Identify three changes that American society is undergoing, how you experience them, and discuss how those changes are reflected in schools.
Assignment 1 approximately 6 to 8 sentences for each response The
Use APA references from the book
Chapter 1
Education in a Changing Society – submit all reflective questions and responses. (Its highlighted in red in the Text)
Chapter 1
Education in a Changing Society
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Reflective Questions
1. Identify three changes that American society is undergoing, how you experience them, and discuss how those changes are reflected in schools.
2. Think back to your experiences in elementary or high school. What indication do you have that your school was attempting to become a different kind of school? What indication do you have that your school was reflective of an information-age school?
3. In the case study, Sam questions why she needs to be in a diversity course. What experiences have you had that might lead you to say that you are well prepared for diversity? In what areas do you not feel as well prepared?
Chapter 2
Reflective questions
1. This chapter suggests that the experiences encountered during the civil rights movement remain in the public mind. Do you agree that this is, in fact, the case? If so, why? If not, why?
2. This chapter presents the histories of both multicultural and global education. How do you think those histories are similar and how are they different? What are some similarities between the objectives and after practices in multicultural and global education? What commonalities can you identify? What might be an advantage of looking for similarities between the two types of education?
If major societal changes in the 19th century such as industrialization and immigration changed the “deep structures” of our society, what deep changes have occurred in recent decades that seem to call for a more global education
“ Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time. ”
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
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Case Study
Samantha Carter’s Diversity Class
Samantha Carter, or “Sam” as she is called by her family and friends, along with many of her friends, has wanted to be a teacher for as long as she can remember. Most of her friends have worked in a variety of local recreation programs, summer camps, and in neighborhood parks, sometimes coaching younger kids in a range of sports. Although encouraged by their teachers throughout high school, they have all heard from their parents, and increasingly society in general, the arguments against teaching as a career: it’s a difficult, and sometimes even dangerous job; it’s only moderately well paid; they could do more with their skills and abilities. But regardless, they really all want to be a teacher, and that’s all there is to it.
Sam is a volleyball player and has been playing the sport competitively since she started high school. She now is on a full athletic scholarship at the university and hopes to coach volleyball in a high school like the one that she has already begun for some of her field class assignments. She made a good transition to the university last year, has maintained friendships with many of her former friends who are attending her present university and studying to be teachers while managing to remain in touch with others who are at different colleges and universities around the state; with one who even ventured to a school more than 1,000 miles from home. Although she still has a few years to go until she graduates, her heart is set on finding a teaching position in a suburban school system just far enough from her parents’ home to give her a real sense of independence. American history … World history … Economics … Government … and, of course, volleyball! She really can hardly wait!
Except, here she is with some of her friends sitting in a diversity course that is required of all second-year teacher education students, all wondering why in the world everyone is making such a fuss about all this “diversity stuff.” Haven’t we gotten past all that? On the Internet, after all, no one knows your color, your religion, or your gender. Indeed, she and her friends have all used “alternate” personalities while surfing the Net at one time or another, and clearly, people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media often give themselves “other” faces and personalities. The important thing is what people have to say, not what they look like!
Still, Sam recalls that when the class first visited their field site, the principal told them that the district, as well as most others, is changing rapidly in terms of race, ethnicity, and social class. She often wondered if he mentioned that to them because he thought that it might be a challenge for them as they spent more and more time in the school. Regardless of his reason, even though all of her friends are like her in many ways, it isn’t as if they have never spent any time with people who are different from them. Her high school volleyball team looked like the United Nations, and they all got along fine. And it certainly isn’t as if she doesn’t already know that some groups of people still suffer from discrimination—some of her college community service credits were spent working with kids in a low-income urban neighborhood, and she and some of her friends spent one whole summer volunteering in a community development project in Appalachia. They really did like the people they worked with and wished they could have done more to help them.
Why, Sam thinks to herself, she could probably teach this course! And anyway, teaching social studies will give her plenty of opportunities to introduce her students to many issues of difference. Yet, she recalls with a little pang of doubt, that some of the kids she worked with last year in her urban education field classes had zero interest in history, and that some of the people in Appalachia spoke with such an accent she could hardly understand them. And she doesn’t feel too well prepared to deal with children with disabilities either, and no doubt, there will be students with both medical and developmental disabilities in her classes.
Sam and her friends are learning that society is changing—in lots of ways. If there is one thing people keep telling them, it is that schools aren’t like they used to be, even from just a few years ago. Susan, one of Sam’s friends, has a brother who teaches sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade social studies in a school not too far from where they study. He once told them that close to half of the students in his classes live in families headed by a single parent (some of them, fathers), one third are reading below grade level, and two thirds are eligible for free lunches. His classes, too, are far from being all white or even all native-born: he has African American students, East Indian, Vietnamese, and Central American students, as well as an increasing number who are new immigrants or refugees from various countries in the Middle East and Africa. His students practice a number of different religions—a couple of them are fundamentalist Christian, some are Catholic, a growing number are Muslims, a few are Jewish, one is a Jehovah’s Witness, and many are not affiliated with any organized faith. He has one student in a wheelchair as a result of a bad automobile accident, one student with a breathing apparatuses because of asthma, and at least six who are waiting to be tested to determine their eligibility for the newly created severe behavior disorders program which is to be housed in a separate school on the other side of town.
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Other changes are taking place as well. Sam recalls the principal proudly announcing that every teacher in the school will now have a Smart Board or SMART Board this year, and that all are using more and more technology in their teaching. The fact that technology is so ubiquitous in the lives of the students, he went on to say, seems to have dramatic changes on the attention span of children as more and more appear to become easily bored, have shorter attention spans, want things done quickly, and don’t like to read long assignments, even if they are good readers. What’s going on here, Sam wonders?
In addition, since the No Child Left Behind Act was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the performance of students, teachers, and school districts is being measured as never before. “The good news,” says her professor, “is that the proponents of accountability really want all children to learn and all teachers to teach well. The bad news is that we have never before really tried to educate all children to the same standard, and we are still not altogether sure how to do that—nor, it seems, can we all agree on what it means to be a good teacher! Nor are we sure that testing so often is the way to do this.”
Another one of Sam’s classmates, David, raises his hand. “What,” he asks, “about kids with really bad family problems, kids whose parents aren’t there for them, or the growing number who are homeless? What about kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or kids who just hate school? What about kids who are working 20 hours a week, or kids who just can’t ‘get it’? What about kids who don’t speak English? What about kids who are victims of violence, sexual abuse, or who act out in violent ways?”
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Another student, Joanne, raised her hand, asking, “How can teachers really go about preparing young students for a globally connected future if they, themselves, have little knowledge or experience of the broader world in which we exist?”
She went on, “Last summer I was lucky enough to spend 4 weeks in Australia on a study abroad program designed especially for future teachers. This is something most teacher education students don’t do, by the way, which I highly recommend! We spent a day with a group of Australian high school students who were part of a Global Futures Club in their school. One student in particular, a 15-year-old girl named Felicity, stood up and challenged us with some ideas I’d never thought about before. This really got me thinking. I was so impressed with what she had to say that I asked her if she could write it down. She had already done that as part of her club’s activity, so she gave me a copy. I still carry it around with me, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to read it as I think there are some really important messages for us.”
“Go ahead,” said the professor.
“Here’s what she said … I want you to understand how I think about my future and my world. Wherever I live and work, I will certainly be mixing in a multinational, multifaith, and multicultural setting. During my lifetime, a planet-wide economic system is likely to operate, controlled not so much by big nations as by big business networks and regional centers of trade like Singapore, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. By the time my classmates and I are 35 years old, it is thought that more people will live in Shanghai, just one city in China, than in the whole of Australia. Most people will be working across national borders and cultures, speaking more than one language—that probably includes an Asian language. That’s the kind of job for which I need to be prepared. Because I am growing up in Australia, the Asia-Pacific area will be a strong focus of my world. There are three billion people in Asia alone—and that number will certainly continue to grow, with the Asian continent (from India to Japan) already accounting for half the world’s population. And, the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, is in this region too, just north of Australia, with a population of over 220 million—larger than that of Japan and Russia. People, the world over, will have to learn about Islam and to respect Muslims—even in the face of all the challenges present today.”
“But change is not only happening to those of us in Australia. More than half of the population in many of the world’s developing countries is under the age of 25—think about the consequences of that! These are all potential partners and competitors of all of us young people around the world and they’ll all want the good things they see that life has to offer. It will not matter what nationality any of us have, because our world is smaller, people move about, and most workplaces will be internationalized. Our world is likely to be borderless. We are more than likely to be employed in an internationally owned firm, and it is likely that in our homes someone will speak Japanese, Korean, Spanish, or Chinese.”
“Our environment, too, will continue to be changed and challenged. In the 1950s, when my grandparents were born, only two cities in the world, London and New York, had more than 8 million inhabitants. In 2015, there were 42 such cities—more than half of them in Asia. Environmentally what happens within the border of one country is no longer solely that country’s business, and environmental responsibilities will have to be enforced internationally. By the time I am 50, the world could be threatened by “green wars” or “water wars” unless my generation learns to do something to balance the unequal access to clean water, good soil, food distribution, and climate change. And recall the horribly devastating wildfires that only get worse and worse in Australia each year—how are we to continue to live in a country where this is a growing threat?”
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Joanne continued, “The more I think about it, all of our future students are like Felicity in many ways. A lot of our schooling, from the way people look at things, and even many of the textbooks used around the world, are Eurocentric in their thinking and orientation and really are out-of-date. Schooling today must teach young people about living comfortably and successfully in a multicultural world. What skills and understandings will people living and working in the near future need? Most schools today say that students need to be global citizens. But do they really know what that means? … Do teachers know what an international curriculum looks like, and how it can be taught? … Do they know what to teach? … Do they know how to teach?… And are they confident that they can design and deliver a curriculum that will equip today’s young people to live in a complex, intercultural world?”*
“Yes,” says Melissa, another classmate, “How are we supposed to teach everyone?”
Carl jumped in, “I’m not really comfortable with all that I’m hearing in this class right now. Do you all really think that we should teach for so many differences? Aren’t we doing ourselves a disservice if we think we have to address everyone’s needs and interests? Shouldn’t we just teach what has proven in the past to be good education? Aren’t there just too many external influences and different groups trying to tell us what’s good and right?”
Another student, Susan, chimed in, “I don’t know Carl. I agree that the world is changing quite a lot and we’d better be prepared for this, not only as teachers, but as citizens in this global world. I’ve got a friend who is studying abroad this semester. I’m going to reach out to her to learn what her experience is like. I’ll let you all know later what I learn.”
“You all have raised some good points,” says Professor Adams, “Perhaps we’re better off asking it another way: How are we to think about our practice of teaching so that everyone learns and that they learn what they need to learn given the times in which we live? The scene has shifted in schools today for sure, from an emphasis on teaching to an emphasis on learning. This change in focus makes it all the more important that we understand the differences among students—all kinds of differences, visible and invisible—because those differences may influence a student’s learning, and our job is to create classrooms in which everyone learns. Perhaps we can all agree on that; even you Carl.”
Sam sighs. She really does want to be a teacher, but it seems to be a lot more complicated than she thought it would be. As the world around her changes, perhaps she, too, will have to make some significant changes if she is going to be as effective an educator as she hopes to be.
*(Modified from Tudball, 2012).
The Reality of Social Change
As we get used to living in the 21st century, Samantha, along with all of us, continues to witness changing circumstances in many areas of life that have widespread importance for the future of our country, our schools, and the world-at-large. Taken together, these changed circumstances are resulting in profound changes in the nature of some of our basic social institutions, such as the economy, politics, religion, the family, and, of course, education.
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Institutions in Transition
The term social institution has been defined as a formal, recognized, established, and stabilized way of pursuing some activity in society (Bierstedt, 1974). Another way to define a social institution is to think of it as a set of rules, or norms, that enable us to get through the day without having to figure out how to behave toward others, whether to brush our teeth or not, or if, in fact, we should go to school or to work. In this society, as in all societies, there are rules that pattern the way we interact with family members, friends, people we see often, such as neighbors, teachers, or doctors, and even strangers who fill certain roles—the bus driver, the clerk in the store, and the server in a restaurant. We know these rules because we have internalized them as children, and in a stable society we can depend on the rules staying relatively the same over time. All societies, including nonliterate ones, create social institutions—or sets of norms—that govern at least five basic areas of social need: economics (ways of exchanging goods and services), politics (ways of governing), religion (ways of worshipping one or more deities), the family (ways of ensuring the survival of children), and education (ways of bringing up and educating the younger generation so that the society will continue to exist).
In our society, and indeed in most of the world, people are encountering profound changes in the nature of these basic institutions; in other words, the rules—or norms—are changing, and more and more are feeling unsettled or unsure by what they are encountering. Many scholars who study the past as a way to understand the future assert that these changes are so fundamental as to constitute a shift in the very nature of our civilization. In his book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler (1980) was among the first scholar-futurists to warn that our institutions (what is normative in society) are changing in specific and characteristic ways and to hint at the rise and the effect of globalization on us all. Many of today’s changes, Toffler suggested, are neither random nor independent of one another. He identified a number of events that seem to be independent from one another—the “breakdown” of the nuclear family, the global energy crisis, the influence of cable television, the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States, and the emergence of separatist movements within national borders of many nations. Today, we might add the ubiquitous use of new technologies, the Internet, and various social media that have dramatically changed the way we live our lives and interact across various boundaries—in many circumstances resulting in major social change. These and many other seemingly unrelated events are interconnected and may be part of a much larger phenomenon that Toffler described as the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization that he called “the Third Wave.”
Toffler is not the only one to have perceived these changes before most people were aware of them. In the early 1980s, the book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives added a new word to the language. In this work John Naisbitt (1982) accurately predicted the move toward globalization, the shift from an industrial economy to an “information” economy, and the growth of networks as a way of managing information (although he didn’t even mention the Internet or the World Wide Web!). Later Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (1990) wrote Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s, in which they discussed the evolution of telecommunications, the rise of China as a competing power, and a growing need to “look below the surface” to find the meaning of these changes for real human beings and real organizations. More recently, in The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas Friedman (2006) introduced the notion of the “flat world” in which people from all walks of life, almost regardless of their location, can engage in meaningful ways with one another. Indeed, Patricia Aburdene (2005) revealed in her book Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism that our society was reaching a new phase in which the ideas of social responsibility, environmental values, and a spiritual dimension were beginning to reshape capitalism in interesting ways. Although we cannot take all these predictions as absolute fact (predicting the future is a precarious occupation), it is worth thinking about our changing circumstances and the impact these changes are having (and will continue to have) on the way we live, work, play, govern ourselves, worship, and learn.
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The Impact of Specific Changes on Basic Institutions
It is useful to think in terms of four different sets of specific changes that, taken together, seem to be reshaping our basic institutions. These areas, suggested by Willard Daggett (2005) in Successful Schools; From Research to Action Plans, are globalization, demographics, technology, and changing values and attitudes among the generations. New circumstances in each of these areas are having an impact on the way we think about and accomplish our purposes as a society. Also each of these areas provides a rationale for greater intercultural knowledge and understanding. Let’s take a closer look at how each of these areas may be changing the basic social institutions in our society.
Factors Influencing the Institution of Economics
1. From National to Global
For much of our nation’s history, the U.S. economy has been based on manufacturing done by companies whose production could be found within the borders of the country. Today, our economy is firmly global, and the acquisition of raw material, manufacturing processes, and distribution of goods by such giants as Ford Motor Company, General Motors, or General Electric is done worldwide. In large measure because of advances in computer technology and high-speed travel, we find ourselves looking more and more often beyond our own borders for goods, services, and sales. Indeed, the much-revered American corporation can hardly be said to exist any longer. In 2017, for instance, General Motors sold 32% more automobiles in China than it did in the United States. This represents the 7th year in a row that sales in China surpassed those in the United States.
The effects of globalization are now increasingly encountered by each and every individual. Call the help desk with a problem with your computer, or have a question about your cable TV, and it is likely that the person you are speaking with on the other end of the phone is in India or Costa Rica. In your daily interactions, whether on campus or in your local stores, hospitals, and community in general, you are almost certain to encounter people who have immigrated to the United States and who speak a language other than English.
Our recent experiences related to the COVID-19 global pandemic offer an example of the ways in which people across the globe can, and do, come together on the global level in response to a common threat (see Chapter 6 for more detailed discussion of the contact hypothesis and superordinate or common goals). Never before in human history have so many of the world’s scientists and medical researchers focused so urgently on a single issue as they did in response to the coronavirus, putting aside national identities, individual recognition and profit, as well as most other research in which they were engaged (New York Times, April 1, 2020). Science, and mathematics, many would say, speak a global language rather than in terms of my nation or your nation; my language or your language; and my geographic location or your geographic location. Such nationalistic or ethnocentric thinking does not reflect the thinking and practice of most top-level scientists.
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One morning, in the first weeks of the pandemic, for instance, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh discovered that a ferret exposed to COVID-19 particles had developed a high fever—a potential advance toward animal vaccine testing. Under ordinary circumstances, they would have started work on an academic journal article. But realizing the potential they were dealing with, the reality that their own academic journal writing could take a back seat for the time being, and that this was not the time to be touting “America First” or other nationalistic ideologies, they quickly shared their findings with scientists around the world through the World Health Organization (WHO). Within a few days, the lab in Pittsburgh was collaborating with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Austrian drug company Themis Bioscience. This consortium then received funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, a Norway-based organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a group of governments, and was in talks with the Serum Institute of India, one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world. Vaccine researchers at Oxford made use of animal-testing results shared by the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana. And separately, the French public-health research center Inserm was sponsoring clinical trials on four drugs that showed promise in treating COVID-19 patients. The trials then were underway in France, with plans to expand quickly to other nations.
In many ways, the coronavirus response reflects the global reach of our medical communities. At Massachusetts General Hospital, a team of Harvard doctors was testing the effectiveness of inhaled nitric oxide on coronavirus patients. The research was being carried out in conjunction with Xijing Hospital in China and a pair of hospitals in northern Italy. Doctors in those centers had been collaborating for years, but the coronavirus suddenly ignited them in ways that no other outbreak or medical mystery had before. This reflects the scope of the pandemic and the fact that, for many researchers, the ho
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