Article Review

In the article “Educating The Next Generation Of Global Citizens Through Teacher Education, One New Teacher At A Time”, Lorna R. McLean, Sharon A. Cook and Tracy Crowe (2006) highlight a renewed interest regarding the state of young peoples’ civic engagement, their character development and their knowledge levels about public issues. Although McLean, Sharon and Cook agree that society has been worrying about the next generation’s character development and knowledge of public issues since ancient times, they suggest that is little comfort to a society “preoccupied with consumerism, especially, as some maintain, amongst the young.” (p.1) The authors draw attention to a connection between this state of young people and the “narrow and nationalist construction of the very curriculum which should be challenging young peoples' ideas and perceptions of the world in Social Studies or History curricula.” (p.1) Interestingly, the authors suggest that even if the curriculum provided more globally responsible content, concerns remain about the kind of preparation that teachers receive to effectively teach these issues. This article introduces a University of Ottawa based initiative called “The Developing a Global Perspective for Educators” initiative and attempts to describe how this initiative aims to address the “knowledge deficit, the paucity of pedagogical skills and the provision of curricula with pre-service students.” (p.1)

Although I did not find the authors really do speak to the article’s claims of addressing the ways in which the Developing a Global Perspective for Educators initiative specifically addresses the “knowledge deficit, the paucity of pedagogical skills and the provision of curricula with pre-service students,” (p.1) the article, (and initiative) does offer a variety of links to useful teacher resources for teaching global perspective type issues and does propose sensible assumptions for which the initiative is based. For example the article suggests that the classroom is a central site for raising these global issues and questioning attitudes among young Canadians. It also suggests that at this formative stage of their professional development, new teachers are receptive to integrating new themes into a curriculum which can accommodate such topics and that the introduction of such themes not only benefits the international community, but also Canadian society.

The Developing a Global Perspective for Educators website explains itself best and offers a number of great links to other useful teacher resource websites as well as desginates two sections of the website to free lesson and unit plans; check it out: http://www.developingaglobalperspective.ca/homepage.html