Global/Cultural Teachers Creating Possibilities: Reading Worlds,Reading Selves,and Learning to Teach

In this article I explore the notion of a global/cultural educator, especially how we as teacher educators prepare future educators for the global communities that they might serve. I argue that our challenge is to prepare educators to work on behalf of, from, alongside, and within communities. To work globally requires educators to bridge the gap between the privileged and the marginalised, between uniformity and diversity, between local and global, across gender and races, and between indigenous and immigrant. To achieve these goals, I posit that we need to go beyond an infusion of the knowledge of various cultures in our curriculum. I suggest that we need to find spaces where the global/cultural educator can have an identity that emerges not from theory alone but from a mix of scholarship, practice, global development, and cultural critique and proceeds in a manner that is responsive, supportive, diverse, and nonoppressive. It is a journey for which we lack a map and indeed may be blinded by our own vision.