"Am I North American or South American?" Theorizing and Studying Living Curricula of the Global
Open Access
- Author:
- Diaz Beltran, Ana Carolina
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 31, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Mark Thomas Kissling, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Mark Thomas Kissling, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Gail Louise Boldt, Committee Member
Kimberly Anne Powell, Committee Member
Esther Susana Prins, Outside Member - Keywords:
- curriculum
citizenship
global citizenship
Latinas/os
immigrant
youth
Hazleton
living curriculum
place
global
stories
storying
narrative - Abstract:
- Education about the world in K-12 schools frequently emphasizes the interconnectedness of nation-states. The curricular aim is often to prepare citizens for a world community with shared values, ethics and goals in order to maintain world peace. However, this notion of global education exists almost entirely outside the lived experiences of teachers and students; the notion lacks consideration of the specificity of people’s relations to world systems of power and to the historicities of the place(s) they inhabit. Moreover, questions about community and belonging are often prioritized solely in relation to the nation-state, eliding alternative forms of identification and citizenship that are articulated via other associations of political belonging and systems of power. Thus, definitions of citizenship in global and international education lack a framework of power that engages with how the everyday lives of citizens in different places and communities are related to global systems of power. This dissertation is a curricular study of global citizenship education that is attuned to those missing lived experiences. The study is based on narratives of citizenship and belonging in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Specifically, it maps an inquiry into the lived experiences of citizenship for transnational immigrant Latina/o youth in Hazleton, and also incorporates my own experiences. I story personal narratives by implementing a narrative research approach: I interweave collective history, theory, vignettes and drawings to offer a form of curriculum for global education that is situated in lived experiences and that questions predominant assumptions of citizenship framed by the nation-state. Ultimately, I theorize and argue for a living curriculum of the global: a course of learning that attends closely to the lived experiences of students and teachers in the specificity of their place(s) and historicities. In doing this work, I aim to respond to oversimplified and restrictive forms of identity sanctioned by a Euro and US-centric curriculum of the global. Such curriculum of the global is better defined as a curriculum of dislocation because it assimilates “others” into systems of power that quarantine citizens from the place(s) and historicities that configure their lives. A living curriculum of the global is an important antidote to this curriculum of dislocation.