Children’s Literature as Pedagogical Content and Method in Cultivating Global Teacher Ethics

• In Event: Curriculum and Aesthetics

Abstract

Our global era of standards (Spring, 2006) promises to professionalize the field of education while also homogenizing the curricula and future global person. Capitalistic tendencies can influence classroom pedagogies to become market-like (Renshaw, 2013). Technology creates opportunity for unprecedented innovation contributing to international peace or conflict. Technology leaders recognize need to prepare educational designers able to navigate complex webs of information to cultivate meaningful knowledge (Kilbane & Milman, 2014). Sanger, Osguthorpe, & Fenstermacher (2013) further highlight that teaching is a moral work and that teachers as moral beings are engaged in moral endeavors, including critical reflection, character development, identity and relational development. Teacher educators need to create pedagogical opportunity for teachers to experience their profession as “infused with moral and ethical expectations, responsibilities, and complexities” (Campbell, 2013, p. 41). In an increasingly diverse global society, key questions emerge, including how to create such pedagogical opportunity and what curricular content will form the foundation of such learning.

This teacher educator self-study explores the creation of children’s literature as pedagogical content and method in helping teachers navigate the complex content of global ethics and how teaching as a moral work may be approached systematically in the teacher education profession. (See Appendix) By taking up her own a/r/tographic ethical inquiry (Irwin et al., 2006) into environmental sustainability from Confucian and Western perspectives (Ames & Rosemont, 1998) during a long-term international professional development experience, the author lays a pedagogical foundation others may follow in social cultivation of global ethics (Costa & O’Leary, 2013).
 

Author

• Laura Blythe Liu, Indiana University