Toward New Worlds: An Ethnographic Study Probing Global Citizenship Education, Cosmopolitan Literacies, and Multimodal Assemblages

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Reframing Digital and Multimodal Literacies and Rethinking Online Learning

Abstract

Aspiring towards more ethically and equitably interconnected futures, many institutions reorient classrooms to cultivate global citizens. Thus, I add ethnographic research to how a K-8 bilingual school in Northern California instantiates a global turn and teaches cosmopolitan literacies. I interrogate how students are taught to draw differences in the first instance, and suggest the need to move beyond understandings of the world built on colonial architectures of nation-state. Instead, we can borrow from students’ everyday multimodal practices that illuminate (de/re)assembled identities across multiple times and spaces, reconstituting new socialities and selves in world(s). My research probes institutional narratives against students’ existing literacies to reveal ongoing negotiations between forces determining how to read the world(s) and be read as global citizens.

Author

• Catherine Park, University of California - Berkeley