Obstacles to Internationalizing American High School Curricula: Teacher Perspectives on Teaching World Literature in Hawai‘i.

Abstract

For over a hundred years, the course called World Literature has attempted to broaden American high school curriculum beyond British and American worldviews. In spite of these historical purposes and the stated interest in “global citizenship” articulated in many school mission statements, World Literature courses, in many of today’s high schools, remain decidedly un-international reviews mainly of British and American literature. This dominance of English language texts in World Literature reflects and perpetuates British and American political hegemony and may be inadequate in an increasingly globalized world defined by increased political, economic, and cultural interactions between people of different nations. While teacher preparation and a dearth of works in translations have been cited as contributing to this problem, the experiences of high school teachers remain largely absent from discussion on internationalizing curriculum. This dissertation presents a multiple case study analysis of eight high school teachers of World Literature in Hawai‘i. Teachers were selected from schools with a wide range of purposes. These schools included two parochial Christian schools, a Buddhist/international school, an International Baccalaureate school, a private school for Hawaiians1, a public school, and a charter school. This study also includes the views of a retired teacher, a former supervisor of the author. Using cosmopolitanism on the ground, a theory of cosmopolitanism that investigates cosmopolitanism in education, this study draws from individual interviews and a focus group to find (a) while some teachers 1 Here and throughout this study, “Hawaiian” refers to persons of Hawaiian ancestry or to recognized Hawaiian cultural knowledge and/or practices. prioritized global citizenship, a number of factors take priority over internationalizing curriculum, and (b) teachers did not equate global citizenship with internationalizing curriculum. Finally, in keeping with cosmopolitanism on the ground, this study finds that enacting cosmopolitanism means (c) students’ local identities need to be privileged before international contexts, a counter-intuitive understanding of cosmopolitanism. In addition to these findings, this study identifies six definitions of World Literature and ten common criteria for text selections.