schools often place emphasize on the
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