Critical Global Perspectives

A volume in Research in Social EducationSeries Editor Merry Merryfield, The Ohio State UniversityThe primary purpose of this book is to invite educators to (re)think what it means to critically conceptualizeknowledge about the world. In other words, imagining curriculum in a critical way means decolonizingmainstream knowledge about global societies. Such an approach re-evaluates how we have come to knowthe world and asks us to consider the socio-political context in which we have come to understand whatconstitutes an ethical global imagination. A critical reading of the world calls for the need to examinealternative ways of knowing and teaching about the world: a pedagogy that recognizes how diversesubjects have come to view the world. A critical question this book raises is: What are the radical ways ofre-conceptualizing curriculum knowledge about global societies so that we can become accountable to thedifferent ways people have come to experience the world? Another question the book raises is: how do weengage with complexities surrounding social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., in theglobal contexts? Analyzing global issues and events through the prism of social difference opens up spacesto advocate a transformative framework for a global education curriculum. Transformative in the sense thatsuch a curriculum asks students to challenge stereotypes and engages students in advocating changes withinlocal/global contexts.A critical global perspective advocates the value of going beyond the nation-state centered approach to teaching about topics such as history, politics,culture, etc. It calls for the need to develop curriculum that accounts for transnational formations: an intervention that asks us to go beyond issues thatare confined within national borders. Such a practice recognizes the complicated ways the local is connected to the global and vice versa and cautionsagainst creating a hierarchy between national and global issues. It also suggests the need to critically examine the pitfalls of forming dichotomiesbetween the local (or the national) and the global or the center and the periphery.