Chapter 7: Reading a Different Culture: The Use of International Children’s Literature in Teacher Education

Merryfield (1994) laments that only about 5% of the nation’s K–12 teachers have had any academic preparation in global education and that college students in teacher education programs take fewer courses with global or international content than do all other college majors. We have seen this for ourselves with several students in the teacher education program at our university who could not differentiate Japan from China. This became apparent when one student stated to Yukari, a Japanese native, “Although you’re from Japan, a communist country, I’m glad that you’re not a communist!” The majority of our students are monolingual English speakers and do not seem to have much interest in learning foreign languages besides Spanish.