Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local: Engaging Students in International Literature Through Connections to Personal Experience and Culture

Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local presents a critique of multicultural education, which tends to focus on multiculturalism at the expense of a truly international curriculum. While lessons in multiculturalism are oftentimes well intentioned, this book begins with the premise that we do a disservice by imparting lessons in international culture and history through multiculturalism, which can perpetuate insularity even as it claims to promote global coverage. The book offers background on World Literature, a term used for one hundred years to refer to a global literary tradition; reviews the numerous challenges of reading cross culturally; and provides an overview of cosmopolitanism, a two-thousand-year-old concept referring to our ability to appreciate cultures and nations different from our own. The book also shares the stories of three teachers who engaged their students with international literature by connecting texts topically or thematically with the students' lived experiences. The book closes with suggested curriculum on modern Chinese literature. Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local provides important and practical background information invaluable to courses on literacy, children's literature, multicultural education, and global studies. Review "«Engendering Cosmopolitanism Through the Local» by Jacquelyn Chappel is a timely book that engages with the complexities of cosmopolitanizing the teaching of literature through the use of international literature. The book usefully distinguishes between multicultural and global education as well as world literature and international literature while acknowledging the overlaps among these terms. A key strength of the book is the examples of cosmopolitanism-on-the-ground through rich and nuanced examples of the ways teachers attempt to introduce international literature and the challenges that occur as teachers attempted to connect foreign culture with students' lived experiences. The book provides an original and important contribution to the ever-growing field of cos-mopolitan studies in English education." Suzanne Choo, Assistant Dean and Assistant Professor, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University "This book invites teachers to engage with the potentials of cosmopolitanism for transforming their teaching of World Literature by providing practical examples of how these theories play out in sec-ondary classrooms. These classroom examples demonstrate how supporting students in critically connecting to their own cultural values provides a context within which they can become more criti-cally open to values that differ from their own--connecting the local with the global. This book chal-lenges educators to move beyond the Euro-centered approaches that continue to dominate World Lit-erature, despite good intentions, and instead engage readers in critical dialogue about international literature." Kathy Short, Professor, University of Arizona; Director, Worlds of Words About the Author Jacquelyn Chappel received her BA from Dartmouth College and completed her MA and PhD at the University of Hawaii. She currently teaches English and education in the University of Hawaii system. Her previous publications appear in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, and English Journal.