Chapter 8: Seeking a Curricular Soul: Moving Global Education into Space/Place, with Intimacy, and toward Aesthetic Experience

One would be hard pressed to find an educational institution that does not invoke global in their mission statement. And one would be equally challenged to find such calls enacted in the realities of daily life in those same institutions. Going global in education may suffer from the misfortune of having too much interest that is too widely spread, such that rationales for global education are shallow, diverse, and often contradictory. Some raise alarms about the lack of academic competitiveness among U.S. students as the central point of a rationale, a claim that resonates in other countries (Clough, 2008). Others seek the maintenance of U.S. power internationally, economically, and otherwise (Burack, 2003; Smith, 2006). Still others want global education for humanitarian reasons, such as promoting cross cultural understanding (Merryfield, 2002; Merryfield & Kesai, 2004), global citizenship (Gaudelli, 2003; Gaudelli & Heilman, 2009; Myers, 2006; Osler & Vincent, 2002), and economic and social justice (Bigelow & Peterson, 2002; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 2005). While such diverse and discordant calls enrich curricular discourse by inviting a varied conversation of possibility, the complexity of rationales may also thwart the development of global curriculum projects in the places that need them the most: schools.