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As an interruption to existing nationalistic and neoliberal frames, teachers are beginning to embrace cosmopolitanism to ground literacy instruction. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the possibilities and tensions of using a cosmopolitan approach to literacy instruction. This chapter presents a qualitative study of interviews with 24 educators from the United States, Belize, and China to examine curricular and instructional choices educators report using to promote students' global meaning-making and cosmopolitan worldviews. Findings include three themes: situated relevance, glocal connections, and intercultural collaboration. Participants reported that creating a welcoming environment and promoting equality in the local classroom is foundational to teaching students at the local or global level. Teaching global literacies included teaching about similarities and differences locally and internationally and making local–global connections on issues of importance to the students. Also, participants reported that for students to engage in global meaning-making, they needed to dialogue and collaborate with people from different countries. While the findings present possibilities, the discussion approaches the data through the lens of potential challenges. Some participants reported first helping students move beyond ethnocentric thinking and stereotypes through reflexive exercises so that students could constructively interact with peers cross-culturally. However, not all participants taught reflexivity or with a critical lens. This study may bring awareness to educators as to curricular choices and instructional processes that hold promise for promoting students' global meaning-making.

This chapter provides some final thoughts on global meaning making as exemplified by the authors in the book who interrogated literacy research, policies, and pedagogical pursuits applying the tenets of global meaning making with the ultimate goal of transforming how we engage in global language and literacy endeavors. We consider their work associated with the three dimensions of interrupting existing practices and policies, decolonizing spaces for learning and indigenizing curriculum and pedagogy. In addition, we raise questions that require further investigation related to global meaning making that is emancipatory and promotes the cultural capital of the locals.

This chapter explains how the idea of this book occurred, and introduces readers to Tierney's multidimensional framework for global meaning making. It describes the organization and structure of the book and the contents of each chapter and calls on readers to transform international language and literacy research through global meaning making.

The purpose of this paper is to explore leadership styles and patterns in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the USA in order to contribute to a greater understanding of global leadership.

The paper uses cultural mythologies as a lens (Kessler and Wong-MingJi, 2009a) to extract the most favored leadership traits within selected countries. In doing so, the paper explores historical trajectories and core values of each country to identify their distinctive characteristics. Additionally, leadership styles of well-known business leaders in each culture are examined to develop a comparative discussion of global leadership patterns and styles.

The paper finds that leaders may share same characteristics across countries, however, their behavioral expressions tend to unfold differently within each context. The paper argues that without context, meanings embedded in cultural mythologies and behaviors often become lost. The paper concludes that a comparative analysis of selected countries reveals a more complex and rich array of cultural meanings, thus offering support to a contextual view of leadership.

Examination of cultural mythologies on leadership makes important theoretical contributions by illustrating that cultural mythologies indeed shape the values, behaviors, and attitudes of global leaders, and provide three important functions that are identified as: cultural bridging, meaning making, and contextual nuancing.

Understanding comparative leadership patterns is critical in international business. The paper offers cultural mythologies as a tool for leaders who seek to cross-cultural boundaries in developing long term and high-quality productive international business relationships.

The value of the study lies in developing a comparative analysis of leadership patterns in three Southeast Asian countries and the USA with the help of cultural mythologies. The paper urges that scholars to move beyond quantification of cultural dimensions to a more contextualized understanding of leadership.

A collaborative autoethnography (CAE) conducted by six Belizean educators in a US-based PhD program in Language, Literacy, and Culture Education and one of their faculty members is presented in a creative, dialogic format in this chapter. The group of educators embarked on this reflective self-study to explore how their programmatic language and literacy education knowledge was taken up, remixed, rejected, indigenized, or transformed into local Belizean pedagogies and curricula. Using CAE methods of narrative data generation and dialogic analysis and reflection, the educator-researchers examined the degree to which their program met the expectations of Tierney's (2018) global meaning making endeavor. They found that being vulnerable learners and building their own disciplinary confidence and competence enabled them to take up the new ideas they were encountering, and that new learning led to transformative shifts in their pedagogical philosophies that included culturally relevant and proactive pedagogies. They also innovated and remixed pedagogies in their teaching contexts while wobbling with how to create sustainable changes. This work indicates that Western, US-based universities and programs can, with intentional macro- and micro-curriculum design and ongoing critical reflection, facilitate cross-cultural, international language and literacy programs that enact decolonizing and emancipatory curricula and practices.

Within the context of forced migration, literacy can facilitate liberation and participation, though literacy often serves instead to exclude. Given the ongoing global refugee crisis, literacy researchers must work toward understanding how literacy shapes the livelihoods of those impacted by forced migration. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the ways in which certain literacies were valued or disregarded in the pursuit of a college degree and to uncover the ways that refugee-background students navigated these limitations. Using a multiple case study, this research explored the experiences of six students from refugee backgrounds as they navigated the literacy expectations of the college program. This chapter highlights two themes – our way versus their way and playing the game – that highlight the ways that participants pushed against the literacy constraints that they perceived in the program.

This chapter examines the perspectives of culturally responsive teachers of immigrant and refugee youth in a high performing school in the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Academic success in the region has been traditionally designated for ethnic Germans and nonnatives who suppress their culture and assimilate into normative German culture. Assimilating to normative German culture through the lens of global meaning making is a preordained social order that perpetuates exclusion for immigrants in society and school. The consequences of failed intercultural education in Europe have prompted increased demands to consider diversity in teacher training and to provide more equitable opportunities for immigrants. Gymnasium Baden welcomed a few Syrian refugees where immigrant youth represented one 10th of the population during the 2015–2016 academic year. In a broader context of limited access and opportunity to higher education among immigrant and refugee youth, this chapter examines teachers who interrupted existing frames and maintained high expectations and mindfulness for their students. The perspectives and voices of teachers who employ culturally responsive practices were documented through interviews and examined through the lens of Tierney's (2018) dimensions of global meaning making, more specifically the models of interrupting existing frames, critical literacies, and being mindful. Participants' perspectives interrupted existing frames and were documented against the grain of a conservative region that has experienced dilemmas of integrating immigrants and refugees into school and society. An examination of interview transcripts revealed teachers who maintained high expectations through an asset orientation and were overwhelmingly supportive and responsive to longtime immigrant and newcomer refugee youth.

To deconstruct colonizing ideologies and expand our understanding of global meaning making (Tierney, 2018) in this chapter, we describe a qualitative study that explored how a cohort of teacher candidates (TCs) from a large Southwestern university in the United States made sense of a community mapping project as part of their international service-learning program in rural South Africa. The TCs observed, collected, and reflected on various literacy activities and artifacts. Findings suggest that the TCs grappled with colonizing perspectives and practices specifically related to language, literacy, and cultural hegemony. They identified and struggled with the power and privilege they noticed bolstering Western literacies and the English language in the local community to the extent that it overshadowed local languages and local cultural norms. They questioned the historically situated use of certain spellings in local texts and how such spellings are connected to Apartheid policies still influencing this rural community. By engaging in the community mapping project, the TCs also recognized that literacy is socially informed and is more than just reading and writing but employs a range of semiotic tools such as images, movement, and music. The transformative process of participating in the community mapping project helped TCs develop a deeper understanding of the relationships between community and school literacies and grapple with the broader impact of Western epistemologies in the Global South.

The New Zealand Teaching Council recently published Tapasā, a touchstone document to support non-Pasifika teachers in considering how their practices might be more culturally sustaining for Pasifika students, signaling continued national recognition of the need for teachers to inquire into their teaching practices as culturally informed and situated. In this chapter, we see this call as an invitation to look critically at the content of our initial teacher education literacy classes, and also to look critically at the methods of instruction and assessment. In our framing and analysis, we draw on several aspects of Tierney's (2018) framework for global meaning making, including “interrupting existing frames.” Despite Aotearoa New Zealand's official foundation in biculturalism, Indigenous ways of knowing have been historically marginalized in official schooling spaces, so there is a continuing need for rigorous interrogation of curriculum and practices that continue to privilege settler colonial perspectives and values. Using diffractive text analysis and talanoa vā, we explore the processes and first wave of insights to arise through a collaborative effort to decolonize some aspects of literacy teacher education curriculum.