Global Leaders in Education
EDU 562
Terrains of Global and Multicultural Education: What is Distinctive, Contested, and Shared?
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Welcome to Global Leaders in Education.
In this lesson, we will discuss the Terrains of Global and Multicultural Education: What is Distinctive, Contested, and Shared?
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Topics
- Origins and Contexts of Global and Multicultural Education
- Legal and Philosophical Justifications
- Different Beneficiaries, Proponents, Opponents, and Scope
- Similarities between Multicultural and Global Education
- Monocultural Approaches: Defending Against Diversity
The following topics will be covered in this lesson:
Origins and Contexts of Global and Multicultural Education;
Legal and Philosophical Justifications;
Different Beneficiaries, Proponents, Opponents, and Scope;
Similarities between Multicultural and Global Education;
Monocultural Approaches: Defending Against Diversity;
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Topics, Continued
- Particularistic Approaches: Defending Diversity
- Pluralistic Approaches: Resourcing Diversity
- Liberal Approaches: Negotiating Diversity
- Critical Approaches: Intersecting Diversity with Oppression
The following topics will also be covered in this lesson:
Particularistic Approaches: Defending Diversity;
Pluralistic Approaches: Resourcing Diversity;
Liberal Approaches: Negotiating Diversity;
Critical Approaches: Intersecting Diversity with Oppression;
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Topics, Continued
- Joining the Fields through Poststructuralist Pragmatist Citizenship Education
- A Call for a New Political-Personal Citizenship
The following topics will also be covered in this lesson:
Joining the Fields through Poststructuralist Pragmatist Citizenship Education; and
A Call for a New Political-Personal Citizenship.
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Origins and Contexts of Global and Multicultural Education
- Global Education
- Develops in response to international and national politics and global issues
- Multicultural Education
- Develops as an aspect of national minority struggles in the context of national political issues
Let‘s get started by discussing what is distinctive between global education and multicultural education. Global education and multicultural education have very different origins. Global education developed in response to international and national politics and global issues. It emerged as a coherent educational field in the 1960s owing to four interrelated contexts; An American domestic sphere increasingly dominated by foreign policy issues, the emergence of global jurisprudence and global economic systems exemplified by the United Nations and Bretton Woods financial institutions in the wake of World War II, the emergencing ecology and environmental education movement, and the influence of a global focus in disciplinary academic study in areas ranging from anthropology to geography, world literature to history, and political science.
Multicultural education developed as an aspect of national minority struggles in the context of national political issues. An example of this would be the push for the growing civil rights movementand the legal challenge of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in education to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. This history making triumph set the stage for a major new development in American education, the desegregation of Southern schools. By the 1980s, equity was increasingly interpreted not just as having access to equally funded and openly available schooling but much more deeply as having equitable access to curriculum and instruction. James Banks, one of the major architects of multicultural education, argued that in order to obtain a multicutural school environment all aspects of the school had to be examined and transformed including policies, teachers‘ attitudes, instructional materials, assessment methods, counseling, and teaching styles. He concluded that multicultural moved through many stages before becoming complete. It has gone from ethnic studies to multiethnic education designed to bring about structural and systematic changes in schools, into the third phase that introduced other monority groups, especially women, into the conceptualization and, finally, into the fourth and current phase that keeps at the forefront the development of theory, research, and practice that focus on the interplay of race, gender, and class.
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Legal and Philosophical Justifications
- Multicultural Education Justifications
- Principals of democracy and is supported by laws
- Focuses on interpersonal and community relations
- Global Education Justifications
- Principals of national and global citizenship and human rights
- Focuses on participating in global economics and politics
- Global Accomplishments
One of the most important differences between multicultural education and global education is the fact the multicultural education policies are often mandated by law, and they have a judicial constitutional protection. Multicultural education is justified as necessary to assure justice, liberty, and freedom of expression, which are foundational to democracies and central to individual lives and micro-politics. Because democracy requires the just distribution of public goods and opportunities and equal treatment under the law, multiculturalism and diversity are perennial issues in our debates about our largest national policy concerns. All democracies have some kind of multicultural education policy. Yet there are also differences in democracies and in their corresponding multicultural policies.
Multicultural education emerges as part of a wider social movement for minority rights, which include not only the right to capital goods such as fair wages, housing, and equal spending on education, but more broadly, the right to include cultural values and curriculum in nation states that previously had de facto identity. Nations are not considered multicultural by virtue of diversity alone. Many nations states in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are culturally diverse and have long been multicultural in the sense that people from different cultures live there, but they are not multicultural if diverse people do not have equal rights to participate in society and to have their cultures recognized as worthy.
Global education has no legal or procedural basis in the way that multicultural education has. Global education takes on two forms. One has to do with the perspectives needed for active citizenship; the other with the philosophical perspectives needed for democratic thinking. One is formal and policy oriented; the other is more oriented to culture and philosophy. From the knowledge perspective it can be argued that global education is a practical necessity for citizens who vote about matters affecting the world. From this perspective, many of the pressing issues of our time, from terrorism to global warming, are world problems and commitment to both a global civic culture and the skills of global citizenship.
From a philosophical perspective it can be argued that Americans need to recognize the human rights of everyone on the planet. Although there is not yet any formal global citizenship, there are increasing venues for global rights and global cooperation such as the United Nations and its Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the Universal Postal Union (UPU).
The philosophical recognition of global human rights has actually led to an increasing number of institutions for and examples of practical and legally negotiated tolerance. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is widely endorsed, there are international standards for the rights of individuals and the treatment of prisoners of war and international agreements about biological diversity, endangered species, and sustainability. There is also increasing agreement about global standards in trade, communication, transportation, and environmental safety, and about global moral standards in such areas as child soldiers, child brides, international prostitution, torture, and child pornography. Although agreements are unevenly negotiated and enforced, agreement among diverse nations is a real global accomplishment considering that no such agreements existed at all 100 years ago.
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Different Beneficiaries, Proponents, Opponents, and Scope
- Multicultural Education
- Benefits national minorities
- Led by minorities and native people
- Opposed by nationalists
- Includes issues of curriculum, instruction, and the learner’s culture
Different legal and philosophical positions have separated people into two groups; those who support or do not support multicultural and global education. Often the leaders of multicultural education are minority and native people and scholars. It tends to attract support from social progressive and liberal scholars and both are generally opposed by conservatives and nationalists. Given the legal ethical context of multicultural education, its curricula are often the products of contentious public debates and ultimately formulate resolutions. Multicultural education as a movement is not only focused on curricula but also concerned with
instructional techniques for specific real children and explicit school policies.
Multicultural education is a lively discourse and contested practice in liberal nations. Critiques of liberalism on the one hand, and of identity politics on the other hand, have had a real influence in how culture is understood in education policy, alternatively justifying common schools, the study of traditional American history, English only policies, and, alternatively, public funding for private schools, Afrocentric schools, and home schooling. The richness and complexity of this philosophical engagement with the nature of culture, equity, and identity is mostly absent from global education discourse, curriculum, and policy.
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Beneficiaries, Proponents cont.
- Global Education
- Perceived to people outside of the nation and every citizen to some degree
- Led mostly by first world whites and scholars.
- Opposed by nationalists
- Usually low profile unless national interests are evoked
- Focuses primarily on curriculum.
The leaders of global education have tended to be educated white elites who have had a significant international or global experience. This movement tends to also attract support from social progressives and liberal scholars and is also generally opposed by conservatives and nationalists. In the field of global education, instruction and school policy are comparatively marginal aspects. Global education tends to engage in issues in nations that are external to a student’s country of residence. Global education is sometimes perceived as being championed by white liberal elites, to benefit elites, even potentially to take attention away from national minorities and national multiculturalism.
Global education tends not to delve into the toughest issues of national culture and diversity. One form of cosmopolitan global education endorses a form of post-identity and post-national citizenship and seeks to shift authority from the local and national community to a world community that is a loose network of international organizations and subnational political actors not bound within any clear democratic constitutional framework.
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Similarities between Multicultural and Global Education
- Multicultural Education is about the “us”
- Global Education is about the “us and the other”
Multicultural education addresses cultural diversity, individual and human rights, prejudice reduction, and social justice within the particular legal political and social context of the nation in which the student resides. Global education is about us and the other. However, these distinctions are becoming less and less clear, especially with increased immigration, deepening global communications, and the proliferation of transnational identities. A hot topic in both multicultural and global education is respecting other cultures and protecting one’s own, and in finding the boundary between tolerance and critical judgment.
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Shared Discourse
- Monocultural Approaches
- Particularistic Approaches
- Pluralistic Approaches
- Liberal Approaches
- Critical Approaches
Monocultural approach is both an old approach that defends against diversity and a very current one as the need for nation making in new emerging democracies is inevitable. It is also a common reactionary approach to diversity in many contemporary societies. Particularistic multiculturalism defends against diversity. It fosters the cultural, linguistic, and religious autonomy of major minority groups and helps to reify their cultural attributes. The Pluralistic approach does not deny or defend against culture differences; instead they see diversity as inevitable and as something to understand, use, and learn from, as a resource that can enhance the individual, the dominant culture, and the economy. Pluralistic approaches are common in both global and multicultural education. In the Liberal approach, cultures are not to be consumed as a resource, accepted at face value, or tolerated but something very different. Diversity is to be encountered critically and negotiated. The Critical approach on diversity questions the neutrality of any exploration of diversity and draws attention to the socially constructed nature of race and the difference of the power laden nature of the public sphere.
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EDU562_CheckYourUnderstanding
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Summary
- Origins and Contexts of Global and Multicultural Education
- Legal and Philosophical Justifications
- Different Beneficiaries, Proponents, Opponents, and Scope
- Similarities between Multicultural and Global Education
- Monocultural Approaches: Defending Against Diversity
We have now reached the end of this lesson. Let’s take a look at what we’ve covered.
First, we learned the origins of global and multicultural education. Global education developed in response to international and national politics and global issues. Multicultural education developed as an aspect of national minority struggles in the context of national political issues
Next, discussed the differences of global and multicultural education. We learned that the multicultural education policies are often mandated by law, and they have a judicial constitutional protection. Global education has no legal or procedural basis in the way that multicultural education has. Global education takes on two forms. One has to do with the perspectives needed for active citizenship; the other with the philosophical perspectives needed for democratic thinking. One is formal and policy oriented; the other is more oriented to culture and philosophy. From the knowledge perspective it can be argued that global education is a practical necessity for citizens who vote about matters affecting the world. From this perspective, many of the pressing issues of our time, from terrorism to global warming, are world problems and commitment to both a global civic culture and the skills of global citizenship.
Then, we became acquainted with the leaders of both global and multicultural education. Often the leaders of multicultural education are minority and native people and scholars. It tends to attract support from social progressive and liberal scholars and both are generally opposed by conservatives and nationalists. The leaders of global education have tended to be educated white elites who have had a significant international or global experience. This movement tends to also attract support from social progressives and liberal scholars and is also generally opposed by conservatives and nationalists.
Finally, discussed and looked at the distinctive approaches to global and multicultural education and to the general issue of diversity. They included monoculturalism, particularism, pluralism, liberalism, and criticality.
This completes the lesson.
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