Two Cases of Teacher Professional Learning Programs for Global Citizenship Education in the United States and South Korea

• In Event: Teacher Education and Comparative and International Education: Exploring the Symbiotic Relationship between Two Scholarly Fields

Proposal

This paper draws on two professional development programs, one from the United States, and the other from South Korea, and investigates how these two programs rationalize and implement in-service teacher training for teaching students as (future) global citizens. We highlight the contextual forces in shaping GCE frameworks adopted in the two programs and take a comparative inquiry perspective informed by the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) to analyze the possible points of convergence and divergence in their approaches to GCE. Additionally, findings based on the two programs offer new visions to stimulate the revival of CIE in teacher preparation and professional learning, since GCE could mediate CIE within teacher education via a contribution to teachers’ interests in global commons (Torres & Bosio, 2020), moral responsibility, civic virtues, and participation when teaching comparative or international perspectives, issues, or beliefs.
Through a qualitative content analysis of program descriptions on websites and online documents, we ask 1) How do these two professional development programs prepare in-service teachers to teach global citizenship? 2) What are the similarities and differences in terms of the content and pedagogies for GCE covered in the two programs? Before transitioning to an overview of the paper, we start with illustrating the dual nature of CIE (Wolhuter, 2021, p. 12) and its academic positions. First of all, CIE embodies a thread of research method. In the case of teacher learning for GCE, a comparative inquiry for this research topic has the explanatory power to learn from the different countries and their educational systems, issues, and challenges (Wolhuter, 2021), embedded in and reflecting a bigger social and cultural context. A comparison of GCE topics and pedagogies also enables educators to see GCE from new perspectives, and these widened perceptions could contribute to policy, practices, and assessment for GCE.
In this paper, we first revisit literature on the conceptualization of GCE and the important role teachers play, followed by a review of the trends and tensions regarding the inclusion of GCE components in teacher education. Then we set the study background and discuss how GCE is contextualized in the U.S. and South Korea, respectively. Andreotti’s (2006) Critical GCE theoretically illuminates the study, and with this theoretical position GCE must be geared towards challenging assumptions and mechanisms for sustaining inequality. We present the findings as a two-case study through a qualitative content analysis on two programs: Strive for Future Teaching (SFT) and Capacity-Building on GCED for Teachers. The first program is nested within a teacher training organization affiliated with a West Coast U.S. university, and the latter is under the Asia Pacific Centre of Education for International Understanding (APCEIU), located in South Korea and sponsored by UNESCO. The discussion section illustrates the similarities and differences in terms of the frameworks, topics, and pedagogies covered within the two programs. More importantly, the last section on implications for CIE highlights and explains a nexus that GCE can help build between the academic fields of teacher education and CIE.

Author

• Yuqing Hou, UCLA