Preparing US teachers for critical global education

Abstract

While recognising the nature and significance of the theoretical bases and dimensions of the range of theoretical orientations that inform the literature on global and international education, the central aim of this paper is to describe in a more concrete way ‘critical global education (CGE)’, an approach to global education that seeks to educate students about the causes and consequences of global injustices and that aims to support students to work in solidarity with the world's people towards transformative change. The particular focus of this article is how such orientations may most effectively be introduced into teacher education, a field that has so far not developed such a focus. Our purpose in defining both CGE and globally competent teaching (GCT) is to articulate the knowledge, skills and dispositions that we feel teachers need and to communicate the rationale for our work. We develop the idea of CGE in the main part of the paper alongside the concept of the ‘globally competent teacher’, which together form the conceptual basis for our efforts to internationalise teacher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In doing so, we have attempted to distinguish our work from other efforts in teacher education in which the basis for the work is either vaguely defined or defined differently in the service of the neo-liberal agenda.

Keywords:

• teacher education
• internationalisation
• teachers