On 16 April, Profs Laura Hauerwas of the Providence College, USA and Shea Kerkhoff of the University of Missouri–St Louis, USA presented their research on teacher education. The title of their presentation was ‘Preparing teachers to serve in a global landscape through critical global teaching’. They introduced participants to the special issue of the Journal of Research in Childhood Education, which they had edited together with Prof Sandra Schneider and in which Prof Saloshna Vandeyar published and invited paper titled ‘Pedagogy of compassion: Negotiating the contours of global citizenship’.

Profs Hauerwas and Kerkhoff shared a new framework for critical global teaching that offers four features of teaching praxis: glocality, reflexivity, interculturality and worldmaking. Glocality reflects practices that are situated in connections between the personal, local, national and global. Reflexivity involves individuals examining motives for, and implications of their actions in a way that disrupts systemic dominance of one over another. A third feature addressed by interculturality is how individuals interact with one another from their understanding of diverse perspectives and identities. Lastly, worldmaking is teaching that inspires imagination and actions ensuring justice and equity to sustain our world. Sharing this frame with the Faculty at the University of Pretoria they continued the conversation with global educators who are transforming their practices to prepare teachers who will ‘build a more just and sustainable global landscape [than] yet imagined’ (Hauerwas, Kerkhoff & Schneider, 2021:199).  

Reference

Boynton Hauerwas, L., Kerkhoff, S.N. & Schneider, S.B. 2021. Glocality, reflexivity, interculturality, and worldmaking: A framework for critical global teaching. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 35(2):185-199, DOI: 10.1080/02568543.2021.1900714.