Journal of Teacher Education

62(2) 222 –234

© 2011 American Association of

Colleges for Teacher Education

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DOI: 10.1177/0022487110385428

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Global Crises, Social Justice,

nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia. This near-record transformation, one in which diasporic populations

now constitute a large and growing percentage of communities throughout the nation and an ever-growing proportion of

children in our schools, documents one of the most profound reasons that we must think globally about education. This

transformation is actually something of which we should be proud. The United States and a number of other nations are

engaged in a vast experiment that has rarely been attempted before. Can we build a nation and a culture from resources

and people from all over the world? The impacts of these global population flows on education and on teacher education

are visible all around us.

Keywords

critical theory/critical pedagogy, educational policy, globalization

When the U.S. government released its 2007 census figures

large and growing percentage of communities throughout

the nation and an ever-growing proportion of children in our

schools, documents one of the most profound reasons that

we must think globally about education. This transformation

is actually something of which we should be proud. The

United States and a number of other nations are engaged in a

vast experiment that has rarely been attempted before. Can

we build a nation and a culture from resources and people

from all over the world? The impacts of these global popula-

tion flows on education and on teacher education are visible

to do a number of things. First, I want to argue for a broader

understanding of globalization and its effects and point to

some implications that this has for teachers and teacher edu-

cators as they try to comprehend and act on their changing

situations. Second, I shall remind us of some “first princi-

ples” that should guide our understanding and actions. Third,

I will point to some key works that should be required read-

ing for anyone who wants to take seriously the realities of the

effects of globalization on many of the countries and regions

from where new populations may come. And, finally, I pro-

steps toward more critical understandings of globalization.

But our problems are large as well. In my notes and refer-

ences, I provide further resources that are critical for going

further into the issues I raise.

Understanding Globalization

If one were to name an issue that can be found near the top

of the list of crucial topics within the critical education litera-

ture, it would be globalization. It is a word with extraordi-

nary currency. This is the case not only because of trendiness.

Exactly the opposite is true. It has become ever more clear

that nearly all educational policies and practices are strongly

Apple 223

influenced by an increasingly integrated international econ-

omy that is subject to severe crises; that reforms and crises in

one country have significant effects in others; and that immi-

gration and population flows from one nation or area to another

have tremendous impacts on what counts as official knowl-

edge, what counts as a responsive and effective education,

what counts as appropriate teaching, and the list could con-

tinue for quite a while (see Burbules & Torres, 2009; Dale &

out the world.

While localities and national systems affect the processes

of globalization differently and provide different contexts for

struggles, a homogenization of educational policies and prac-

tices, driven by what Santos (2003) calls “monocultural log-

ics,” is very clearly evident within and between settings. These

logics are very visible in current education policies both

inside and outside of teacher education that privilege choice,

competition, performance management, individual responsi-

bility, and “risk management,” as well as a series of attacks on

& Gandin, 2010). Neoliberal, neoconservative, and manage-

rial impulses can be found throughout the world, cutting across

(Gulson & Symes, 2007, p. 9). The fact that the attacks by

conservative think tanks on teacher education institutions in

the United States are now surfacing in many other nations

documents part of this dynamic. The additional fact that per-

United States is yet another indication of the ways in which

policies concerning teaching and teacher education travel

well beyond their original borders.

The insight that stands behind the focus on globalization in

general can perhaps best be summarized in the words of a

(Rushdie, 1981). To paraphrase what he says, “The problem

with the English is that they don’t understand that their history

constantly occurs outside their borders.” We could easily sub-

stitute words such as “Americans” and others for “English.”

There is a growing literature on globalization and educa-

tion. This is undoubtedly important, and a significant portion

of this literature has provided us with powerful understandings

of the realities and histories of empire and postcolonialism(s);

engage with diasporic students in “their own language.”

But the final words in the above paragraph speak power-

fully to my point about knowing more about the politics and

multiple cultural traditions of home countries. Many of the

students from, say, Mexico and other Latin American nations

speak indigenous languages as their first language. Spanish

is their second language. In their home countries and regions,

there are powerful movements among indigenous groups

and their progressive allies to defend these languages and

cultures. Not understanding this political history and the cul-

ical and cultural movements and struggles there would be

absolutely essential for creating curricular and teaching prac-

tices that are culturally relevant (see Apple & Beane, 2007;

Ladson-Billings, 1994). But this would also help prevent us

from misrecognizing the actions of parents and communities

in the areas in which the schools sit and the areas from where

the people originally may have come.

This recognition of agency, of people and movements

actively engaged in building a better future both “here and

there,” would go a long way in reducing the tendencies among

learn about how we might transform our own often overly

bureaucratic and at times strikingly unequal institutions by look-

ing at other nations’ experiences and seeing people who have

come from these nations as resources, not only as problems.

Let me give an example here. There are powerful models

that specify more critical moments and processes in education

from which we could learn, with the work of Luis Armando

Gandin on the justly well-known reforms in Porto Alegre,

Brazil (see, e.g., Apple et al., 2003; Apple, Au, & Gandin,

2009; Gandin, 2006; Gandin & Apple, 2003), and Mario

policy and practice and in the close connections between

teacher education and these transformations. The account

that Kenneth Zeichner and Lars Dahlstrom (1999) give of

the limits and possibilities of more democratic teacher edu-

cation in parts of Africa also serves as a good example of

the kind of work that needs to be done as well.

United States should not make us assume that discussions

of globalization are only about “other” countries. Any com-

plete analysis of the United States needs to be situated in the

over education. Economic transformations, the creation of

both paid and casualized and often racialized labor markets

that are increasingly internationalized and unequal, demands

for new worker identities and skills—and all of this in a time

of severe economic crisis—are having profound effects

(Apple, 2010a). None of this can be understood without also

recognizing the ways in which the realities of the United

States are influenced and often shaped by our connections

with economic, political, and cultural policies, movements,

and struggles outside our official borders.

through class politics or gender or race—or more lamentably,

that poststructural analyses are total replacements for struc-

tural understandings. Yet no one dynamic nor one single the-

ory is sufficient (Apple, 2006; 2010b). It is the intersection of

and sometimes contractions among multiple dynamics and

histories—what is called in the literature on critical race the-

ory “intersectionality” (Gillborn, 2008)—where we can find a

more adequate sensitivity to the utter complexities surround-

ing globalization and its effects. When one adds to this a set

of compelling understandings of “empire” and colonial and

Apple 225

diasporic people come; the ways in which these realities are

structured and experienced differently around such markers

as class, gender, race, region, and increasingly religion; the

identities that people bring with them and the ways in which

these identities are transformed in the process of building a

life here; and the fact that many people have hybrid identities

based on their experiences of constantly crossing geograph-

ical borders as they go back and forth between countries,

of dynamics that Nancy Fraser (1997) had identified as cru-

cial to the reconstruction of our core institutions: the politics

of redistribution and the politics of recognition. The first refers

to the ways in which the economy works, how it is controlled,

and who benefits from it. The second deals with cultural

struggles over identity, the gaining or denial of respect, and

the basic ways in which people are recognized or misrecog-

nized as fully human and deserving of rights.

Of course, there are those who would reject this more inte-

grative approach, who believe that there is only one way a

an approach that seeks to deal respectfully with and learn

from critical theories and resources from multiple sources and

necessary, is not an example of losing one’s political soul.

Indeed, as I have said before, while we need to be very cautious

about theories that turn the world into simply discourses and

that fly above the gritty materialities of real life, we are not

and a willingness to build alliances and participate in the social

agendas of other groups who suffer from the structures of this

society. This will require using theoretical/political resources

that are varied but still intensely political and committed.

Without expanding our critical theoretical and empirical

crucial questions facing educators and activists today: What

do the global realities that increasingly challenge education

and teacher education look like? And, what can we as educa-

tors and community members do to alter these realities?

Before we go further, however, it is important to face real-

tion of farm commodities, and the production of inequalities

inside and outside of education. I focus on the connec-

tions between the lack of schools, well-educated teachers,

health care, decent housing, and similar kinds of things in

one particular Asian nation—all of which lead to immense

immiseration—and the constant pressure to drive down the

cost of labor in the imperial center. My basic point is that the

connections between the exploitation of identifiable groups

of people in the “Third World” and the demand for cheap

commodities—in this case potatoes—here in the United States

haps one particularly powerful author’s work can serve as an

example. It is a book that should be required reading for any

teacher and teacher educator who wants to get a clearer pic-

ture of the conditions of people’s lives and of the resiliency

and struggles in many of those nations and regions from where

new populations are coming. If ever there was a doubt in

anyone’s mind about the growth of these truly distressing

conditions, Mike Davis’s volume Planet of Slums (2006) makes

this reality crystal clear. At the same time, Davis powerfully

illuminates both the extent of, and what it means to live (exist

Davis provides us with a powerful analysis of political

economy, of structures of dominance, one of the key elements

that I mentioned in building an adequate understanding of

globalization. And he does this not simply by rhetorically

challenging the economic, housing, ecological, educational,

and other policies that are advanced by international bodies

such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund

(IMF) and by dominant groups within the “less developed”

world. Rather, Davis draws together empirical and historical

evidence that demonstrates time and again not only the nega-

in the usual sense of that term, it is better to think of “infor-

mal survivalism” as the major mode of existence in a major-

ity of Third World cities (Davis, 2006, p. 178).

section, Davis (2006) is clear on what is happening through-

out the Third World:

struggles that should force us to recognize that for the poor

certain words that we consider nouns are better thought of

as verbs.

the result of a complex, ongoing—and often dangerous—

trade-off among contradictory needs. Thus, the urban poor

who live in the slums “have to solve a complex equation as

they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of

shelter, journey to work, and . . . personal safety.” And while

the very worst situation “is a . . . bad location without [gov-

mitted people, why do the realities and very real complexities

in this situation seem to be so readily ignored by governments,

international agencies, and as Davis also demonstrates, a num-

ber of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? Part of the

explanation is that many Third World cities (and diasporic

and poor populations of cities in the First World as well)

exist in something like an epistemological fog, one that is

sometimes willfully opaque. Most governments—and unfor-

tunately not a few teachers in our urban areas and the teacher

degradation that is being visited upon millions of people like

the ones both Davis and I have pointed to has led only to a

politics of simple acceptance. Indeed, as I argued earlier, one

Apple 227

agency of oppressed people inside and outside of education.

This is a crucial step in our rejecting the stereotypes that

often go with an almost missionary sense that pervades

teachers’ perspectives on global immigrants: “They are pas-

sive, less intelligent, and need to be saved.”

While Davis’s book is not a conscious response to Spivak’s

well-known question, “Can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak,

1988), it does provide a number of insights into where and

Even within a single city, slum populations can sup-

port a bewildering variety of responses to structural

neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic

churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street

gangs, neoliberal NGOs, and revolutionary social

movements. But if there is no monolithic subject or

unilateral trend in the global slum, there are nonethe-

less myriad acts of resistance. Indeed, the future of

human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of

the urban poor to accept their terminal marginality

Davis’s discussion of the ways in which resistance operates

actually recognize how powerfully resilient and creative the

parents and communities of their diasporic students actually

are. Only if these characteristics are recognized can we engage

in a politics of recognition and respect and see global dia-

to assist their children in having a better life. Why do so

many educators here in the United States look at them as if

they were uncommitted to education and simply knowable

by their economic circumstances now? Perhaps by thinking

of words such as “housing” and “food” as verbs, as requiring

we might give “the others” the respect they have earned.

Planet of Slums provides us with a deeply honest account

of the realities and complex struggles in which diasporic peo-

ple engage. We cannot, however, ignore education’s role in

challenging such immiseration. Indeed, as the aforementioned

example of Porto Alegre in Brazil so clearly shows, when

deeply connected to a larger project of critical social transfor-

mation, educational transformations in schools, in the

styles of those higher up on the economic ladder. No analy-

sis of the realities of schooling in cities in the United States

or of the relations between cities, suburbs, and rural areas

in the United States can be complete without an under-

standing of how schooling is implicated in these relations.

And no significant changes in preparing teachers to teach

in these areas can be successful if these realities are not

given due attention.

This is the case not only in our urban areas. Throughout

the rural regions and small towns of the United States, large