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Introduction[1]

Globalization has extended the required knowledge, skills, and attitudes that schools must foster in students so that they can successfully live, work, and take action as citizens in an interconnected world (Bottery, 2006; Zhao, 2010). The proliferation of political and economic structures and systems that transcend national borders (e.g., the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, international free trade agreements, transnational corporations) requires that students know how to communicate, cooperate, and negotiate with individuals from different national and cultural backgrounds (Zhao, 2010). The unprecedented rise in global migration and displacement has increased the linguistic and cultural diversity of communities and classrooms. Therefore, educators must be able to respond to the academic and social needs of an increasingly diverse student body and to teach all of their students to understand, appreciate, and respect similarities and differences across various racial, ethnic, and religious groups within a pluralist society (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011; Suarez-Orozco, 2001). Furthermore, educators must prepare students to address problems of equity and justice not only locally but also worldwide as globalization has made environmental and social injustices even more apparent (Apple, 2011; Banks, 2008; Suarez- Orozco, 2001). To support students in developing multiple, intersecting civic and cultural identities and participating as citizens in a global community, teachers must be equipped with specific skills, knowledge, and attitudes. The purpose of this article is to flesh out a framework for what globally competent teaching looks like in K-12 classrooms.

Given the realities of globalization, our education system must rethink what citizenship education entails and how it is taught in K-12 classrooms. Schools have traditionally conceptualized citizens as those belonging to a nation-state with certain rights and responsibilities, and have placed citizenship education in distinct courses or as part of the social studies curriculum. However, in today’s increasingly interdependent world, what it means to be a citizen has transcended traditional nation-state boundaries and has made more fluid the cultural, national, and global identities to which individuals feel a sense of belongingness (Banks, 2008; Myers & Zaman, 2009). As such, global citizenship does not require individuals to give up their national, regional, or cultural identities for one global culture. Rather, global citizenship is a “layered citizenship” (Banks, 2008) whereby individuals possess the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that foster productive and socially just participation in inextricably connected local and global communities (Osler & Vincent, 2002). Further, not only should global citizens have the right to be able to “live and work effectively anywhere in the world” (Noddings, 2005, p. 2) but they should hold the responsibility to reflect critically on their position in interconnected global systems (Andreotti, 2006) and “make decisions and take action in the global interest to benefit humankind” (Banks, 2008, p. 134).

Global citizenship education scholars and NGOs supporting global citizenship education have outlined the competencies (i.e., dispositions, knowledge, and skills) that students engaged in global citizenship education should learn if they are to “secure a world that is more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure, and sustainable” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 9). This includes perspective consciousness, empathy, human rights and social justice, the interconnectedness of the local and the global, intercultural understanding and communication, and how to take political action across the local, national, and global arenas in which students are situated (Asia Society, 2014; Banks, 2008; Girard & Harris, 2013; Myers, 2006; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011; UNESCO, 2014). Just as globalization affects multiple sectors of society, the specific issues arising from globalization that students should learn to take responsibility for and act upon cut across grade levels and academic disciplines (Gaudelli, 2003; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011). Therefore, to move global citizenship education from abstraction to action, advocates have called for global citizenship to be integrated into extant subjects (Asia Society, 2014; Klein, 2013; UNESCO, 2014).

While the literature establishes what it is that students ought to know and be able to do, less is known about how teachers instill these mindsets, concepts, and skillsets in students across grade levels and subject areas and what responsibility policymakers and teacher educators have in moving teachers in these directions. In the United States, state departments of education and national teacher organizations have begun to incorporate aspects of global citizenship education in their teaching standards and evaluation tools (Kirby & Crawford, 2012). For example, the North Carolina Teaching Standards and Teacher Evaluation stipulates that teachers “embrace diversity in the school community and in the world” and “promote global awareness and its relevance to subjects they teach” (Public Schools of North Carolina, 2012). Similarly, NCATE’s diversity standard for teacher candidates requires that educators “reflect multicultural and global perspectives that draw on the histories, experiences, and representations of students and families from diverse populations” (National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2008, p. 36). However, for these policies to translate into teaching practice, educators at all levels need to understand what teaching for global citizenship looks like in practice and what a core set of pedagogies might look like for teachers across subject areas and grade levels that could be incorporated into district, teacher education, and evaluation policy.

Research conducted in this area of study has been situated in social studies and foreign language classrooms, often in the upper grade levels (Gaudelli, 2006; Karamon & Tochon, 2007; Merryfield, 2008; Myers, 2006; Rapoport, 2010; Suarez, 2003). For example, Merryfield (1998) studied three groups of social studies teachers: (a) those identified as exemplary global educators, (b) experienced classroom teachers just beginning to teach with a global perspective, and (c) preservice teachers who studied global education in a methods course, and found common practices across all three groups. Social studies teachers of all levels of global competency development connected global content to students’ lives, taught students about their own cultures and diverse cultures through sharing multiple perspectives and comparisons of similarities and differences, and made connections across time and space. Exemplary teachers stood apart in that they also taught about the interconnectedness of local and global inequities; provided cross-cultural experiential learning; used themes, issues, or problems to organize global content; emphasized skills in higher level thinking and research; and employed various teaching strategies and resources. Similarly, Girard and Harris (2013) examined how world history courses could address global citizenship competencies. They suggested that teachers need to engage in disciplined inquiry around global issues, teach the interconnectedness of economic, political, and cultural systems, and teach students to understand and respect multiple perspectives. These authors acknowledged that certain aspects of the social studies context (e.g., curriculum) facilitated these practices.

While global citizenship education is of critical importance in social studies and foreign language contexts, so too is it in all content areas and across all grade levels if we are indeed going to successfully prepare students to be world citizens. Yet, with the exception of a few reports (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2011), little research has highlighted what globally competent teaching looks like in content area classrooms that, at first glance, may not lend themselves to teaching global citizenship. Furthermore, while studies have examined how pre-service teachers develop global competencies in teacher preparation and teaching abroad programs in multiple subject areas (Burton, 2011; Colville-Hall, Adamowicz-Hariasz, Sidorova, & Engelking, 2011; Cushner & Brennan, 2007), there is an absence of research examining how in-service teachers then employ these competencies in their classrooms and move them into teaching for global citizenship.

This study addresses these gaps by examining the pedagogical practices of in-service teachers in one southeastern state who infuse global citizenship education in both expected and unexpected subject areas. Specifically, we sought to uncover the signature pedagogies (Boix Mansilla, 2013; Shulman, 2005) that these teachers used in math, music, science, English, social studies, and language classes across elementary schools and into middle and high schools. Then we set out to determine implications of these understandings for policymakers and teacher educators as the stakes for K-12 global citizenship grow higher.

Unpacking Global Competence for Global Citizenship Education

Before we move into the bulk of the study, we wanted to expand a bit on our definition of global citizenship education by exploring the notion of global competencies. A central component of global citizenship education, global competence is a compilation of dispositions, knowledge, and skills necessary to effectively engage as citizens of the world (Zhao, 2010). Like others before us, we argue that in order for educators to foster a unique set of global competency dispositions, knowledge, and skills in students that can empower them to “reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their cultures and contexts, to imagine different futures, and to take responsibility for their decisions and actions” (Andreotti, 2006, p. 96-97), educators are required to develop those same competencies in themselves. While there is a focus on global competence within the field of global citizenship education (e.g., Girard & Harris, 2013; Klein, 2013; Zhao, 2010), we were struck in our review of the literature by a lack of an agreed-upon set of global competencies for teachers in particular. Thus in this article, we first flesh out the competencies required of teachers so that they can in turn teach for global citizenship.

Derived from a systematic review of the literature on K-12 teacher training and global education (including work in global citizenship education), we identified 12 core elements that globally competent teachers demonstrate. These are divided into three domains: dispositions, knowledge, and skills (Tichnor-Wagner, Glazier, Parkhouse, & Cain, 2016). Dispositions include valuing multiple perspectives and a commitment to equity worldwide; knowledge includes understanding of global conditions and current events, the interconnectedness of the world and an experiential understanding of multiple cultures; and finally, skills include a teacher’s ability to communicate in multiple languages, to create a classroom environment that values diversity and global engagement, and to facilitate intercultural conversations. Figure 1 provides a complete list of these elements.

Dispositions and knowledge related to global competence are the areas currently most addressed in teacher preparation programs that purport to prepare teachers for global citizenship education work. These may develop through preservice coursework (Kirkwood, 2001; Landorf, Rocco, & Levin, 2007) and student teaching abroad experiences (Cushner & Brennan, 2007; Mahon & Cushner, 2007; Zong, 2009). Furthermore, pre-service teachers often enter programs of education with prior dispositions and knowledge related to global education, for example, through childhood experiences, travel, or former jobs (Parkhouse, Tichnor-Wagner, Glazier, & Cain, 2015). Missing, however, from teacher preparation and continuing professional development is the explicit teaching of the necessary and varied skills pre-service teachers need to teach in globally responsive ways. These necessary skills are varied and critical and require particular attention in teacher education and in ongoing teacher professional development and evaluation if teachers are to foster an ethos of global citizenship in students.

Globally competent teaching skills include the following. First, globally competent teachers communicate in multiple languages, particularly as a means to converse with parents, students, and community members who may not speak English as their first language (Asia Society, 2014; Houston & Pierson, 2008; Nero, 2009; Zhao, 2010). Examples of this may include teachers talking to parents in the parents’ home language, allowing students to talk to each other in their home languages, and incorporating multiple languages into everyday classroom instruction, for example, by regularly introducing new words from different languages and having classroom resources available in multiple languages. This skill helps validate and respect the cultural identities of students within a global context (Banks, 2008; Myers & Zaman, 2009).

Second, globally competent teachers create a classroom environment that values diversity and global engagement. This encompasses using multiple global resources (e.g., books, globes, lesson plans), providing specific global examples when teaching content-area skills, engaging students in class discussions about global issues, and providing opportunities for students to reflect upon the impacts of their actions on global issues and people (Banks, 2008; Eslami, 2005; Girard & Harris, 2013; Merryfield, 2008; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011; Zhao, 2010). In doing so, students may become comfortable with their layered identities, value diverse perspectives, and build skills in reflexivity and dialogue that leads to understanding of different lived realities among interconnected global actors (Andreotti, 2006; Andreotti & Pashby, 2013). Third, globally competent teachers integrate learning experiences that promote content aligned investigations of the world (Girard & Harris, 2013; Subedi, 2010; Ukpokodu, 2010). These learning experiences incorporate students’ interests and experiences (O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011) and are applied to real-world issues and concerns, prompting students to think critically about behaviors and processes that contribute to inequities, injustices, and environmental degradation and planting the seed for students to take responsibility and action (Leduc, 2013; Noddings, 2005).

Fourth, globally competent teachers facilitate intercultural and international conversations. These authentic conversations are shared and collaborative rather than unidirectional (Merryfield, 2002; Noddings, 2005; Roberts, 2007). This may include Skype conversations, pen pals, or inviting individuals from diverse cultures and countries as guest speakers (Devlin-Foltz, 2010; Merryfield, 2002; Roberts, 2007; Sprague, 2012). A fifth skill is developing local, national, or international partnerships that provide opportunities for collaborative real-world contexts for global learning experiences (Merryfield, 2002; Noddings, 2005; Roberts, 2007). Partners can range from international students at local universities, to sister classrooms halfway around the world, to local non-profit organizations whose work addresses global concerns. These conversations and partnerships can be an important first step in developing empathy and the ability to work with, rather than for, others in order to craft alternative solutions to global problems (Andreotti, 2006). As Andreotti and Pashby (2013) argued, “Justice starts with the forms of relationships we are able to create” (p. 433).

Finally, globally competent teachers assess students’ global competence development using a variety of authentic, differentiated assessments. This could include, for example, projects or rubrics (Boix Mansilla & Jackson, 2011) that allow students to critically reflect on their own global competence and contributions—both positive and negative—to current global conditions (Andreotti, 2006). In discussing global competency components, Klein (2013) further argued “We are true global citizens when the values we have acquired through global learning translate into new behaviors in every aspect of our lives...[Therefore] we need evidence that new insights are shaping students’ behavior and leading them to ‘walk the ‘walk’ even when no one is looking” (p. 486).

Armed with this more comprehensive understanding of the competencies required of teachers if they are to engage in global citizenship education, we set out next to explore what these competencies looked like in the real world of classrooms. As we identified, missing from the literature are multi-disciplinary depictions of what these competencies—and global citizenship more generally—look like in teachers' practice as they teach the required curriculum. We sought to address this gap through interviewing, observing, and analyzing the work of teachers in various content areas who are engaged in global citizenship education.

Signature Pedagogies: A Framework for Illustrating Global Citizenship Education

Through this study, we set out to determine if there is a core set of pedagogies that demarcate global citizenship education across different disciplines. What are the distinct ways in which teachers prepare K-12 students to live, work, and take actions in ways that make the interconnected world in which we live more just, equitable, and sustainable? In other words, what are the signature pedagogies—the “forms of instruction that leap to mind” (Shulman, 2005, p. 52) —of teachers who infuse global citizenship education into their classroom?

Most often applied to research on professional schools, such as medicine and law, signature pedagogies encompass visible teaching practices and underlying beliefs about why those practices should occur (Shulman, 2005). In explaining the concept of signature pedagogies in professional schools, Shulman gave the examples of “bedside teaching,” or medical rounds, for medical students and legal case study methods for law students. Medical rounds and case studies qualify as signature pedagogies because they encompass both visible teaching practices (e.g., a physician engaging a group of medical students in discussion as they led them through clinical rounds) as well as the underlying beliefs about why those practices should be utilized and the values and dispositions of the profession itself (e.g., case study dialogue in law school reflecting what legal encounters entail in the courtroom). In this study, we sought to apply of the concept of signature pedagogies to include the practices and beliefs involved in teaching for global citizenship.

According to Shulman (2005), signature pedagogies contain three dimensions. The first is a surface structure, or “concrete, operational acts of teaching and learning, of showing and demonstrating, of questioning and answering” (p. 54). Second, signature pedagogies have a deep structure, or a “set of assumptions about how to best impart a certain body of knowledge” (p. 55). The third dimension is its implicit structure, which “comprises a set of beliefs about professional attitudes, values, and dispositions” (p. 55). Shulman (2005) further contended that signature pedagogies can be defined by what they are not, or what knowledge and ways of teaching are deliberately not conveyed.

Although specific surface, deep, and implicit structures may vary by profession, signature pedagogies share a common set of features. They are “pervasive and routine, cutting across topics and courses, programs and institutions” (Shulman, 2005, p. 56). Therefore, we would expect to see the same signature pedagogies across classrooms in different communities, different content areas, and different grade levels. Additionally, we would see these practices as routine habits occurring as a part of educators’ everyday teaching.

Building from Shulman’s (2005) framework for signature pedagogies, Boix Mansilla (2013) characterized signature pedagogies in global education as teaching approaches that nurture the development of students’ understanding of the world and global habits of mind. Drawing from a case study of the classroom of a fifth and sixth grade social studies teacher, Boix Mansilla (2013) proposed that signature pedagogies in global education that support students' development of global citizenship include the following components: 1) identifying “a clear global competence purpose” (e.g., classroom instruction or activities aimed to develop students’ abilities and attitudes to understand and act on issues of global importance); 2) having a “strong disciplinary foundation” (e.g., incorporating concepts, content, and ways of thinking from applicable disciplines); 3) maintaining “integrative units of understanding that are central to the development of global competence and can integrate students’ capacity to investigate the world, take perspective, communicate across difference and perhaps even take action” (e.g., including a holistic set of skills from multiple disciplines); 4) having a “ubiquitous, spiraling presence” in the curriculum; 5) being “centered on learning demands” so as to best meet students’ needs”; and 6) being “open to teacher inquiry and ongoing feedback” (p. 14-15). While significant, the pilot study was limited in its attention to one grade level and subject area. Thus we embarked on this study to examine whether there existed signature pedagogies of globally competent teachers that would carry across schools and classrooms.

Because signature pedagogies are meant to pervade across different locations, we wondered if educators in different institutional contexts teaching different subject areas and students with varying demographics shared common practices across their classrooms as they sought to foster global citizenship in their students. Furthermore, although pedagogical practices for global competence have been identified for social studies and foreign language instruction (Boix Mansilla, 2013; Girard & Harris, 2013; Merryfield; 1998; Rapoport, 2013), to date, few empirical analyses have considered what these pedagogies might look like across different content areas including English language arts (ELA), math, science, and music. Are there signature pedagogies for globally competent teaching that cross disciplinary boundaries? If so, how might we then introduce teachers to these pedagogies through policy so that they can enact global citizenship education?

Methods

We conducted a qualitative multiple case study (Yin, 2009) with ten North Carolina K-12 educators committed to globally competent teaching practices. A multiple case design allows for the selection of two or more “replications” wherein the same phenomenon is occurring (Yin, 2009). These cases were purposefully chosen to represent varying contexts in which the phenomenon of globally competent teaching occurs in regards to location, school level, and content area(s). All cases were also purposefully selected within the same state in order to control for the same policy context —both in regard to political will for teaching with a global perspective and additional accountability mandates that impact classroom instruction.

North Carolina is in many ways a microcosm of how globalization is affecting local communities in the United States. Over the past three decades, North Carolina has experienced one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in the United States; furthermore, the state has experienced an economic shift from manufacturing and agricultural jobs to knowledge-intensive jobs within transnational companies. Responding to these new global realities, for the past decade, the State Board of Education and Department of Public Instruction has increasingly highlighted the importance of infusing a global perspective into instruction. In 2007, North Carolina’s Teacher Evaluation and Professional Standards incorporated “global awareness” into five of its standards. Most recently, in 2013 the State Board of Education commissioned a task force whose findings emphasized that the state must prepare students to be “the most globally aware and prepared in the nation” and was the first state to provide concrete recommendations to provide teachers the training and tools to do so (North Carolina State Board of Education, 2013, p. 7). As such, teachers that represent the diversity of North Carolina schools—from urban centers to rural regions to military communities—have been asked to incorporate a global perspective into their everyday teaching. However, these state documents do not define global awareness, nor do they include global awareness into school or district accountability systems, which exclusively target reading, math, and science standards. Therefore, this study serves an important purpose in operationalizing feasible signature practices in which teachers in different content areas and different school contexts might be trained to support global citizenship education.

Sample and Data Collection

We used a stratified purposeful sampling strategy to illuminate globally competent teaching strategies in different grade levels and content areas (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Participants were recruited through a rigorous application process that included submission of lesson plans, a description of potential participants' global education experiences, and examples of how they incorporated global competencies into their classrooms. Participants were selected based on 1) the extent to which they demonstrated different elements of global competencies as identified through the extensive literature review; and 2) to maximize variation in subject area, school level, school location (urban, suburban, rural), and school type (e.g. traditional, international focus). These were teachers who actively engaged in global citizenship education.

Ultimately, 10 teachers participated in the study, a number arrived at when we reached representation from elementary, middle, and high school teachers and the subject areas of English, math, social studies, science, language, and the arts. This allowed us to search for signature pedagogies that were present across grade levels and content areas. The selected participants represented a cross-section of elementary school teachers (Ally, Linda and Shauna), middle school teachers (Mike, Simon, Chris, Kate, and Nelson), and high school teachers (Alyssa and Marlene). Two of the elementary school teachers taught all subject areas, and one taught ESL students in all subject areas. Middle school and high school teachers were also selected to represent a variety of content areas, including math (Chris), science (Simone), English language arts (Kate and Alyssa), and music (Nelson) in addition to the more commonly examined areas within global education literature of social studies (Mike and Simone) and world languages (Marlene). The school context of the 10 teachers varied as well. Shauna, Mike, and Nelson taught in global-themed public magnet schools. Linda and Mike taught in suburban contexts. Shauna, Nelson, and Alyssa taught in urban schools. Ally, Simone, and Marlene taught in rural schools. Chris taught in a private Christian school.

Data sources for each participant case included an in-depth biographical interview, two-tofour classroom observations and post-observation interviews, two online focus groups, an in-person focus group, and a collection of teaching artifacts (e.g., lesson plans, unit plans, project descriptions, grading rubrics). While classroom observations and teaching artifacts provided evidence of surface structures, post-observation and in-depth interviews allowed us to uncover the deep and implicit structures underlying teachers’ actions. A complete list of participants and participant interactions can be found in Table 1.

Data Analysis

Data were analyzed through several alternating phases of focused and open coding to identify common themes, as well as counterexamples (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Initially, we—the authors and research team—coded the data for instances of the global competency skills derived from our comprehensive literature review that represented observable practices (Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2016). Skill codes included: using multiple languages, creating a classroom environment that values diversity and global engagement, providing content-aligned investigations of the world, facilitating intercultural conversations, facilitating intercultural partnerships, and assessing students’ global competencies.

From the a priori skills identified, we then conducted several iterative processes of coding for globally competent signature pedagogies to search for commonalities within and across teachers’ work. We first examined individual teachers' cases before aggregating for cross-case analyses to “help ensure that emergent categories and discovered patterns [were] grounded in specific cases and their contexts” (Patton, 2002). Second, through constant comparison of incidents (i.e., global competence skills) across teacher cases via a cross-case matrix (Corbin & Strauss, 2008), we derived a list of inductive codes that suggested examples of surface, deep, and implicit structures that comprise a signature pedagogy for globally competent teaching. As we compared across cases, we defined “signature pedagogies” as those that were evident across at least three interactions for each teacher case and found in nine out of 10 teachers to ensure that they held true across content areas and grade levels. In addition, each pedagogy identified had to have surface, deep, and implicit structures (Shulman, 2005). This resulted in three signature pedagogies for globally competent teaching.

Findings: Signature Pedagogies for Globally Competent Teaching across Content Areas

Overall, we found that each teacher demonstrated the same core signature pedagogies throughout his or her regular instruction, embodying Shulman’s (2005) supposition that signature pedagogies are “pervasive” and “routine.” The three signature pedagogies evident across content areas were: 1) intentional integration of global topics and multiple perspectives into and across the standard curriculum; 2) ongoing authentic engagement with global issues; and 3) connecting teachers’ global experiences, students’ global experiences, and the curriculum. In this section, we describe overall trends and specific examples of signature pedagogies across the 10 participants, illuminating for each signature pedagogy the surface, deep, and implicit structures (Shulman, 2005) that K-12 educators evoked in preparing students to be citizens of the world (illustrated in Table 2).

Below, we synthesize the 10 cases to describe these signature pedagogies. Specific examples for each teacher case are identified in Table 3.

Integrating Global Topics and Perspectives Into and Across the Standard Curriculum

First, all 10 teachers used global examples—that is, examples that introduced students to diverse countries and cultures or to conditions and challenges common across the human experience (Ukpokodu, 1999)—and presented students with multiple perspectives to teach their content area standard course of study. In doing so, they infused global citizenship goals such as empathy, tolerance, and valuing multiple perspectives alongside conventional curriculum standard objectives.

To teach language arts objectives, middle school teacher Kate provided her students with reading materials from multiple cultures. During a unit on point of view, Kate partnered with her school’s media specialist to create a list of books set in countries around the world. Students picked a book of their choice to independently read and, upon completion, write a book report and create a poster on the country where their book was set. On the day students presented their posters, the class engaged in a discussion on the differences between countries and between the cultures of the characters in their books and those in the United States. For lessons on specific reading skills, Kate also infused global examples. In a review lesson on idioms, small groups of students matched idioms from around the world with their countries of origin. Students then discussed their reasoning along with the meaning of the idiom. Then, students independently created an idiom using the setting of their book from the book project.

In middle school science teacher Simone’s classroom, students examined examples of energy use around the world as they learned science standards on the environmental consequences of obtaining, transforming, and distributing energy sources and the implications of the depletion of energy sources. After discussing the pros and cons of obtaining and utilizing major sources of energy, Simone assigned small groups of students a country and had them choose an energy source that would work best for that country based on the price of the energy source, available natural resources, and the size of the population. The next day, the class examined charts on energy consumption around the world, discussed challenges that some countries could have in using ecofriendly energy sources, and debated whether it was more important that everyone around the world have access to electricity or that the environment be preserved.

Nelson, a middle school music teacher, introduced music method standards (e.g., developing tone and discriminating pitch, using expressive elements, interpreting standard musical notation) by comparing songs and musical genres from different Latin American countries (e.g., ballads, mariachi, orchestral music). The examples of Kate, Simon, and Nelson represented a surface structure of observable global content.

The ways in which global content was introduced represented a deep structure of teachers’ beliefs about the best ways to infuse global content in the standard curriculum: namely by providing multiple global examples and perspectives. Kate’s students, for example, presented on books that took place in a variety of countries including Canada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Vietnam, Korea, China, England, Russia, Sudan, and Nigeria. Similarly, in a single lesson Nelson introduced different forms of music from multiple Latin American countries, including Mexico, Venezuela, and Paraguay.

Another deep structure of this signature pedagogy was that global examples and perspectives were not something designated for a particular lesson or unit of study, but were spiraled throughout the year. Kate pointed to daily warm-ups as another way to achieve that spiraling presence in her middle school English language arts classroom. She explained why she introduced news stories from around the world (e.g., a story on Cambodian farmers) during warm-ups on a regular basis:

I really try to read the news daily because…there’s always a chance to insert something. A lot of times, I’ll start the class with a news article just so they have something different they may not hear about...That’s just a little snippet of something that’s easy to do the beginning of the day. (Interview)

Kate and Alyssa in particular noted that maintaining this spiraling presence throughout the year was particularly important because global competence was not something that developed in students overnight.

In addition, the presence of global topics spiraled across multiple content areas, thus illustrating “integrative units of understanding” in that the complexity of global topics required teachers to draw upon different disciplines of knowledge for students to develop a holistic understanding (Boix Mansilla, 2013). For the three elementary school teachers, all of whom taught all subject areas, this meant incorporating global examples into social studies, language arts, math, music, science, and ESL instruction and creating globally-oriented interdisciplinary lessons and units. Shauna, for example, read books aloud in Spanish and English to reinforce what students were learning in their language elective. She regularly met with the team of first grade teachers and the specials teachers (e.g., language, music, library, art, P.E.) to make sure that everyone “incorporated a world view in everything we teach” (Interview).

Like the elementary school teachers, middle and high school teachers of content-specific areas infused an interdisciplinary perspective as they integrated global elements into their standard course of study. For example, middle school music teacher Nelson reported how, in using global examples from Mexico and Venezuela, he pulled in geography, social studies, and language. For example, when he introduced a musical genre, he provided background knowledge of the geographic location of the country of origin and explained the history and politics of each country’s music education systems. Nelson shared that in teaching about the background of Venezuela’s El Sistemo music program that he wanted students to see how “even stuff with the government affects the arts.” He shared a video of Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and product of El Sistemo, explaining that he wanted students

…to see his [Gustavo Dudamel’s] response to the Venezuelan [economic and humanitarian] crisis and if [students] could bridge how the arts and politics could be kept separate sometimes but how sometimes they should be kept together. They both should work hand in hand but since it’s a delicate situation with the government funding of El Sistemo he didn’t want to say anything negative. (Interview)

In having students sing and play songs in Spanish, he incorporated world languages into music class as well, not only by exposing them to Spanish but by evoking mini grammar lessons. As he explained in an interview, he “touched briefly on the male and female context of un and una and how that’s not the same.” The spiraling of global topics across time and content area kept global education always present in the teachers’ and students’ minds.

Teachers further described the implicit structure of valuing global citizenship as the rationale for integrating global content into the standard curriculum. Science teacher Simone shared in a postobservation interview that one of the goals of her lesson on energy was to have students develop empathy for those in countries that may not have access to clean energy sources. Elementary school teacher Ally emphasized the importance of “teaching our children empathy for others as we teach them about the world.” Shauna expressed a similar sense of empathy in an interview when describing one of the end goals of her science unit on seeds – which she opened with a video on a seed vault in Norway that stored the seeds of fruits and vegetables from all over the world – as “caring for plants and animals and thinking about our world that we all share and just putting that in [students’] heads. We share and there are things that we have to do.” These teachers expressed an implicit purpose in using global examples to develop in their students the global citizenship elements of empathy, perspective consciousness, and expanded worldviews.

Authentic Engagement with Global Issues

The second signature pedagogy that emerged from the data was authentic engagement with global issues, in which teachers engaged students in learning tasks related to contemporary global issues or real-time global experiences. These tasks were authentic in that they required depth of knowledge, higher order thinking, and an audience beyond the classroom (Newmann & Wehlage, 1993). Audiences beyond the classroom include community members, pen pals in other countries, legislative representatives, and others. Regarding the surface structure, some authentic tasks were directly embedded into standard content-area curriculum. For example, in Simone’s science class, students synthesized the knowledge they had learned about energy use around the world (described in the previous section) to write a letter to the President of the United States outlining the steps he should take to solve the global energy crisis.

Teachers of different content areas also had students engage with authentic audiences through activities that fostered intercultural communication. Ally, Alyssa, and Marlene facilitated video-chats between their students and individuals from different countries; Linda, Ally, and Simone initiated pen pal exchanges between their students and those in other countries. For a semester, high school ELA teacher Alyssa worked on a video exchange between her classes and a school in India. Each student created a slide that introduced him or herself and asked questions of students in India (e.g., “What are some favorite cultural dishes that you enjoy?”), compiled them in a Prezi presentation, and edited the presentation as a class before Alyssa sent it to the receiving school in India. Elementary teacher Ally facilitated a weekly Friday Skype session between her first grade classroom and a school in Indonesia that had been built after the tsunami. First graders emphatically introduced themselves with loud hellos and waves, shared music, and asked and answered many questions about one another’s cultures (e.g., “Why do girls wear hoods on their heads?” “Do you have a uniform to wear in school?”). Linda described a pen pal exchange between her first grade students and students in an orphanage in Uganda that she had previously visited, saying “not only were we working on language arts, we were working on identifying with someone else who's not just a picture in a book or in a movie. So it really made it real for them and that was exciting to see.”

Community service and service-learning projects were another form of authentic learning that cut across disciplines and age groups. Ally, Linda, Simone, Chris, Kate, and Alyssa introduced these projects as a part of the curriculum or as extracurricular activities as a way to instill in students empathy and a desire to take action on issues of global importance. For example, Linda, a first-grade ESL teacher, engaged her students in a community service project where the students created shoeboxes full of school supplies for a local organization that distributed them to children around the world.

This signature pedagogy of authentic engagement also appeared to hold a deep structure of a spiraling presence, as teachers engaged students in authentic tasks throughout the school year.

Alyssa’s students’ communication with the school in India was a semester-long project where students worked on videos and prezis for their counterparts in India during learning stations, where students rotated between three different activities to practice providing evidence for argumentative writing. Ally and her first grade students Skyped with the same school in Indonesia on a weekly basis. Ally also helped create an ongoing pen pal exchange with a school in Tanzania, which resulted in her school becoming involved in a fundraising campaign to build a well in a Tanzanian school.

As when they discussed intentional integration of global topics, teachers revealed implicit structures of valuing global citizenship when describing the authentic tasks they used with students. For example, Ally equated service-learning projects with “teaching empathy,” elaborating that “when I shared that information with kids, they started to have a different perspective...they think that everything is about them but they need to know that there are others out there we need to care for.” Likewise, Alyssa shared the following experience that revealed how intercultural communication experiences allowed her students to understand a sense of “layered” citizenship (Banks, 2008):

I took a group of students one year to [a local university] and we had this teleconference with students in Jamaica... Some of the kids were really surprised about the idea of skin tones and so forth and this idea of bleaching your skin. Some of the kids just did not realize that was going on, or that it was that extreme. And then there were other kids where their parents were immigrants and so they were very familiar with this idea; even within their household there’s this talk of who was bleaching their skin, or they thought that person should bleach their skin. So, someone might walk by and say that’s a room of Americans or that’s a room of black students or that’s a room of minorities but there’s so much more going on. There’s different layers going on; there’s different perspectives within a culture whatever you may define that as. (Interview)

In describing the project where students collected school supplies to send to children in need around the world, Linda explained how her first grade students “were able to visualize the inequity and to see this is one way that I can help--this is a way that I can be selfless. . . That I can give my new crayon to this little kid who needs it more than I do. To have that perspective I think is really eye-opening for some of these students.” Linda further explained how using global examples in a science lesson about scarcity was key to developing empathy in her young students:

It didn't really click with them what scarcity was until I showed examples from students from other countries. You know our students can choose what they want for lunch. Students in other countries can't choose their meal every day. They might just eat the same thing every day. For them, that was just mind-blowing, that they couldn't choose their meal. Or you know, you guys have shoes. Every kid that comes to school has shoes. In other countries kids might never have shoes when they go to school. I mean they just couldn't fathom constantly walking on the ground without shoes. . . Especially here in the mountains where students are in dire poverty. . . Maybe that clicked with them to say, I don't have shoes, but neither does [that student]. Now I can identify with, this is what I'm struggling with, or this is what I see. (Interview)

In the above examples, teachers revealed an implicit structure in which they believed part of their role as educators was to provide opportunities for students to engage as global citizens.

Connecting Teachers’ Global Experiences, Students’ Global Experiences, and the Curriculum

The third signature pedagogy that emerged from the data was that all 10 teachers made connections between their own experiences and their students’ past, present, and future, including connections that would orient students towards local and global activism. This corroborates Merryfield’s (1998) study of social studies teachers, which found that social studies teachers at all levels of global competence development made connections between students’ own cultures, global content, and time and space. Surface structures included teachers sharing global experiences informally or in lessons and providing students spaces to share their global experiences as well. Teachers frequently shared with students their personal experiences from time spent in different countries as volunteers, teachers, or tourists. Linda had spent a year teaching English in a Greek-American school in Athens, and Alyssa taught at a school in India for six weeks over the summer as a part of a teacher exchange program. Nelson, Shauna, and Chris participated in professional development programs that took educators abroad to locations such as Japan, Denmark, Norway, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. They discussed these experiences with students informally, for example, answering questions students asked or hanging objects or photos from their travels on the classroom walls as a way to elicit conversation. Alyssa explained the value of devoting a portion of a class period to sharing a PowerPoint presentation of photos from the summer teaching program in which she participated in India:

It was a good idea for me to show the pictures and actually talk about it. It wasn’t just looking at pictures. They [the students] had questions that I really didn’t think they were going to ask and that leads to important topics to debate...They might even bring in their own personal stories too. To actually see a real live example is helpful to students.

Teachers also deliberately wove the knowledge and attitudes developed through these life experiences into lesson plans and authentic activities. Shauna launched into a new science unit on seeds by introducing the concept of seed vaults—knowledge she had gained as a result of a trip she had taken to the Artic with National Geographic where they visited the world’s largest seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. Her students watched a short video on the Svalbard seed vault, then engaged in a class discussion on where seed vaults are located around the world and why seeds need to be protected. As Shauna described,

Remembering my trip to Svalbard and knowing that the seed bank was there just hit me. I’m like, I can show them the seed bank and let them know that seeds are important to our survival and let them know that there are places on our planet that I’ve seen before that house seeds in case there’s any kind of catastrophe . . . If I had not gone there and heard about it, I would not have known to include this . . . Just having that background and knowing about the seed vault was able to help me create that lesson . . . It’s neat to see, for me, to take me back to last summer when I was seeing this with my own eyes. To bring it into my classroom is priceless. (Interview)

The school in India that Alyssa’s students were communicating with was the school she taught in during the summer teacher exchange program. Kate engaged her students in a service-learning project that provided supplies for the school in Cape Verde where she was a Peace Corps volunteer.

Likewise, Nelson’s inclusion of Latin American music into his lessons was inspired by the professional development program he attended in Costa Rica.

In order to weave student experiences into lessons, teachers first had to create classroom environments where students felt comfortable sharing these experiences. Teachers did so by sharing their own experiences first, which created spaces for students to share their experiences. Teachers allowed such sharing to arise organically in classroom discussions. Shauna explained of her students, the majority of whom had family members from different countries and lived in multilingual homes, “They write a lot about it [international and intercultural experiences] and they share out and of course their classmates have lots of questions.” Shauna described a particular incident when teaching water pollution: “We were talking about dams and then they started talking about trash island . . . and they talked about people getting sick from drinking the water. They said if you go to Mexico you can’t drink the water. Well, if you go to India too I had to pump my water. I showed them the pump that I used.” Linda similarly elaborated:

Not only can I bring my experiences into the lessons, but I can bring their experiences into the lessons. If they can relate to a story about an Eastern European folktale, and they recognize the name of the grandmother in the story, [then] they can tell me a story about their grandmother. If I read a story about the Mexican Christmas where a little girl is making tamales with her mother, I had a little boy who popped in and explained his memory of doing that. And so it’s just really neat. I can share mine, but when we blend it together with the students and the teacher, it makes for a really rich learning environment.

Kate shared how she had to open up about her own experiences to have students feel comfortable opening up about their unique cultural backgrounds: “In sixth grade they want to all be the same so they don’t want to really bring up, well, we do this at home. But I think once I start telling stories or once I am open about it then other students will share things.” As Nelson explained about a professional development travel program he attended in Costa Rica,

They [the students] heard about Costa Rica the first three months of school. There is so much that I learned that they could appreciate. We had dialogues for extended periods of times. They, especially the Hispanic students, were able to relate and the Hispanic students were able to educate their neighbor who did not have a similar background as to how their family sometimes operates. (Interview)

As the above quotes demonstrate, in having students share their experiences, teachers learned from students and students learned from each other in ways to helped students value their layered identities as global citizens (Banks, 2008).

While the seats of some teachers’ classrooms were filled with students with transnational identities, other teachers acknowledged that their students did not yet have an awareness of the world beyond their local communities. As such, it became all the more acute for teachers to share their personal experiences in order to build that awareness in students. Ally explained:

Some kids because they have military backgrounds have travelled quite a bit, but that is not the majority. [It’s] challenging because some have never been anywhere. We are an hour and a half from the beach and we have kids who have never been out the county or state. It’s difficult at times because I feel like when I try to expose them to different cultures, they seem almost imagined to them. That is why it is so valuable to me to have personal experiences because they know it is possible. I can say this is the way it is because I saw it myself. I want them to know that it is possible. (Interview)

Math teacher Chris and social studies teacher Mike reflected how the privilege of their students served as a springboard for teaching global topics from a more critical perspective. Mike explained:

I think that's the biggest thing for [my students] is exposure, because even if they travel overseas, they travel to destination spots overseas. We do have some kids do mission work . . . But overall, even if they have visited other places, it’s very touristy, and they don’t really know how it is. So we get into some pretty in-depth topics here, like we do Howard Zinn and things like that. When we talk about Columbus in Spanish and what they did to the Aztecs and we have genocide debates in here, and they do research on it. And they try to decide if this is a genocide or not genocide. We try to look at the other half of history, so the people who didn’t get to write it. We focus a lot of our class time on the other end, so the people who didn’t have the opportunity to speak for themselves. (Interview)

The deep structures, or how these connections between teacher and student global experiences were taught, were intentional yet flexible. Teachers were able to improvise and be spontaneous in how they made personal global connections to their instruction, acting responsively to students’ curiosities, experiences, and questions in real time. Mike explained,

A lot of times we'll get a lot of ignorant comments and statements. And I think the biggest thing for me to do is to pause, all the time, when there's stuff like that. And I'm like, “Hold up. We're going to talk about it. This is an IB school, and we can't have you walking around having this misconception of what this is or having the wrong ideas.” So we do a lot of that. And I'm very comfortable with that. (Interview)

Shauna adhered to the philosophy that students’ “curiosity will drive the lesson,” and often went off-script from the lesson plan to ensure that students’ questions and connections were validated. For example, during one observation, she took a break from her read-aloud to teach an impromptu mini-lesson differentiating similar sounding Spanish and English words when her native Spanishspeaker students made a connection between the English word she had read aloud and a Spanish word.

A second deep structure underlying these teacher and student global connections was that teachers provided opportunities for students to learn global content and perspectives from one another. Shauna emphasized, “With all the diverse, multiple cultures, [students] learn a lot from each other.” Rather than provide students information about different countries and cultures around the world, Kate asked her students to present to each other about the countries and cultures they had experienced through the book they read for their global book project. At the high school level, Spanish-as-a-Heritage-Language teacher Marlene had a student from Barcelona present to the class about Spain as a way to broaden the perspectives of the majority of students who were largely from Latin America (Observation).

As with the two signature pedagogies listed above, these connections that teachers made to their own and to their students’ global experiences revealed the implicit premium teachers placed on fostering students’ identities as global citizens. Specifically, teachers alluded to the importance of cultivating students’ interrelated cultural, national, regional, and global identities (Banks, 2008). For example, Chris reflected, “If we do stories about different cultures all the time they start to lose value on their own. And my white middle class children from North Carolina have a culture of their own too and so I think we want to connect to that... Because we are part of the globe aren’t we?” Nelson emphasized that he and his students “talk about our backgrounds a lot” as a way to acknowledge the diversity of the students and teachers of the multicultural school and “share and connect with one another.”

Although teaching different subjects and students of different ages and backgrounds, these ten teachers shared signature pedagogies that defined their globally competent teaching practices. The vignettes that follow illustrate in more depth what these signature pedagogies look like during a regular classroom day, and reveal nuances in how these pedagogies look within three different cases, representing different content areas, grade levels, and school contexts.

Weaving Together Signature Pedagogies in Everyday Practice

Teachers in our study wove together the three signature pedagogies throughout their lessons. These pedagogies did not live in isolation. The three vignettes that follow demonstrate how an elementary, middle, and high school teacher wove the three signature pedagogies together in a way that taught students to think deeply about their roles in the world as global citizens. We intentionally highlight these vignettes as representing three distinct cases in three different contexts, thus expanding the classroom examples that exist in the literature on global citizenship education.

Shauna, a 15-year veteran teacher, taught in a public, PK-5 urban IB magnet elementary school. In the words of Shauna, as an IB school the faculty “includes a world view in everything we teach” and students learned Spanish in every grade level. Her diverse classroom included students who were African American, Latino/a (including Brazilian, Dominican, Mexican, and Puerto Rican), Afghan, and Indian. Chris taught mathematics for over five years in a private, Christian PK-12 school with a predominately white student population. Alyssa, a lateral-entry English teacher, had been teaching mostly 11th grade for almost 10 years at a large, historically African American high school in a mid-sized city. The majority of her students were African-American, but she had a handful of Latino/a ESL students as well. While the specific curricular materials and teaching strategies differed across these three classroom contexts, the same underlying signature pedagogies were interlaced throughout their lessons.

Shauna: Trash-Free Lunch. As a part of a science unit on sharing the planet, Shauna introduces the book Trash-Free Lunch to a small reading group of five students, which tells the story of students who measured the amount of garbage that their school generated during lunch and then made efforts to eliminate the trash they used. As students read the story together, Shauna asks: “What can you do to make your lunch have no trash starting tomorrow? What do you think?” She then asks, “How many of you bring your lunch?” One student raises his hand and she asks him to get his lunchbox to show the group. She also shows her lunchbox and reusable water bottle to the horseshoe table where the students are sitting. She asks students to explain whether these lunches were trash free. A student then shares that her dad is going shopping today and after hearing the story she will ask her dad to get a water bottle that she could fill with water and juice to put in her lunchbox. Shauna replies, “That’s action based on what you learned about pollution. You’re ready to change what you’re doing. You can share this with your friends in the cafeteria.” Shauna then says that there are schools all over the world that are trash-free and shows a video on the iPad of lunches all over the world. “What’s different about their trays?” Students respond, “They’re metal.” She then asks, “Do they throw away their metal trays?” Students say no and that the schools re-use them. Shauna ends the lesson by sharing her experiences during a professional development program in India where all of the lunches she ate in schools used metal silverware and plates so that there was no trash. Students bring the books home to read with their parents that night. (Observation)

All three signature pedagogies were woven throughout this lesson. Shauna integrated the global issue of pollution into her science unit and taught it in an interdisciplinary way via small reading groups. Students had authentic engagement with global issues as Shauna challenged them to apply the lessons from the story into their daily lunch routine. Third, she shared examples of how she and another student in the class brought reusable water bottles and sandwich containers, and how she observed trash-free lunches in India, thus connecting the curriculum to the teacher’s and students’ experiences. An important part of these signature pedagogies was the intentionally on Shauna’s part of teaching students to be responsible stewards of the planet and active global citizens, which represented the implicit structure underlying the actions she and her students took in the classroom. As she explained in a post-observation interview, “These kids saw a problem in their school and acted on it.”

Chris: Global Math Stories. Chris passes out a worksheet to his middle school class entitled “Investigation: Shipping Graveyard.” This worksheet introduces Chittagong, Bangladesh, as one of the 10 fastest growing populations in the world with shipbreaking as one of its top industries. Before reading the worksheet, Chris shows his class on Google Maps where the city is located. The class reads the background statement together. Working together in small groups, students use the division property of exponents to estimate the population of Chittagong at various time points. After coming back together as a class and having students share how they solved the problem, Chris poses the question of what happens when the population grows so quickly. He then shows a documentary of the shipbreaking industry. When a student makes a comment that shipbreaking could be fun, Chris responds by explaining the dangerous working conditions, including hauling sharp, heavy metal with bare feet and pulling material apart that contains toxins and asbestos. He points out that some of the workers are 14, the same age as his students.

He then asks the class, “Here’s the challenge. What did we learn about Chittagong in our activity?” A student responds that it has one of the fastest growing populations. “What does that say about resources?” Chris prods. Students respond that they need a lot of resources but don’t necessarily have them. Chris connects this back to why shipbreaking has become a popular industry in Chittagong. He asks small groups to discuss the following: What are some alternatives? How could we help? What are your impressions? At the end of discussion, Chris says, “One thing that I was so impressed by was that I was hearing solutions to the problem. I heard you talking about how you could handle the waste. What are your thoughts on what to do with that?” Students then share the different ideas their small groups discussed. (Observation)

This vignette illustrates multiple signature pedagogies in practice. First, Chris used a global example (population growth in Chittagong) to teach the curriculum standard of exponential growth. The real-world context of applying exponential rules to population growth and the ensuing discussion on solutions to the problems borne from the shipbreaking industry illustrates authentic engagement with global issues. Third, Chris made connections to students’ experiences and the unsafe working conditions of ship-breakers by responding to student comments that initially lacked sensitivity to the topic. Using these pedagogies, Chris taught math content while simultaneously guiding students towards developing empathy towards those working in the shipyards and thinking about ways to take action that addressed the underlying causes of inequities in the shipbreaking enterprise (i.e., rapid population growth, scarce resources, and developed countries sending ships filled with toxic waste to shipbreaking ports).

Alyssa: Integrating Global Current Events into English Language Arts. As she does many mornings, Alyssa begins her second period Advanced Placement English class by discussing current events. Alyssa asks students to share news stories they’ve heard and to think about how they could use the news to support an argument and counterargument for an argumentative essay. With each news story shared, the whole class discusses the broader themes that could be drawn from it. After a few minutes of sharing news from around the United States, Alyssa points out that they shared very few global news stories. She asks students what they think global news stories are, specifically telling them that she does not know the answer, and prods them to share global current events they’ve heard. One student shares something she heard about President Obama’s foreign policy concerning Iran. A second student shares the news about the Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram, which the class discusses for a short time. From this story, the class identifies themes of terrorism and threat of education; one student calls out that it was similar to the story of Malala in Afghanistan. Alyssa then turns on CNN student news and, during the 10-minute segment, asks students to rank the news stories from most to least relevant to their personal lives. Afterwards, students share with each other how they ranked the different news stories and debate why they thought specific stories were relevant. (Observation)

In this vignette, Alyssa used global examples to teach a content area standard. In her case, she used international current events as a way to help students with their argumentative essay writing as she asked them to consider their reasoning for their choice of story relevance. The use of global news had a spiraling presence throughout her curriculum, as students watched the news in class on a regular basis and were able to make connections between current and previous news stories they had heard, for example, the student making a connection between the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls and the Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai. Further, using current events as a jumping-off point to practice argumentative writing is an authentic way for students to engage in the ELA curriculum, as opposed to making arguments for decontextualized hypothetical situations. Alyssa also made explicit connections between students’ lives, the curriculum, and global content. She had students share the news that they heard outside of class and reflect on how different news stories are personally relevant to them. She allowed students to define for themselves global news and debate what global news stories they deemed relevant. Ultimately, the ways in which Alyssa engaged students in international current events helped open students’ eyes to the multiple ways in which they were influenced by and contributed to events taking place in the interconnected world.

Discussion

The findings from this study suggest a core set of integrated signature pedagogies that we might expect to see from teachers across content areas as they prepare their students for global citizenship: 1) intentional integration of global topics and multiple perspectives into and across the standard curriculum; 2) ongoing authentic engagement with global issues; and 3) connecting teachers’ global experiences, students’ global experiences, and the curriculum. Each contain what Shulman (2005) identified as core features of signature pedagogies: surface, deep, and implicit structures, all of which pointed to the desire of the 10 teachers to guide students to see the world through multiple perspectives, respect differences, develop empathy, and take action to improve global conditions. These signature pedagogies were pervasive and routine, as they revealed themselves in teachers across different school contexts, in classrooms filled with students representing varying demographics, and in different subject areas and grade levels. Further, these pedagogies are aligned with educational research demonstrating the positive outcomes on student achievement that result from culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Paris, 2012) and teaching for problem-solving through authentic engagement (Newmann & Wehlage, 1993). This suggests that as UNESCO (2014), Asia Society (2014), and other advocates recommend, it is feasible for global citizenship education to be infused into extant curriculum in courses such as math, science, English, and the arts alongside social studies and language. To do so, educators must value critical conceptualizations of global citizenship in how and what they teach and themselves be supported via state, district, and teacher education policy in developing globally competent teaching practices.

Implications for Policy

If all teachers are to become global citizenship educators as suggested by current global citizenship education policy advocates (e.g., UNESCO), they need visions of possibility across content areas. These signature pedagogies for globally competent teaching provide a framework around which global citizenship education policy could be designed and implemented. First, state and district teacher standards and evaluations can, and should, include global citizenship integration as part of the competencies that all teachers should be expected to possess. These are not prescriptive, but rather are intentionally flexible so that teachers and students have autonomy in determining what global content to incorporate, what authentic tasks are most meaningful, and how their personal global experiences may contribute to global citizenship and curricular goals. This could take the form of observation checklists or a part of teachers’ professional development plans.

Policies that require teachers to utilize these pedagogies necessitate that structures be put in place to build teacher capacity in these areas. Therefore, these signature pedagogies, as visions of possibility, have implications for teacher education. As teacher educators set out to prepare teachers for globalized contexts, a deep and thorough understanding of signature pedagogies for global citizenship education provides teacher educators with a place to begin preparing teachers for this work. Teacher education programs could embed these pedagogies throughout coursework and field experiences (Shakley & Bailey, 2012). Within foundations and methods coursework, these signature pedagogies could be intentionally integrated into course objectives, content, instructional materials, and modeling of instructional delivery (Tichnor-Wagner et al., 2016; Ukpokodu, 2010). Teacher education programs can better link theory to practice by placing student teachers in classrooms where teachers are committed to doing this work so that they can observe and practice globally competent teaching in the school contexts where they will teach. In addition, teacher educators should be attuned to the range of cross-cultural, international, and activist-oriented experiences that teacher candidates bring with them when they enter a program, and provide additional differentiated local and international experiences. For example, they might prioritize student teaching abroad opportunities for those who have not traveled overseas or forge partnerships with local community organizations that play active roles in promoting equity and social justice for those students with few experiences engaging with the local community. Participating in such experiences may help teachers create authentic global citizenship-oriented tasks for students and better connect their own experiences with the curriculum and the experiences of students.

School districts play a primary role in furthering the professional development of teachers once they matriculate out of teacher education programs (Whitenack & Swanson, 2013). As such, they can use these three signature pedagogies as a framework for selecting required professional development for educators or for providing information and funding for non-mandated professional development opportunities that can further educators’ development of these signature pedagogies for global competence development. A number of organizations provide such training and programs abroad for in-service teachers, including Asia Society, Primary Source, VIF International Education, World Savvy, and World View. In addition, school districts should provide opportunities (e.g., shared planning periods, professional development days) for teachers in different departments and grade levels to collaborate on global signature pedagogies to help achieve the spiraling, integrated presence of global content and perspectives across the curriculum (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Guskey, 2003). It is important that school districts go beyond simply saying that global citizenship education is important by inserting it into mission and vision statements or teacher evaluations. For teachers to truly integrate these signature pedagogies into their everyday teaching practice requires that they are given the time, resources, and funding to learn, practice, and reflect.

Conclusion

Global citizenship education can, and should, be woven throughout the school day and the scholastic experience of youth today, not as an add-on but as a way to teach all subject areas. The problems and perspectives that students will encounter in our interconnected world will not occur in isolation but will be deeply rooted in areas such as the humanities, social sciences, technology, and the environment. The teachers we worked with recognized the importance of using their traditional content areas as a vehicle for driving their students to identify as citizens of the world who are empathetic, respect differences, understand global interconnectedness, and take action on issues of global importance, and they used common signature pedagogies as a mechanism for doing so.

As others have argued against soft forms of global citizenship that prescribe universal solutions to complex global problems (Andreotti, 2006), we believe that signature pedagogies for globally competent teaching should remain broad and flexible so that teachers can reflect on how to adjust learning activities and global citizenship outcomes to the needs and experiences of their students and curriculum that they are required to teach. As with Shulman (2005) and Boix Mansilla (2013), we also recognize that signature pedagogies are open to ongoing feedback and revision. As such, we invite researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to use the signature pedagogies we described as a starting place to embark in future research and policy action that supports teachers in all content areas to guide students’ development as active, responsible citizens in our globalized world.

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Notes

Author notes

arielt@live.unc.edu

IR