Glocality, Reflexivity, Interculturality, and Worldmaking: A Framework for Critical Global Teaching

At the time of this writing, we are closing the unprecedented year of 2020 and embarking further into the new decade. The year 2020 rendered powerful reminders of our global interconnectedness, interdependence, and indebtedness to each other. We have a deepening sense of the reality that our interconnectedness will continue with increasingly sticky entanglements as we meet the frontier of our collective challenges, opportunities, and potentiality. This collection of articles is a labor of love focused on our collective potential as a field. We affirm our field’s commitment to bringing together scholars from the Global South and North to further map the terrain for developing a linguistically and interculturally competent teaching force to facilitate global citizenship, critical dispositions, and interculturality across the globe. Our purpose in framing this special issue on preparing teachers to serve in the global landscape is to explore and examine how we should move forward in both conceptualizing the global landscape and preparing educators to serve in that landscape.

Globalization is a social situation or sociological reality describing “human conditions in a globalized world” (Beck, 2006, as cited in Wahlström, 2014, p. 114). Features of globalization include (1) integrated economics, trans-multinational flows of assets, and physical and human capital; (2) a geopolitical matrix, the interconnectedness, and interdependence of countries; and (3) cultural aspects, the flow of values, meanings, and ideas in the contact points, uptake, and transmission of globalization (Kellner, 2002; Miglani & Burch, 2020; Spring, 2015). Historicized power and privilege are constantly reanimated through these features of globalization, pushing homogenizing tendencies and obscuring the asymmetries of global consequences experienced on the local scale (Apple, 2011). Although commonly imposed from above, globalization can be reconfigured and contested by the local (Dei, 2014; Kellner, 2002).

This insight elucidates that engagement with the global does not require a fixation on comparison and dualism. Instead, it is an opportunity to create flexible, liminal, and hybrid spaces for more complexity in engagement, outlook, identity, and imagination. Hybridity, as envisioned by Suzanne Choo (2011), offers fertile ground for “positive difference,” where tensions can co-exist and co-evolve in shared spaces that do not succumb to homogenizing (p. 49). The curriculum serves as an important hybrid space for global imaginaries where students can map their own dialectics into the futures they see with others in an interconnected world. In this globalized arena, teachers are front-line mentors for students growing up in an increasingly global and interconnected world. There is a high degree of agreement regarding the fact that education requires a global frame.

There are currently ongoing efforts to internationalize teacher education and infuse formalized schooling with global orientations (OECD/Asia Society, 2018; UNESCO, 2016). Teachers have been called upon to develop and facilitate global education and engagement (Dei, 2014; Goodwin, 2020; Ukpokodu, 2010). Reflected in this special issue are explorations into the possibilities and challenges of developing critical global education that can play a role in “mediating and challenging the differential benefits,” and consequences globalization is producing and exacerbating on the local scale (Apple, 2011, p. 223). The articles in this special issue illustrate the unique local groundings, personal experiences, educational expressions, and communities of inquiry emergent from the professional training and teaching of critical global perspectives.

Critical global education

Critical global education is a particular approach to global education “that seeks to educate students about the causes and consequences of global injustice and aims to support students to work in solidarity with the world’s people” (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011, p. 521, emphasis ours). The orientation of critical global education does not see economic development and educational standardization as a means to a global end. Critical global education is distinct from solely economic, human capital, or ethnocentric understandings of globalization. Critical global education maintains that globalization is a reality, not necessarily an ideal. Integral to critical global education is an emphasis on interconnectedness, shared humanity, and acting in solidarity on issues, such as human rights, health and well-being, peace, environmental justice, and poverty (Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Ukpokodu, 2010). In addition to a shared humanity, critical global educators respect difference, value diversity, and enact interculturality (Apple, 2011; Jorge, 2012; Song, 2020).

Critical orientations

Critical global educative sensibilities require a deep understanding of how we acquire knowledge and know our environment, including our place in the world. We allow ourselves to develop nondualistic outlooks to live and thrive in diverse spaces and to understand ourselves as biosocialcultural beings. Moving beyond dualistic thinking allows for the development of complex views of ourselves and others. Interacting and acting with diverse others necessitates moving from dualistic otherness to critical interculturality – a “move from a mere emphasis on people from the outside (migrants, ‘others’) to considering the diverse diversities from within” (Dervin, 2013, p. 3). In other words, rather than comparing and judging the other, as teachers, we need to recognize the fluidity and complexity of our own identities and the multiple identities of those with whom we interact, including our students and their families. Focusing on just culture “hides unequal power relations, including poverty [and] violence, structural inequalities such as racism, and possibilities of multiple identities” (p. 6). Because consciousness is integral to global education’s critical orientations, interculturality requires a particularly experientially dependent pedagogical orientation that allows for rich recontextualization about who we are, who we are in relation to others, and how to share the world with others (Wahlström, 2014).

Critical orientations in global education are dependent upon frameworks grounded in cosmopolitan outlooks to disrupt nationalistic points of view and facilitate critical cosmopolitanism. Therefore, a critical “cosmopolitan outlook” (Wahlström, 2014, p. 114) describes an orientation aligned with particular values. A cosmopolitan outlook orients us flexibly to “take the interdependence of the world, especially the global risks, as its starting point” (p. 115). Flexible means that our loyalties do not need to be us and them contradictions, as highlighted previously; we can create and thrive in educative hybrid spaces (Choo, 2011; Tierney, 2018). Engaging in hybrid spaces necessitates particular moral and ethical standpoints that direct action (Byker & Marquardt, 2016). Our moral and ethical obligations expand beyond human concerns. We have an obligation to embrace our inherent interdependence and understand that we are one part of a planetary system. In the process of action, we engage, care, and hold a desire to know each other, even the non-human, as we address the existential risks that are already challenging our social world and the planet (Misiaszek, 2015).

Cosmopolitan routines and habits

Staying grounded in cosmopolitan frameworks, in addition to grandiose action on a global scale, critical global education is also embodied and enacted every day. From a biosociocultural view of human development, being globally competent describes the everyday and ongoing process of becoming someone who does something. Consistent with this view, action, emotions, and cognition are interdependently undertaken in a situation to address emergent and ongoing ends (e.g., organism-in-environment). Habits are descriptive of active adaption and embodied cognition embedded in a social context (Rogoff, 1990). Particularly relevant is the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962/2002) and the Pragmatism of William James (1912/2000) and John Dewey (1980) that speak to the role of habits and indeterminacy in learning. Dewey (1983) used the term “habit reconstruction” (p. 88) to describe growth in much the same way as scholars today describe dispositions and criticality. Becoming globally competent means progressively seeing the world and our place in it from multiple perspectives and having a reference point for the actions available to us to act on issues of global significance (Boix Mansilla & Suárez-Orozco, 2020; Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2019). This requires seeing the body “as essential to the production of meaning” and knowledge (Boler, 2007, p. 162), which means that global competence involves emotion, perspective, and sensitivities as much as cognition.

Routines rooted in cosmopolitanism habits entail the emotional, social, cultural, critical, and ethical (Boix Mansilla & Suárez-Orozco, 2020; Choo, 2020). For example, teachers invite students in structured ways to interrogate whose voices are present and whose are missing from discussions or texts and zoom from local contexts to global. Habits do not develop with occasional use, but rather require an enculturation wherein global routines are an integral part of the learning environment (Boix Mansilla, 2016/2017). Use of routines regularly provide learners with means to engage in respectful dialog about global issues in a responsible and complex manner. By retaining the contours of the authentic forms of participation inherent in how humans acquire habits and creating meaning and perspective in expression and communication, we can shape classroom routines to make the unrealized present in imagination, and change their world by just action.

The critical orientations and cosmopolitan routines required to be globally competent and work in solidarity with the world’s people describe a (1) globally competent and critical subjectivity involved in (2) action with diverse others to critically understand and act upon local and global inequity and oppression. Educators are well aware of the relationship between these two items. We have experienced and observed the “profound connection” (Wenger, 1998, p. 149) coupling identity and experience/practice, a basic tenet of biosociocultural learning theories in education. We are what we participate in, including our ability to reflect on actions, thoughts, and imagined possibilities.

Transactions for transformation: Inquiring, experiencing, communicating, and participating

Critical global education retains openings for transformation by engendering transaction in the elements of inquiry, direct experience, intercultural communication, and the creation of participatory learning environments. Transactions take place in the Deweyan artistry of experience, indeterminacy, and activity, and for humans, transactions rely heavily on communication, the primary medium of imaginaries and associated action (Wahlström, 2014, p. 123). John Dewey (1929/1958) provides us with a pedagogical focus on social and naturalistic inquiry and the embodied, transformative experiences such explorations and participation affords (e.g., organism-in-environment, transactions). Dewey’s notion of transaction sees humans as “functional ‘life processes’ or activities” (Garrison, 2001, p. 277), which means humans are more than observers of their world. We are ongoing events transacting with our environment by simultaneously calling upon the interdependent holistic functionality of living, the actions, emotions, and cognition to understand situations and respond (i.e., undertake actions to resolve things); we are not finished products. As social humans living by way of our environment, the transactions constitutive of individual and associative living require “holistic action” (p. 278) through which we coordinate with others, non-humans, and objects in our environment to address needs, desires, and wants. Teachers positively function in classroom practice when they are holistically attuned to students’ participation and the class as a system. Additionally, the term environment should evoke all aspects integral to living and well-being: biological, social, and emotional needs, and the landscape of our natural, built, and cultural worlds. From this perspective, living is made up of transactions grounded in experience and communication and manifest in enaction, how we perceive situations and act (Wahlström, 2014).

The focus on transactions in critical orientation of global education is an acknowledgment of how important holistic and authentic educative experiences and diverse communication are in learning, imagining, and acting with others. The focus here is education with, rather than about or for, others. In all its forms, education is “humanity’s unique method of acquiring, transmitting, and producing knowledge for interpreting and acting upon the world” (Levinson, 2000, p. 2). The design of educative events from critical global perspectives call upon embodied experience to develop global competence because critical perspectives do not preface instrumental skill and information more than the formation of habits. Habits go beyond cognition to facilitate “non-measurable values that promote a climate of critical and reflective stewardship of resources, and more importantly, extends the space of accountability beyond one’s community and nation” (Choo, 2011, p. 54).

Thus, we are our habits, and our habits are our will, character, and everything else – all of which are socially distributed possessions (Dewey, 1922/1988). Transactions become transformative when they entail the establishment and disruption of constellations of habits. Building on Dewey’s distinction of established habits and situations where habits are disrupted, Wahlström (2014) describes disruption as a time in a learning experience where students “take an aesthetic-reflective approach to emphasize the transactional character inherent in … creating new meaning” (p. 125). In other words, in transactions that transform, students’ habits are disrupted and they have moments to feel, self-reflect, and create new understandings.

The educational value is not in returning to certainty, but rather in “unlearning the ‘usual’” (Dervin, 2017, p. 94) and “questioning the ‘unquestionable’” (Dervin et al., 2020, p. 102) to purposely cross beyond geographies to experience, question, disrupt, and imagine the unknown and unknowable with others. These are the habits of mind and communities of practice that may allow us to grapple with the human and the more-than-human challenges in our future (Hodge et al., 2014). From a critical stance, educators hold space for imagining the worldbuilding (Postma, 2016; Rizvi, 2006) of a “bottom up” solidarity of heterogeneous global networks of people, autonomous local entities, humane technology, and notions of a flexible subjectivity that afford action in a set of interconnected futures that can build capacity to move forward. Teachers are key actors in this locally grounded global capacity building. These undercurrents of growth, creativity, imagination, criticality, habit, and identity are seen in the surface current of O’Connor and Zeichner’s description of globally competent teaching as aligned with critical global education; yet the authors do not codify critical global teaching.

Articles in this special issue

The authors in this special issue guide us in describing the aspects and challenges of teaching and learning for global competence. Each offers explorations of the complexity inherent in working out critical global education in in-service and pre-service contexts around the world. Their work sits in the mutually constitutive relationships between (1) teaching and learning and (2) the individual student and their social world(s) that informs practice, conceptual knowledge, and methodology. The quality and knowledge of being a globally competent teacher are manifest in the observable articulations of practiced responsiveness in both the act of and reflection on teaching.

This special issue provides articles that explore the role of locality, critical consciousness, and reflection in both teacher education course-based introductions to global competent and globally competent teaching and in-service teachers’ practices. The relevance and resonance of critical global education are emergent from the local contexts (Dei, 2014; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011). This points to the importance and distinctiveness of regional and cultural context, the need to analyze power and privilege, and the need to iteratively denaturalize the “naturalness of their perspectives” (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011, p. 525) in developing in-service and pre-service teachers. Denaturalizing perspective in professional training and development requires a recognition that we begin to develop our pedagogical bias, beliefs, and assumptions about teaching and learning long before we enter a classroom as an educator (Sugrue, 1997). Additionally, identity in the professional development of teachers is an ongoing process engaging both current and prospective identities that require thoughtful forms of engagement to explore and examine interactions with others in particular contexts (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; Dervin, 2013; Kajee, 2018). We see these considerations throughout the articles in this special issue that explore critical global teaching in three contexts: in-service teachers’ practices, pre-service experiential teacher education, and teacher education for globally diverse communities. Contexts of the research include five continents, specifically in the United Kingdom, Romania, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Peru, and the United States, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Mapping of the research contexts presented in this special issue

In-service teachers’ praxis

Several articles in this special issue focus on K-12 critical global teaching. These articles focused on classroom teaching, marking the level of K-12 educators’ involvement in explicit and implicit forms of teaching for global readiness, reinforcing the view of the unique teacher as an essential instrument in calibrating and facilitating the investigations and competencies required for critical engagement with global citizenship. Inspired by methodological discussions around the qualitative researcher’s role, we evoke a positive view of teacher-as-instrument (Turato, 2005, p. 510). The notion of teacher-as-instrument reaffirms teacher agency, autonomy, reflection, and professional development as all playing a crucial role in both the uptake, local capacity, and quality of teaching for global readiness.

In the first article, Saloshna Vandeyar shares a single embedded case study exploring an Indian grade-seven teacher’s experience teaching in South Africa. In her contributions (Vandeyar & Swart, 2019), Vandeyar builds upon the Freirean notion of transformative intellectual and Megan Boler’s ethics of discomfort (Boler & Zembylas, 2003) to develop a pedagogy of compassion. Her case study illustrates the teacher-as-instrument, not as a neutral practitioner, but instead as a transformative intellectual grounded by an epistemology of compassion. Vandeyar shows how compassion frames the action in teaching and learning and how critical competencies are grounded in societal relevance beyond the classroom.

Similarly, Kelly C. Johnston, Lakeya Omogun, and Crystal Chen Lee share a qualitative study set in middle school language arts teaching in New York City. The researchers trace out teachers’ enactment of critical literacy curriculum infused with global perspectives (Yoon, 2016). Their study illustrates the use of cooperative learning, students’ cultural funds, the global nature of multimodal literacies, and the importance of teacher leadership in guiding students’ responsible action. Johnston et al. highlight strategies designed to “maximize the heterogeneity of the student group” (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011, p. 527) although linking global topics to the local context and addressing affective and socially responsible dispositions.

Alina Slapac offers a case study exploring how four Romanian English language teachers taught about American culture as a tool for global communication in their context. Slapac frames her analysis of the teaching she observed with the Global Teaching Model (Kerkhoff & Cloud, 2020) and Roland Robertson’s notion of Glocalization (1995). Affirming the teacher-as-instrument, Slapac also shows the need for networks of professional relationships, coordinated international efforts to support and facilitate global experiences, and authentic materials for educators to teach successfully from a global perspective. Authentic materials refer to culturally relevant materials that support critical engagement with multiple perspectives and nuanced cultural communication that have value outside of classroom settings (Kozhevnikova, 2013).

Pre-service experiential teacher education

Common in this next set of manuscripts, authors share the integration of experiential pedagogy as part of pre-service global teacher education. In each of the articles, the authors, preservice teacher educators, purposely engage their students in experiences designed to develop global competence. The researchers expound on the role of intercultural awareness, positionality, and the local sociopolitical context in how global competence may manifest through abroad experiences, glocal service learning, and virtual exchange.

The first article, by Minda Morren López and Pamela Roxana Lara Morales, offers a qualitative study of a study abroad program from Chile to the United States. The researchers explore how the participants, Chilean pre-service English pedagogy teachers, integrated global competencies after their study abroad experience. In their analysis, López and Lara Morales show how Chilean teacher candidates possess global competence in multiple ways. Their research provides crucial insights into how colonialism, anti-colonialism, socio-political context, and positionality frame and situate what it looks like to be globally competent.

In another approach to experiential learning, Erik Jon Byker and Vicki Ezelle-Thomas provide a case study of a global service-learning project situated in the UNESCO sustainable development goals. The global service-learning project provided a local grounding and experiential context for teacher candidates to develop global competencies (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2011) and understand the indications of identifying as a global citizen who can act. The “pedagogical authenticity” (Heath & McLaughlin, 1994) of the service-learning project resides in how the researchers structured their students’ experiences of the project; the tools, activities, resources, and interactions were grounded in authentic tasks of global citizenship. Framing their analysis around Critical Cosmopolitanism (Byker, 2013; Byker & Marquardt, 2016), the researchers examine teacher candidates’ perceptions of the service-learning project in relation to developing global competencies and end with questions about additional steps to critical engagement and interrogation of the diagnosis of an issue or problem, along with our actions with and for others (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011).

Sonja Arndt, Samara Madrid Akpovo, Marek Tesar, Tao Han, Feifei Huang, and Macy Halladay use action research methodology to explore a four-week virtual intercultural exchange between students from four teacher education programs in New Zealand and the United States. Their analysis of cultural otherness and interculturality is framed by critical interculturality (Dervin, 2016). Arndt reiterates instructors’ mentoring role in facilitating online intercultural interactions and exchanges by elucidating the need for careful cultural mentoring and iterative approaches. COLAB is described as a “platform of reciprocity” for relationships of solidarity. Arndt cautions us about being vigilant in designing and implementing virtual exchanges so that these projects do not inadvertently reproduce or promote Euro-Western theoretical ideas, frames, and notions.

Michele Back, Douglas Kaufman, and David M. Moss use a mixed-method design to explore the essential role of an extended reentry program in helping candidates process their immersion experiences in international teaching internship programs. In framing immersive and reentry experiences, the researchers employ critical cosmopolitanism (Byker & Marquardt, 2016) and critical interculturality (Dervin, 2017). In their analysis, the authors, using Donald Schön’s phases of reflections (1991), show the role of extended reentry programs in iteratively facilitating and enhancing complex, sophisticated orientation to cultural difference. Back et al. illustrate how situated practice matters by highlighting the continuum of reflecting in action although immersed in a new cultural environment toward reflecting on those actions while in their home environment reentry program.

Teacher education for globally diverse communities

In elaborating on globally competent teaching for critical global education, O’Connor and Zeichner (2011) focus on components grounded in notions of authenticity, non-neutrality of knowledge, and egalitarian relationships. Their three main components are “construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and value beyond school” (p. 526). The legacies of critical pedagogy, multicultural principles, and constructivist traditions permeate the framing of globally competent teaching. These components and legacies are apparent in the articles that address teacher education for globally diverse communities. The enactment of these components denotes the teacher’s vital role in facilitating and designing the interactions and collective inquiry we see in the projects and strategies shared by our authors.

In the article by Kathleen Ramos, Elisa J. Wolf, and Melissa Hauber-Özer, we look into an asynchronous online graduate teacher course that provides candidates with an introduction to culturally and linguistically diverse learners, emphasizing refugee and immigrant children’s experiences in both a local and global context. Ramos uses pedagogical tools, global thinking routines (Boix Mansilla, 2016/2017), and a Global Competence framework (OECD/Asia Society, 2018) in the design and assessment of the course. Ramos shares the affordances and challenges of developing critical cognitive skills and attitudes for teaching for global competence. In reflecting on her work, Ramos speaks to the need to engage in dialog with teacher educators worldwide to develop further and deepen online offering of global teaching.

Andrea Arce-Trigatti and Ashlee B. Anderson illustrate why addressing education students’ biases, interpretations, and judgments about globalization in education must include opportunities for students to denaturalize the policy paradigms of their country of origin. Education policy shapes the educational policies and practices framing their own student experiences and successes in the formalized schooling system in which they grew up as students. Arce-Trigatti and Anderson share a case study of an undergraduate International Education course in which students work collaboratively and imaginatively to explore real-world educational issues in both developed and developing nation contexts. The authors leverage bell hooks’s (1994) notion of engaged pedagogy in the form of mindful abstraction techniques to understand educational policy implications. Arce-Trigatti and Anderson show the critical role of education policy and reform knowledge in desublimating and disenchanting the Western-centric tendency to collapse neoliberal technocentric market ideology with global education (Miglani & Burch, 2020).

Toward a framework for critical global teaching

In considering the collection of special issue manuscripts as a whole, we have the opportunity to codify what the emerging field of global teacher education considers critical global teaching. Across the articles, we identify four features of teacher’s praxis that are essential for prompting deep criticality: glocality, reflexivity, interculturality, and worldmaking (see Table 1). We capture patterns and nuances across authors’ voices to identify features of critical global teaching through quotes in column 3. These features are not linear, but rather are overlapping, layered, and dynamic. They are intended to evolve through educators’ praxis in their contexts; as such, praxis runs across all four features.

Table 1. Features of critical global teaching

Glocality	Situated in connections self in relation to world understanding of political, social, environmental, economic, and technological interdependence culturally sustaining and globally connected teaching	“The complexities, fluidity, relational and bidirectional interplay [of the local and global]” – Slapac “Equips learners with authentic experiences to make academic connections to relevant issues in local and global communities” – Byker & Thomas “Recognizes the similarities and intersubjectivity that unite and bind us together in one common humanity … and co-constructed local and global identities” – Arndt et al. “The collective feature of global citizenship means that a global citizen’s local efforts are intertwined with a shared humanity” – Byker & Thomas “Nurture respect for all, build a sense of belonging to a common humanity, and help students become responsible and active global citizens” – Vandeyar
Reflexivity	Examine motives and implications of actions self-reflection of affect on others disrupting hegemony recognizing the agency one has for transformation and liberation	“To be aware of oneself and the influence one has in the transformation of the lives of others though the construction and dissemination of knowledge … . Challenging our students to not only look within (self-reflection) but also to apply externally these abstract concepts as tools to identify social justice issues” – Arce-Trigatti & Anderson “Develop a critical awareness of the way social location and worldview shape teachers’ interpretations of global issues and how these judgments are influenced by one’s race/ethnicity, social class, and language” – Ramos “Critical analysis [and] reflection-on-action that contemplated the various social and cultural factors influencing successful learning and teaching … [that is] synergetic, complex, and context-sensitive” – Back “Acted and reacted with others and involved a negotiation of relationships and critical reflection about the political and social contexts embedded in the relationships” – Arndt “Enhanced awareness of their social agency to make change” – Byker & Thomas
Interculturality	Interact from an understanding of culture(s) consciousness of self in relation with others acceptance of complex, fluid diversity relationships of reciprocity transactions of diverse perspectives	“Cross-cultural encounters with individuals or groups in diverse cultural and social positions, taking into consideration multiple practices, power relations, and societal understandings” – Arndt “Identity is fluid and context-based’ – Vandeyar ”Compassionately engaging with diversity” – Vandeyar “Translanguaging or the approach of utilizing all of a learner’s linguistic repertoire in learning” – López & Lara Morales “Recognize, understand, and appreciate the perspectives and worldviews of others; communicate ideas effectively [and respectfully] with [culturally and linguistically] diverse audiences by engaging in appropriate interactions across cultures” – Ramos ”We need to become the other – through new experiences, better understanding of who we are” – Slapac
Worldmaking	Act in a responsible manner respond with empathy and solidarity collective imagining engage in transformation	“Engage in local and global dialogue to challenge oppression and work collaboratively to fight injustice” – López & Lara Morales “Critical analyses is to cultivate socially responsive dispositions in students, so they contribute to social transformation locally as well as global transformation” – Johnston et al. “Interrogate knowledge via exploration, the integration of various perspectives, and ultimately through self-actualization” – Arce-Trigatti & Anderson “Adapt their own behaviors and take a role in ‘rewriting the world’ by becoming advocates for social justice and equity in culturally complex situations” – Back “Critical, reflective lens that fosters deep learning about the causes and consequences of global inequities and inspires advocacy and action toward transformative change … both locally and globally” – Ramos

Glocality

Glocality speaks to the interconnectedness of local and global systems. Each of us – and our teaching – is situated in a context that we define by our curriculum, issues, and interactions (Kerkhoff, 2017; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011). As Johnston and colleagues state (this volume), curriculum is “always globally situated, even when locally produced.” Alternately, students are all locally situated, even when we are teaching about the world. As such, each of us is located in a particular time, place, and context from which we view the world (Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Banks et al., 2016; Madrid Akpovo et al., 2018). For example, we know that schools are rooted in local histories and good teaching responds to local realities and enacts curricula that are responsive to the cultures embodied in our classrooms (Lee & McCarty, 2017; Slapac, this issue; Smith, 2017; Tabulawa, 2013). At the same time, each of us is always already globally situated, in that our ideas, words, feelings, stories, and decisions are related to others around the world (Johnston et al., this volume). Following this line of reasoning, teaching about immigration in the United States is connected to war, famine, poverty, and other issues that act as “push factors” for people who choose to leave their homes (Ramos, this volume). In critical global teaching, listening to multiple perspectives and considering different points of view happens on a local and global scale. Teaching with glocality in mind means that teachers show students how the local is already global and always will be, and how our systems are interdependent. Because of our interdependence, we have an ethical responsibility to be globally aware (Andreotti, 2010; Goodwin, 2020). Recognition of interdependence and ethical responsibility leads to the next feature, reflexivity.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity indicates a knowledge that what one does affects people all over the world, and what they do affects us also. Reflexivity involves critical reflection of the motivations and intentions behind our words, actions, and feelings – how they affect others, both positively and negatively as well as locally and globally. A key component of reflexivity is examining our own positionality, another component is to examine power and the effects of colonization systemically (Smith, 2017). Stopping to reflect can, both personally and systemically, disrupt ethnocentrism, biased thinking, hegemony, and colonialism/settlerism/imperialism. As Tierney exemplifies, Western educators should ask themselves if their practices align with colonization or liberation (2018). As Vandeyar states (this volume), “Critical orientations to global citizenship education places emphasis on the epistemological level, drawing attention to the ways that certain worldviews are granted more power and legitimacy than others, and how this in turn both reflects and reproduces material inequalities.” Reflexivity is not the end goal, but rather a means to an end. Once we are cognizant, we must take responsive and informed action. In teaching, this translates to culturally responsive, relevant, and revitalizing teaching (Lee & McCarty, 2017). And as López and Lara Morales (this volume) remind us, all teachers and students “need to confront the impact of colonization on present day thought and action in education.” A reflexive teacher is a critical thinker and reflective practitioner, and is also informed by personal and systemic histories, multiple global perspectives, critical theory, and interculturality (Madrid Akpovo et al., 2018).

Interculturality

Simply put, interculturality is interaction between different cultures. But, when we interrogate each of those words with a critical frame, the complexity of interculturality unfolds. Looking with a critical lens, interactions are not neutral. Therefore, in critical interculturality, interactions are mutually supportive (Andreotti, 2010; Wahlström, 2014) and power relationships are horizontal not hierarchical (Bajaj, 2015; Trigos-Carillo & Rogers, 2017). Understanding of others’ diversities must include a critical introspection of self (Dervin, 2016). Interactions include intercultural communication – speaking and listening in a way that is respectful of the people’s cultures with whom you are interacting and adapting discourse and gestures as appropriate in cultural contexts (Piller, 2017). A reciprocity is needed – a give and take that is rooted in equity and mutual beneficity (Hauerwas & Creamer, 2018). Relating interculturality to teaching includes “recognizing and affirming” the diverse racial, linguistic, ethnic, and transnational identities of students (Johnston et al., this volume), accepting a plurality of epistemologies in the educational theories we consume and in our students’ thinking. Interculturality also affirms the cultural resources and linguistic repertoires our students bring to the classroom, including multiple languages and ways of knowing (García et al., 2018; López & Lara Morales, this volume). Thus, classrooms that reflect interculturality are hospitable places that support intercultural dialogue and “open up possibilities for creativity and a multifaceted view of identity and belonging, but also for withdrawal and resistance” (Wahlström, 2014, p. 130).

Worldmaking

Worldmaking engages individuals in opportunities to act in a responsible, informed manner. Whether alone or in community, we must imagine a culturally and environmentally sustainable world. When engaged in worldmaking, learners deconstruct untenable worlds and reconstruct more just worlds. Stornaiuolo (2015) builds on Goodman (1978) to define worldmaking as “a process of constructing shared worlds through symbolic practices that intertwine the creative, ethical, and intellectual in the act of making meaning from the multiple and dynamic resources at hand” (p. 561). The “shared” in Stornaiuolo’s definition is a key component of worldmaking. Worldmaking is shared, collective, and public (Nakayama & Morris, 2015), what Byker and Ezelle-Thomas state (this volume) call a “collective effort to advance the globe toward a more equitable, amiable, and sustainable future.” And, the word “resources” comprises material and nonmaterial, such as multiple languages and histories. Therefore, worldmaking can be material, as in maker-spaces, and nonmaterial, as in meaning-making and imagining. Oft mentioned in this issue is socially responsible, informed action. Vandeyar (this issue) describes the hope of critical global teaching is for students to be “empowered to take informed actions based upon insights into structural causes of global injustice or sustainability issues.” See Figure 2 for the many aims described as enacted or desired within and across articles in this issue.

Figure 2. Word cloud of aims related to worldmaking

In talking about worldmaking, our authors’ work frequently draws upon Freire’s (1970) concept of rewriting the world, Boix Mansilla and Jackson’s (2011) take action, and hooks’s (1994) self-actualization. Within worldmaking is self-liberation, self-actualization, collective action, and common good, as students are provided hybrid spaces to deconstruct worlds of oppression and reconstruct in solidarity a “more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, and secure world” (Vandeyar, this volume). We chose the word “worldmaking” for the final feature to overtly identify the global landscape and, at the same time, the hope of making the world a better place.

Implications for sustaining the field of critical global teacher education

Our aspiration for this special issue was to explore current conceptualizations of global teacher education from around the world and determine avenues for future research and pedagogy. In collaborating as editors, we took the opportunity provided by our authors’ work to codify features of critical global teaching. We offer the emergent field of critical global teacher education a shared language (e.g., glocality, reflexivity, interculturality, and worldmaking) to discuss, extend, and evaluate. In moving forward, we offer our considerations of how actors in this field can create networks to support bottom-up, culturally sustaining globalization of teacher education. Although our special issue affirms Paris and Alim’s (2014) theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy, our use of sustaining in this article extends to include relevant/responsive/revitalizing/resisting pedagogy (Bajaj, 2015; Gay, 2002; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Lee & McCarty, 2017; Smith, 2017), the importance of sustaining mutually beneficial relationships over time (Hauerwas & Creamer, 2018; Kerkhoff et al., 2020), and the long view of learning that sees criticality and interculturality as developing over time (Back et al., this issue; Dervin, 2017).

Facilitating a critical global subjectivity challenges educators around the world to understand their local community and its interdependence with the world. Each of our authors have incorporated glocality, reflexivity, interculturality, and worldmaking to various degrees. These features provide the foundation to enacting the critical global theories of which we collectively espouse. Teacher educators must situate their teaching where their students are locally and developmentally to provide inquiry experiences that allow students to make local and personal connections and broaden their perspectives to include global issues of power and inequity. The four features were drawn from different global landscapes and technoscapes, and future research could examine how the four features can lead to critical global subjectivity within different contexts and/or across multiple learning experiences as well as how the four features are related to each other in praxis.

As a pedagogical tool, technology has the potential to transform our global teaching practices, helping us redefine what materials are available for our students to inquire about global issues and providing the means for our students to interact with others from distant places. Some teachers do not have knowledge of how to establish partnerships for international collaboration (Kerkhoff & Cloud, 2020; O’Dowd, 2015) or experiences with or access to materials from unfamiliar locations (Slapac, this issue). For example, it is essential that in incorporating virtual exchanges that facilitate critical global education, educators attend to the authenticity of the experience in participation and be careful of hegemony in the interactions (Helm, 2018). In addition to cultural authenticity in experiences and materials and counter-hegemony, partnerships should be horizontal, reciprocal, and equitable. Although technology affords us these opportunities to mobilize critical global education, we must do so without exacerbating inequities within education between privileged and under-resourced communities. Teacher educators can fill this gap in teachers’ preparation for the digital, global world in sustainable ways.

Lastly, as an emerging field of critical global teaching, we are compelled to create and support solidarity among heterogeneous networks of educators and researchers from around the world. Individuals who are committed to the cultural and ideological work of global collaboration for equity and real reform are necessary to sustain the field. The works in this special issue are written by authors from five continents, several in collaboration with teachers from different regions of the world. However, we noted the lack of indigenous voices in the manuscripts and encourage the field to incorporate an inclusive approach that includes the indigenous as part of global. We acknowledge our complicity in the gatekeeping of academia, in that our use of English, the call from a U.S. journal, and editors from the U.S. may have limited global participation. We remain committed to diversifying the geography of participation and building mutually beneficial partnerships (Heath & McLaughlin, 1994) in our local communities and with international actors to sustain our work as critical global teacher educators. In the words of Paolo Freire, “The future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present.” We look with hope to the future in which critical global teaching can help prepare teachers to build a more just and sustainable global landscape yet imagined.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.