Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum

Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum empowers teachers and directors to internationalize their curriculums around the world in their own unique and culturally specific ways. Serving as a guide and catalyst for thinking about curriculum in our interconnected world, this book explores how young children learn about the world and describes how children develop intercultural understanding, including how their teachers transform to expand their own global awareness and citizenship. Stories from actual classroom curriculum projects are featured, as well as suggested strategies and stages for the process of implementation. Exploring the implications for teacher education and professional development, this book gives readers the tools they need to bring internationalization into their own programs. Designed to apply to formal and informal early childhood centers across the spectrum, Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum is essential reading for professional developers and trainers, as well as classroom teachers, directors, policy-makers and NGO professionals providing early childhood services in the U.S. and around the world.

Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum empowers teachers and directors to internationalize their curriculums around the world in their own unique and culturally specific ways. Serving as a guide and catalyst for thinking about curriculum in our interconnected world, this book explores how young children learn about the world and describes how children develop intercultural understanding, including how their teachers transform to expand their own global awareness and citizenship. Stories from actual classroom curriculum projects are featured, as well as suggested strategies and stages for the process of implementation. Exploring the implications for teacher education and professional development, this book gives readers the tools they need to bring internationalization into their own programs. Designed to apply to formal and informal early childhood centers across the spectrum, Internationalizing Early Childhood Curriculum is essential reading for professional developers and trainers, as well as classroom teachers, directors, policy-makers and NGO professionals providing early childhood services in the U.S. and around the world.

Internationalization in the Classroom moves beyond traditional views of multicultural education, with an emphasis on international perspectives, to create internationally minded educators and develop local notions of race and class into global understandings of cultures, religions, and language.

The drive to internationalize higher education has seen the focus shift in recent years towards its defining element, the curriculum. As the point of connection between broader institutional strategies and the student experience, the curriculum plays a key role in the success or failure of the internationalization agenda. Yet despite much debate, the role and power of curriculum internationalization is often unappreciated. This has meant that critical questions, including what it means and how it can be achieved in different disciplines, have not been consistently or strategically addressed. This volume breaks new ground in connecting theory and practice in internationalizing the curriculum in different disciplinary and institutional contexts. An extensive literature review, case studies and action research projects provide valuable insights into the concept of internationalization of the curriculum. Best practice in curriculum design, teaching and learning in higher education are applied specifically to the process of internationalizing the curriculum. Examples from different disciplines and a range of practical resources and ideas are provided. Topics covered include: why internationalize the curriculum?; designing internationalized learning outcomes; using student diversity to internationalize the curriculum; blockers and enablers to internationalization of the curriculum; assessment in an internationalized curriculum; connecting internationalization of the curriculum with institutional goals and student learning. Internationalizing the Curriculum provides invaluable guidance to university managers, academic staff, professional development lecturers and support staff as well as students and scholars interested in advancing theory and practice in this important area.

This book seeks to understand how to internationalize curriculum without imperializing or imposing the old, colonial, and so-called first-world conceptualizations of education, teaching, and learning. The collection draws on the groundbreaking work of Dwayne Huebner in order to invite scholars into conversation with histories of curriculum studies and to posit them within it, opening up new spaces to work in and through curricular issues. This book will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students looking to reconceptualize international curriculum development and theory.