Global Education: Perspectives for English Language Teaching

Contributor: Janice Bland

Editor: Christiane Lütge

Publisher: LIT Verlag

Year: 2015

Book Description: Internationally, global education has become a professional concern of many teachers and teacher educators. Its impact on foreign language teaching is constantly growing, e. g. via current discourses in literary and cultural studies as well as through impulses from environmental education or Content and Language Integrated Learning. Global issues such as peace, human rights, globalisation, sustainability and the environment enter the school curricula in different subjects worldwide. This volume discusses the chances and challenges of global education for English Language Teaching.

Chapter Description: This chapter suggests a global perspective may be effectively incorporated into existing curricula of English language and literature teaching. Affording students the opportunity to develop a sense of global citizenship may encourage much-needed optimism in a problematic world, helping students develop an awareness of their responsibility as global citizens and a sense of their power as critical consumers. The chapter introduces FREE? Stories Celebrating Human Rights (2009), an anthology of fourteen short narratives, commissioned by Amnesty International to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The stories by well-established children’s authors offer compelling, often humorous and always disturbing stories around the struggle for basic human rights.