How global are global history teachers secondary social studie

Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE December 2015 How "global" are global history teachers? Secondary social studies teachers' understandings of global awareness and global education Ardyth L. Watson Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.edu/etd Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Watson, Ardyth L., "How "global" are global history teachers? Secondary social studies teachers' understandings of global awareness and global education" (2015).edu/etd/411 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact surface@syr.

Abstract Although global history has been a part of the discipline of social studies in New York State for a number of years, the inclusion of global education and skills has been less prevalent in the discipline. This lack of global perspectives in education has proven to be detrimental to the global awareness of American students. Global history teachers play a key role in the dissemination of global content that may contribute to increasing global awareness of students. Yet teachers, themselves, may have limited global awareness and intercultural experiences that impact the ways in which they teach global history.

Therefore, this dissertation examined how global history teachers in upstate New York construct their global awareness and the content they teach, and how their understandings of global education impact their teaching. Eight global history teachers in five school districts took part in this study. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and observations, and was informed by theoretical work around colonialism and post-colonialism/post-nationalism. Results of this study revealed that these teachers saw their worldviews as evolving constructs, shaped by upbringing, cross- cultural interactions, travel experiences, media influences, and professional responsibilities.

Certain global education elements infused their teaching, such as local/global connections, perspectives consciousness, and cultural sensitivity, but the inclusion of such elements was uneven. Furthermore, their language in many cases revealed an incomplete understanding of global education and cultural awareness. Elements of colonialism, essentialism, and American exceptionalism were both challenged and reinforced in the ways in which these teachers spoke about their global understandings, and the history content and students they taught. HOW “GLOBAL” ARE GLOBAL HISTORY TEACHERS? SECONDARY SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS’ UNDERSTANDINGS OF GLOBAL AWARENESS AND GLOBAL EDUCATION by Ardyth L., State University College at Geneseo, 1992 M., State University College at New Paltz, 1999 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Teaching and Curriculum Syracuse University December 2015 Copyright © Ardyth L.

Watson 2015 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the teachers who generously donated their time, expertise, and perspectives that form the basis of this work. I am forever grateful for their enthusiasm and willingness to take part in this research. My tremendous thanks and immense gratitude go to Dr. Jeffrey Mangram, who was with me from the beginning and served as coach, therapist, friend, critic, and cheerleader throughout this entire process.

My deepest thanks also to my committee members, Dr. George Theoharis and Dr. Marcelle Haddix, whose unfailing support, helpful advice, perspicacity, and intelligence broadened my perspectives and enabled me to craft a better dissertation. Also, thanks to my sister, Dr.

April Watson, who gave me inspiration and advice over the course of this endeavor. Santa Fe awaits us. And finally, most of all, thank you to my family, Rob, Ella, and Ewan, who saw me with patience, understanding, love, and laughter to the finish. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Alvin and Sheila Watson, who would have been proud.

iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction .1 Statement of the Problem .3 Background: The Discipline of Social Studies and Global Education .5 Background in Global Education .7 Recent Initiatives in Global Education .9 Global Education Resources .11 A Note on State Mandates .14 Overview of Dissertation Chapters .19 Chapter 2: Literature Review .21 Theoretical Lens: Colonialism and Imperialism .22 Discourses and Essentialism .25 Neocolonialism and American Hegemony .28 Legacies of Colonialism and Neocolonialism in Education .32 What is Global Education? Defining the Phrase.33 The Purposes of Global Education .34 Research on Global Education and Teachers.36 Scholarship on Teachers and Multiculturalism.41 Challenges to Implementation of Global Education .43 Gaps and Limitations of the Literature .47 Chapter 3: Methodology and Methods .50 Why Qualitative Research?.53 Data Collection and Analysis.58 Participants and Setting.61 Description of Participants .62 Table of Participants .65 A Note About Reflexivity, Bias, and Situating the Researcher .66 Situating Myself in the Research .67 Issues of Bias and Subjectivity .69 Chapter 4: “There’s a whole other world out there:” Constructing Global Awareness and Perspectives.74 Impact of Diversity in Teachers’ Backgrounds .75 Diversity in Teachers’ Upbringings .75 Using Color-Blind Discourse.82 Experiences with Multicultural Diversity in College .85 vi Teachers’ Development of Global Awareness .88 From “Growing” to “Very Aware:” Teachers’ Descriptions of Global Awareness .89 Global Awareness as Professional Responsibility .92 Global Awareness Through Life Experiences .94 Impact of Travel on Global Awareness: The “Traveler” versus the “Tourist”.97 Teachers’ Understandings of the World .107 Media Representations and Influence on Global Thinking .107 Challenging or Reinforcing Colonialism?: Teachers’ Perceptions of other Places .111 Challenging Notions of American Exceptionalism .119 The Role of the United States in the Twenty-First Century .128 Chapter 5: “The rest of the world matters:” Implementing Global Perspectives in Teaching.133 The Meaning of “Global Education”: Just a Buzzword? .135 Definitions of Global Education .135 The Purpose of Global Education: Cooperation or Competition? .139 Skills and Opportunities of Globally Aware Students .145 Teaching with Global Perspectives .150 Local/Global Connections .151 Prejudice Reduction and Attention to Inequalities .159 vii Cross-Cultural Competence .166 The cultural festival: Promoting tourism, not competence .167 Fostering cross-cultural awareness in the classroom: Transnational students .171 Cross-cultural awareness in the classroom: Teaching about Islam .173 Additional cross-cultural learning opportunities in the classroom .179 Challenges to Global Education in the Classroom .182 The Regents Exam and Annual Professional Performance Review .182 The Challenge of Time .196 Summary of Findings and Further Connections to Literature .198 Limitations and Next Steps in the Field .206 Implications and Recommendations: Decolonizing Social Studies and Global Education .208 Appendix A: School District Information.214 Appendix B: Semi-Structured Interview Questions .215 Appendix C: Email Recruitment Message .216 Appendix D: Informed Consent Form: Interview .217 Appendix E: Informed Consent Form: Observation .218 Appendix F: Principal Notification Letter .220 viii 1 Chapter 1: Introduction When I was about twenty-three years old, I had an opportunity to live in Scotland and travel throughout Europe for about a year, before returning to the United States and embarking on a teaching career. I remember one occasion in which my Scottish friend and I, while staying in a youth hostel somewhere in central France, befriended the young man who ran the hostel. He was English, but had been living in France for a number of years. We were speaking together in a local cafe about what I am sure we thought were very important topics of conversation at the time, such as politics, history, and culture.

In the course of this conversation, I remember the discussion turned to the history of McCarthyism in the United States and the perceived American1_ aversion to socialism in all of its manifestations. Yet as the conversation unfolded, I recall being somewhat sidelined by it; my Scottish friend and English acquaintance essentially rejected my input in favor of their own interpretations of United States history. I remember feeling irked because, while I was the only person from the United States in the room, I was not asked about my opinions and views of my own country’s history on this topic. Some years later, as a new social studies teacher working in a relatively affluent downstate suburban public school district, I had a student in class from a Mexican migrant family.

She had only been in the country a few years and was in the process of learning English. I remember thinking about her quite often as I was teaching United States history. Having some background in Second Language Education, I understood the principles of language acquisition. But my coursework had not prepared me for the cultural aspects of teaching transnational students.

Yet 1 I use the term “American” to refer to citizens of the United States of America, with the understanding that the term may be used elsewhere in reference to other places in the Western Hemisphere. 2 my experiences living abroad raised my awareness to such issues and I often wondered how this student understood the history content that was being taught to her from an American perspective. For example, I was acutely aware of my own lack of understanding about the Mexican War from a Mexican perspective when the topic arose. Furthermore, how did the curriculum I was teaching impact all of the students in the classroom? To what extent was I perpetuating the metanarrative of United States history in my teaching? I recount these stories as personal examples to illustrate how the United States and “the West” historically create the discourses to which others are subjected.

In the conversation between my European friends, I felt personally irritated by people not from the United States directing the conversation, but soon realized that, both historically and presently, the United States’ government, media, and society inflict the same treatment on other countries regularly. The legacies of American exceptionalism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism likely impact the ways in which Americans view the world and devalue the perspectives of other countries. Even the term “American,” referring exclusively to people from the United States and not from other areas within the Americas, for example, represents these entrenched attitudes. Thus, these ideas about colonialism, neoimperialism, and American exceptionalism frame this research in relation to global education and history teaching, and will be defined at more length later in the dissertation.

My interest in such ideas, combined with my reflections from living and traveling abroad and my background with international students, led me to this dissertation. In particular, I wanted to investigate how global history teachers, given the nature of the content that they teach, frame their understanding of the world and its peoples, and how their understandings impact their pedagogy. The field of global education, as will be discussed, aims to challenge and 3 overcome persistent paradigms within education that situate the world in an Us/Them and/or North/South dichotomy (Pike, 2008; Merryfield, 2005; Burack, 2003; Nyambe & Shipena, 1998). Such binaries arose from decades-old discourses of colonialism, neoimperialism, and American exceptionalism that position the United States as the global hegemon and privilege “the West,” politically, culturally, and economically (Rizvi, Lingard, & Lavia, 2006).

Therefore, I wanted to understand the extent to which those ideas continue to persist with, or are challenged by, social studies teachers who teach global history content and how they understand global education. Statement of the Problem Although global history has been a part of the discipline of social studies in many states for a number of years, the inclusion of global education and global awareness skills has been less prevalent in the discipline. These limitations of incorporating global perspectives in education have proven to be detrimental to the global awareness of American students. The results of a 2006 National Geographic – Roper Survey, for example, illustrate a critical lack of global knowledge among 18-24 year-olds in the United States, suggesting that, "young people in the United States…are unprepared for an increasingly global future.

Far too many lack even the most basic skills for …understanding the relationships among people and places that provide critical context for world events" (Roper for National Geographic Foundation, 2006, p. Other recent studies have shown a similar lack of global awareness among American students.