Microsoft Word - Visions Global Education Review Carolyn final.doc Journal of International Social Studies http://www.iajiss.org Volume 1 Number 1 54 Fall 2010 Kirkwood-Tucker, Toni Fuss (2009). Visions in Global Education: The Globalization of Curriculum and Pedagogy in Teacher Education and Schools: Perspectives from Canada, Russia, and the United States. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 978-1- 4331-0309-4 Reviewed by Carolyn O’Mahony, Oakland University In his foreword to Visions in Global Education: The globalization of Curriculum and Pedagogy in Teacher Education and Schools, James Becker suggests that this collection of essays provides readers with a “basis for reviewing the status of the [global education] movement and offers some rich resources for updating, revising, and developing new approaches.” The variety of topics and writing styles in this book attest to the dynamic nature of the field of global education and the people writing in it and about it. Visions is a labor of love by its editor, Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker, who has inhabited the field of global education in the United States since the 1960s. “Advance praise” from six notable names in social studies education, a foreword by a seventh, a dedication to Jan Tucker, the editor’s late husband, and her acknowledgements, reveal Kirkwood-Tucker’s “insider status’ within the field of global education. They are followed by a brief autobiography, in which Kirkwood- Tucker explains that her experiences as a child in Nazi Germany and subsequent immigration to the southern United States in the 1960s resulted in what W.E.B. DuBois called “double consciousness,” compelling her to work for social change through curriculum and instruction on “a hard journey of golden opportunities” as a social studies educator and administrator in Miami- Dade’s public schools, and as a graduate student at Florida International University. Many authors of the thirteen chapters of Visions share Kirkwood-Tucker’s academic genealogy: Pedro Bermúdez, Bárbara Cruz, and Guichun Zong also studied with Jan L. Tucker at Florida International University, while Hilary Landorf is currently a FIU faculty member. Other contributors to the collection include Kenneth Tye, Elizabeth Heilman, John Cogan, David Grossman, and Merry Merryfield from the USA; Jacob Kolker, Irina Sheina, Elena Ustinova and Lena Lenskaya from Russia, and Kathy Bickmore from Canada. The thirteen chapters of the book are grouped into three sections: Historical and Theoretical Foundations, From Theory to Practice, and Pedagogy and Possibilities in the Postmodern World. In the first section Tye’s history of global education programs is a useful guide to acronyms of long-term US-based programs. As a peripheral participant in the field it was fascinating for me to read the origins of programs such as SPICE and CTIR. Heilman compares and contrasts global education and multicultural education and suggests that policy-making regarding multicultural education is more public because it is about local socio-political structures and has been led by members of oppressed groups, whereas, because international issues are beyond the influence of single groups of policy-makers in any one country, global education has been the Journal of International Social Studies http://www.iajiss.org Volume 1 Number 1 55 Fall 2010 interest and purview of the elite, looking to enhance their individual prospects in a global economy. She argues for broader awareness and participation in international conversations. Landorf provides an alternative to Heilman’s analysis of the field of global education, proposing that advocating for international human rights has often been, and should be, the purpose behind efforts to offer global education. From Theory to Practice provides an overview of the literature on globalizing teacher education and reflections of the authors who worked as graduate students in the Global Awareness Program (GAP) at Florida International University, where the professional development model was directly derived from Hanvey’s (1976) conceptualizations of global education. In her review of the literature Zong uses Merryfield’s (1991) framework for analyzing teacher education to write a chapter that endeavors to fill the gap in recent handbooks of the field, where little has been written on either globalizing teacher education or professional development. What this chapter makes clear is the paucity of long term or large scale studies on the effect of global education initiatives. The section also includes chapters describing a long-term collaboration between Florida International University and Miami- Dade County Public Schools, and chapters addressing educational reform in Russia in the time of Perestroika. Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker and Lenskaya illustrate how global education was the umbrella under which reforms of general classroom curriculum and instruction in Miami and Russia could be introduced. The cases illustrate the need for institutional support for reform efforts in public schools in terms of funding, policies, and leadership. Lenskaya’s case illustrates how building relationships with international colleagues, specifically Jan Tucker and the educators in Florida, and how seeing a successful model of professional development based on global education in the Miami-Dade school district, helped Lenskaya and her colleagues envision such a system in Russia. Chapters in Pedagogy and Possibilities in the Postmodern World complement From Theory to Practice. Zong structured her review of research on globalized teacher education in Merryfield’s analytical framework from the early 1990s. However, in her chapter, reprinted with permission from Critical Issues in Social Studies Research for the 21st Century (Stanley, 2001), Merryfield demonstrates how her understanding of the global context has changed. She urges current social studies educators to reconsider how they are defining global education. She uses post- colonial theories to frame her comments as she explains how imperialism has shaped academic knowledge. She posits that this legacy needs to be addressed as a primary tenet of global education if we are to teach children to thrive in an intricately connected world that has no imperial center. Whereas Zong reviewed research on global education in teacher education specifically, Cogan and Grossman define global education somewhat differently. This enables them to offer empirical studies of citizenship education, The Citizenship Education Policy Studies I and CEPS II, as the basis for their list of eight “research-derived key approaches to nurture and support globally minded teachers”. As they reflect upon their time as graduate students, Cruz and Burmúdez share the characteristics and Journal of International Social Studies http://www.iajiss.org Volume 1 Number 1 56 Fall 2010 influence of a globally minded professor and mentor, Jan Tucker. Appropriately, as the final chapter of the book written for scholars and teachers, Bickmore’s contribution provides classroom-ready strategies for K-16 educators looking to globalize their own instruction. Drawing on feminist theories, Bickmore points out that if conversations about global education remain about identity, we will continue to be tied up in generalizations and expectations based on beliefs and values about particular roles and identities. When educators encourage informed conversations about actions based on human rights and awareness of the interconnectedness of the world, there is a way to move forward. A better title for the book might have been “Visions in Global Education: Jan Tucker and the Global Education Movement”. The mélange of styles and perspectives of the chapters form a well- deserved festschrift for Jan Tucker of Florida International University. They provide an elegant collective memoir of a particular period in the development of globally oriented education in the United States and Russia. A critique of professional development efforts has often been that participants have not documented and disseminated their efforts. Descriptions of the Miami-Dade Global Awareness Program by participants who were at different times teachers, administrators and graduate students provide an excellent case study for educators interested in effecting positive change in their own schools through global education. They point to the perennial need for thoughtful leadership in both school administration and educational policy-making when trying to reform traditional systems and practices. Chapters on reform efforts in Russia are moving, informative, and sobering in that they illustrate the importance of addressing context when adopting ideas from other communities. They also provide an example of building relationships across national boundaries when problem-solving in education. These chapters, and Heilman’s, bring to mind Boulding’s classic book Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, in which individuals are encouraged to consider how they can use their membership in non-governmental agencies to foster relationships, influence local and national policies, and effect positive change at a global level. Although the majority of contributors to Visions are US academics who have had similar work published elsewhere this does not diminish the value of this edited work. Teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in the field of global education will find it extremely useful to have these essays available in a single volume. References Boulding, E. (1990). Building a global civic culture: Education for an interdependent world. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Stanley, W.B. (2001). Critical issues in social studies research for the 21st century. Information Age Publishing.