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.