Chapter 8: Moving the Center of Global Education: From Imperial World Views that Divide the World to Double Consciousness, Contrapuntal Pedagogy, Hybridity, and Cross-Cultural Competence

It is time for social studies educators to move beyond the global education conceived in the Cold War. In the 1970s the seminal work of Lee Anderson (1979), Chadwick Alger (1974), James Becker (1979), and Robert Hanvey (1975) contributed greatly to the social studies by conceptualizing citizenship education for a global age. Global education developed worldmindedness by expanding the social studies' Eurocentric curriculum with more content on Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and infusing voices from people in these world regions to develop skills in perspective consciousness (Becker, 1979; Hanvey, 1975). Globally-oriented social studies curricula added to the traditional U.S. foreign policy view of the world by examining how nonstate actors such as individuals, multinational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (as diverse as CARE, the International Monetary Fund, the Grameen Bank, Greenpeace, the National Council of Churches, the Palestinian Liberation Organization) were interacting globally and changing the world (Alger, 1974; Alger & Harf, 1986; Anderson, 1979). Teachers began to teach concepts such as globalization, economic interdependence, and global political systems and situated environmental and human rights issues in a world context so that students would learn how they and their communities influence and are influenced by the actions and beliefs of people around the planet (Merryfield, 1998). Adopted by the National Council for the Social Studies in 1982, elements of global education have been integrated into the social studies curriculum in many states and school districts to help young people understand their increasingly interconnected world.