Exploring issues in international context (4): Globalization

Chapter 8. Globalization and implications for education p. 283

Definition: Globalization has "become the central issue of our time" and "will define the world our children inherit." Globalization results in the increasing interdependence and integration of countries as the result of the worldwide movement of ideas, capital, labor, and goods and is "a set of process that tend to de-territorialize important economic, social, and cultural practices from their traditional boundaries in nation-states."

I. Globalization as paradox rather than paradigm

• Local-global dichotomy
  
  • The lack of attention to issues of social justice (wealth distribution, access and opportunity, cultural identity, and universal human rights and cultural rights)
  • In international projects, the global is actually the knowledge of those from developed nations passed off as priorities onto the Other - the developing nation
  • globalization's forces may incite strong reactions from local communities committed to protecting their particular views and values
    
• Addressing the dichotomy
  
  • Schools are expected to help prepare students to adapt to a global-oriented economy while simultaneously negotiating community values at more local levels
  • Educators are to prepare global citizens (address cultural pluralism)
    

II. Multiple conceptions of globalization

• Globalization as economics
  
  • from a positive outlook: globalization represents a natural and inevitable expansion of the marketplace beyond national borders (economic liberalism; market economy)
    
  • from a critical outlook: the economic aspects of gloablization stress that the anthropomorphic imagery of formulations like that of the World Bank has the rhetorical effect of depicting human actors as beholden to supposedly natural economic forces that are beyond their control rather than as participants in the creation of these forces (ignoring "human agent")
  • Application: A Nation at Risk (rationalized in terms of economic competition)
    
• Globalization as information and communications technologies (p. 291)
  
  • "knowledge economy"
  • ICTs have transformed the rate and the consequences of globalization - changing conception of knowledge and information
    
  • The profusion of IT combines with other forces of globalization to produce a homogenizing effect
  • unequal access - whose knowledge tech exalts and whose may be forgotten
    
• Globalization as sociocultural phenomena
  
  • arising from the acceleration of phenomena such as immigration: the divergence and convergence of perspectives within classrooms that are increasingly multicultural
  • Typical question: how the national and international are reflected in (and shaped by) the local and by the actualities and experiences of people's lives
    
• Globalization as philosophical reassessment
  
  • new moral and ethical imperatives that have emerged (redefinition of citizenship, society
  • Digital divide (new literacies) p. 293
  • Global social justice (universalization of human rights) - injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
  • Be aware of the market-centric conception of globalization as ideologies are commonly defined in economic terms
    

III. Globalization and its impact on educational issues

• Globalization and purposes of schooling
  
  • The purpose of education: prepare the educated person (predicated on the way in which dominant or powerful members of a society view the world)
  • Education is often considered an instrument to develop human capital (globalization thus treated as a paradigm rather than a paradox)
  • Curriculums should be designed not only to acquaint students with globalizing impetuses but also to help them critique the ways globalization benefits some over others
    
• Globalization and educational access and opportunity
  
  • poverty, digital divide, relocation, "white flight" (economic stratification along urban-suburban lines
  • develop identities as world citizens
    
• Globalization and educational accountability and authority
  
  • The global commercialization of education - homogenizes curriculum & instruction
  • acute pressures related to the accountability movement (inspired by the 1983 A Nation at Risk report) - school choice through market principles (vouchers, charter schools)
  • Resistance (NCLB controversial)
    
• Globalization and teacher professionalism
  
  • two spheres educators inhabit
    
    • Official sphere: dominated by formal authorities directing curriculum, instruction & assessment
    • Unofficial sphere: distinguished by the form the culture of teaching practice assumes
      
  • Reconcile 2 major views
    
    • education for national economic growth
    • education for social transformation toward a more just society
      
  • Philosophical commitments: to promote human dignity, engage students in critical discussion about social challenges, and foster teacher reflection on the kinds of educational practices that develop concern for others at home and abroad
    
    

IV. Developing teachers' comparative perspective taking skills