Using International Children's Literature to Support the Development of Global Competence

• In Event: 31.070 - Global Impacts on Higher Education and Teacher Preparation

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a study of U.S. preservice teachers’ engagement with international children's literature through cross-cultural dialogues around those texts. We found that our students’ reading and discussing of international texts with others who were cultural insiders to those texts revealed our students’ (mis)understanding of their own positionality—a concept often overlooked in global teacher education. The cross-cultural dialogues served as a site to facilitate students’ understanding of themselves as “positioned” as they worked toward developing global competence. The selected literature and classroom discussions were catalysts that helped students disentangle conflated conceptualizations of global and local, Other and self, and were one step in preparing them to be educators with a global perspective.

Authors

• Laura Apol, Michigan State University

• Bevin Roue, Michigan State University

• Mark McCarthy, Michigan State University