What U.S. Middle School Students Bring to Global Education: Discourses on Japan, Formation of American Identities, and the Sociology of Knowledge and Curriculum

What kinds of discourses on a foreign country do young people in the United States bring to global studies classrooms? What does it mean for them to engage in a series of discourses in terms of their identity formations, when these discourses represent a particular kind of worldview? How should teachers deal with the tendency of the students to see foreign nations as the other? How can educational researchers study such discourses and the operation of othering at the level of everyday lives in schools? This volume answers these questions by critically examining the meaning(s) of Japan for U. S. middle school students and the formation of their identities vis-à-vis Japan. Employing ethnographic, micro-sociological, and discourse analytic perspectives and methodologies, it approaches the problem of othering by analyzing what the students bring to classroom (i.e., discourses), student voices, and various uses of language that shape students’ views on Japan, themselves, and the world outside them.