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Using perspectives drawn from recent work in the anthropology of learning as socially situated practice, alongside attention to multimodality as a lens for exploring learning, this article analyzes patterns of meaning-making among children engaged in small group learning during an after-school Creole literacy program in Haiti. Ethnographic analysis of an extensive corpus of video data reveals a powerful role for embodiment, wide attention, and distributed participation in children's learning, processes that in turn channel wider systems of meaning in Haitian society and culture. The article suggests that attention to the multiple affordances and cultural resources children use during engagement in socially situated learning offers a resource for thinking more deeply about education as social practice, especially in contexts where schools and society are shaped by social inequalities.

Although much debate exists on the conceptualization, nature, and goals of global citizenship education, there has been widespread support for incorporating ideals of global citizenship into the practices, texts, and curricula of U.S. schools and universities. This article offers an interpretive discourse-based critique of ideas of selfhood underlying global citizenship education. Based on analyses of two U.S. high school curricula and materials available on websites devoted to global citizenship, we develop a critique of universalizing constructs of selfhood that underlie global citizenship discourse. These assumptions obscure reflection on dynamics of social class privilege that shape global citizenship activism and situate global citizenship education as a potentially counter-productive neoliberal discourse. The article concludes with recommendations for practitioners interested in developing a more self-reflective and critical global citizenship education.

Much attention has been given to the theory and practice of global citizenship education (GCE). In this article, drawing from an emerging body of literature that examines GCE through a postcolonial lens, we offer a Freirean critical reading of how GCE intersects with ideologies of globalization. We argue that GCE discourse privileges certain understandings of globalization that work to socialize students into the current global system, rather than giving them the capacity to challenge that system. To move beyond this limitation, we draw from Levinas and argue for a post-humanist approach to GCE, which would open up opportunities to cultivate individuals' capacities to act within and against prevailing ideas and forces of globalization.

Using perspectives drawn from recent work in the anthropology of learning as socially situated practice, alongside attention to multimodality as a lens for exploring learning, this article analyzes patterns of meaning-making among children engaged in small group learning during an after-school Creole literacy program in Haiti. Ethnographic analysis of an extensive corpus of video data reveals a powerful role for embodiment, wide attention, and distributed participation in children's learning, processes that in turn channel wider systems of meaning in Haitian society and culture. The article suggests that attention to the multiple affordances and cultural resources children use during engagement in socially situated learning offers a resource for thinking more deeply about education as social practice, especially in contexts where schools and society are shaped by social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long before the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010, but particularly since, international media and humanitarian groups have drawn attention to the "vulnerable child" in Haiti, a child often portrayed as needing "saving". Focusing in particular on the "restavek" (child domestic laborer), this article first explores the ways in which such children are represented as vulnerable and victimized, despite emerging ethnographic evidence on children's lived experience that paints a rather different picture. It then argues that far from being inconsequential, however, representations of children's vulnerability enable a critique of the Haitian culture and nation itself as fundamentally flawed and in need of saving through the interventions of the international order. Raising the question of for whom and for what purposes such projects of critique and saving exist, the article suggests that the saving of Haiti's children can be seen as a way to position the Haitian nation within a universalized and moralizing narrative of maturation/development that ultimately is not so much about meeting Haiti's (and its children's) needs as it is about satisfying the needs and desires of the more powerful in terms of their own security, prosperity and global dominance. (Contains 19 notes.)

This interpretive critique of the US parenting advice literature explores the underlying cultural values and assumptions concerning emotion and power that are revealed in discourses on child behavior management. The analysis reveals a clear emphasis on the pedagogical and therapeutic role of an emotionally knowledgeable parent in relation to a deficient child. Parents are supposed to teach the child how to handle negative emotions through explicit strategies such as labeling, verbalization, and therapeutic listening, many of which are imbued with cultural and class bias. While emotions appear to be valued, the underlying subtext is one of emotional control and disengagement. The discourse can be read as a window on a contemporary politics of emotion in which freedom of expression and regulation of the self exist in uneasy tension, and in which emotions represent a dangerous terrain of social dis/order. (Contains 8 notes.)

This critical cultural analysis of trends in the field of social emotional learning (SEL) in the United States considers how ideas concerning emotional skills and competencies have informed programmatic discourse. While currently stressing links between SEL and academic achievement, program literature also places emphasis on ideals of caring, community, and diversity. However, recommended practices across programs tend to undermine these ideals by focusing on emotional and behavioral control strategies that privilege individualist models of self. SEL in practice thus becomes another way to focus attention on measurement and remediation of individual deficits rather than a way to redirect educators' focus toward the relational contexts of classrooms and schools. The promise of SEL to foster increased achievement and equity in American education may not be realized unless more work is done to connect ideals with practices and to address the political and cultural assumptions that are being built into contemporary approaches. (Contains 10 notes.)

Presents conceptual analysis of U.S. and Japanese early education discourse, contrasting cultural assumptions and views of self that inform each context. Finds Japan holds progressive, child-centered but not developmentalist views that promote self in terms of cultural values; the United States emphasizes the individual child defined by differences across discrete developmental domains in which the "whole child" is lost. (JPB)

Considers the need for critical inquiry into the notion of identity, suggesting that the field might reconsider an approach that moves beyond identity toward consideration of cultural models of self. Cultural theory, multiculturalism, and transcultural comparisons of teacher and learning are suggested as areas where self appears to be a useful construct. (SLD)

Diversity is an idea that merits closer critical analysis. Many efforts to support diversity are framed by discourses grounded in conceptualizations of culture, difference, and identity that further the status quo, not multicultural understanding. Schools need a strategy of teaching and learning about differences that radically challenges people's assumptions about mainstream and minority cultural frameworks. (34 references) (MLH)

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As a much debated phenomenon in contemporary South Korea, anti-Americanism has been seen primarily as a response to the perceived political and economic domination of the United States in Korean affairs. This article suggests that such a view, however, is incomplete without consideration of the cultural and psychological context in which contemporary discourses of cultural nationalism have arisen: specifically, an indigenous cultural psychology characterized by an emphasis on uri ('we') - a collective sense of socially diffuse yet unified and homogenous selfhood. As one variety of contemporary national cultural discourse, anti-Americanism is a response to certain unwelcome trends in cultural development that have already begun to undermine the collective sense of Korean selfhood, as reflected in part in Korean concern over the Western 'cultural invasion,' and Korean critiques of American bias and arrogance in dealings with Korea. However, far from being a static concept concerned only with defensive protection of Korean identity, uri also reflects Korean concern for re-formulating national cultural identity in terms more accommodating to the outside. Ultimately, anti-Americanism needs to be seen in the context of a Korean cultural psychology, which posits the enduring value of a collectively defined selfhood as an alternative to the prevailing individualist representations of the West.

The younger generations of Japan-born Koreans in Japan is adapting to a newly found identity derived from their Korean roots and their exposure to the Japanese culture. A study conducted among Koreans who have come to Japan in the last 5-10 years and the older generations of Koreans, or Kyopo, showed that new immigrants tend to uphold their Korean identity in Japan's alien environment. The younger Japan-born Koreans draw their new identity from both Korean and Japanese traditions, while their ascendants have adopted Japan's cultural traditions and attitudes readily.

The relationship between language use and second culture acquisition is examined in this study of first generation Iranian immigrants and exiles in the United States. The use of both Farsi and English is found to be instrumental in the process by which American culture is incorporated within the Iranian worldview. (AF)

The global spread of mindfulness-based interventions raises some interesting questions regarding the universality and translatibility of key ideas and practices of mindfulness. Based on ethnographic research, this article reflects on one effort to bring ideas and practices of mindfulness-based stress reduction to Haitian mental health practitioners and educators in Haiti. While core concepts of mindfulness-based stress reduction are often assumed to be universal, this analysis suggests that cultural meaning systems and social contexts, and in particular local cultural psychologies of personhood, strongly influenced the meanings that Haitian participants took away from their exposure to mindfulness-based stress reduction. These differences manifested in resistance to individualist concepts self-embedded in the discourse of mindfulness-based stress reduction as well as to its secularism. However, while rejecting an individualistic and amoral self-focus, Haitian participants also re-interpreted mindfulness in new ways that stressed its value for societal and national well-being. The article reflects on the larger questions that surround the making and re-making of meanings associated with well-being as mindfulness-based interventions move across cultural and national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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