Critical Global Perspectives

A volume in Research in Social Education
Series Editor Merry Merryfield, The Ohio State University
The primary purpose of this book is to invite educators to (re)think what it means to critically conceptualize
knowledge about the world. In other words, imagining curriculum in a critical way means decolonizing
mainstream knowledge about global societies. Such an approach re-evaluates how we have come to know
the world and asks us to consider the socio-political context in which we have come to understand what
constitutes an ethical global imagination. A critical reading of the world calls for the need to examine
alternative ways of knowing and teaching about the world: a pedagogy that recognizes how diverse
subjects have come to view the world. A critical question this book raises is: What are the radical ways of
re-conceptualizing curriculum knowledge about global societies so that we can become accountable to the
different ways people have come to experience the world? Another question the book raises is: how do we
engage with complexities surrounding social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc., in the
global contexts? Analyzing global issues and events through the prism of social difference opens up spaces
to advocate a transformative framework for a global education curriculum. Transformative in the sense that
such a curriculum asks students to challenge stereotypes and engages students in advocating changes within
local/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 that
are confined within national borders. Such a practice recognizes the complicated ways the local is connected to the global and vice versa and cautions
against creating a hierarchy between national and global issues. It also suggests the need to critically examine the pitfalls of forming dichotomies
between the local (or the national) and the global or the center and the periphery.