Implications for Educational Practice
With educational technology growing increasingly accessible, under
what classroom circumstances can young people use digital writing to
engage as global citizens? And under what circumstances will such
engagement be stifled? Literacy educators often occupy a rather
complicated position in relation to their students’ engagement as global
citizens. In the United States, for example, the Common Core State
Standards for ELA charge teachers to prepare students who are “college
and career ready” in a “twenty-first-century, globally competitive
society” (Common Core, 2010). Underlying the idea of a “globally
competitive society” is a neoliberal conception of the global other,
one that views global youth principally as competitors for increasingly
scarce global resources. The CCSS for ELA, then, frames global
citizenship fundamentally as an economic imperative, and this framing
shapes the kinds of reading and writing assignments teachers in the U.S.
bring to their classrooms. Here is a typical example: students are asked
to read an article alerting a U.S. audience that young people in
Asia—particularly those in China and India—are outpacing American
students in mathematics, and their teacher follows this sort of reading
with reflective or research-based writing assignments in which students
interrogate the causes and long-term effects of Asian mathematical
superiority on their future job opportunities.
The tendency to frame the connection between new literacies and global
engagement as a means to acquire capital is not an exclusively American
phenomenon, and literacy researchers themselves sometimes operate under
the same assumption, as we see in Mills (2010) observation that
“sophisticated technological knowledge is now a highly demanded
credential for cosmopolitan recognition in globalised networks” (p.
234-235). And that young people “engage in the transformation of
existing multimedia designs, creating globally oriented funds of
knowledge that are easily expanded and adapted to meet changing criteria
for success in the new times” (p. 235). Note the way in which words
like “cosmopolitan” and “globalized” combine with words like
“credential,” “funds,” and “success.” Such subtle associations
between globalism, new literacies, and the acquisition of capital can
elide a more humanistic conception of the relationship between
technology and young people’s emergent cosmopolitanism, one that sees
the global other as a human resource rather than as an economic
resource—or perhaps both.
In the United States, though, the CCSS for ELA effectively limits
teachers’ attention to global issues to the reading standards for
literature in grades 9 and 10: “Analyze a particular point of view or
cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the
United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.” While it
is reasonable to expect some reference to global perspectives in the
Common Core standards for reading informational texts and writing, the
world outside the U.S. is conspicuously absent. It is, of course,
important that students read literature from around the world as they
develop their global citizenship; however, with the exception of
classics and mythology, it is difficult and expensive to access
published world literature in translation. Which is not to suggest that
students cannot develop a more global perspective by reading old
literature from around the world, but such work seems unlikely to shed
much light on being a contemporary global citizen, which implies actual
engagement with the globe rather than simply knowledge of it. In any
case, reading literature and informational texts from around the
world—both the old world and new—misses an element crucial to young
people’s growth as global citizens: interaction.