"Think globally, teach locally: A study of student teachers' engagement with global citizenship issues "

This paper investigates the potential for developing student teachers' critical and active engagement with issues in intercultural education and global citizenship within a third-year 42- hour B.Ed. elective, 'Think Globally, Teach Locally' during 2010/11. Through their experiences with popular culture, media, simulation games, conversations with members of marginalised communities and school placements, the 16 students explored questions such as: What is culture? How does a sense of national identity evolve? What counts as knowledge? Which voices are listened to and which voices are neglected or silenced? This interdisciplinary and strongly participatory course developed out of a conviction among the Froebel faculty that ethnocentricity needs to be interrogated among student teachers if they are to be equipped to work with our intercultural school population and to centre justice as a core value in their teaching and children's learning. Responsibility for demonstrating their knowledge for assessment purposes was left with the students themselves though their engagement with a discussion board, and by challenging them to choose, design and reflect on their collaborative final-group presentation. We will show clips from the video of the drama which the group chose to present as a medium for conveying their knowledge production and their learning journeys. In this presentation we will share the learning about concepts of discourse, multiculturalism and power that emerged along the way, the scaffolding which we put in place such as the discussion board on the College Moodle, enriching linkages between theory and practice, feedback from students and the impact the course has had on ourselves as reflective practitioners. We will invite the attendees to reflect on the learning of the students and to imagine how they might have managed some of the dilemmas we faced along the way. We will argue that not knowing is more valuable than knowing for teacher education as it stimulates the crucial work of higher- order thinking, curiosity, enquiry-based learning, openness and accountability.