Along
with numerous links to other websites within the various curriculum
modules themselves, there will be a master page of links compiled
for a link on this page.
There will
also be a list of Rutgers Faculty willing to speak in classrooms
in New Jersey or in other classrooms worldwide via Distance Learning
Labs.
The Project
Coordinators for Global Citizen 2000 envision this website to
be an exemplary resource for improving Global Literacy.
In pursuit
of this goal, teachers may want to take advantage of the asynchronous
course offered below:
Promoting
Inter-Cultural Understanding:
Stereotypes, Prejudice and Beyond
In response
to the requests from State of New Jersey teachers, the Global
Citizen 2000 Project will offer a new asynchronous course entitled,
"Promoting Inter-Cultural Understanding: Stereotypes, Prejudice
and Beyond," co-taught by Dr. Eric Davis, Director of the
Program in Middle Eastern Studies, and Dr. Jan Kubik, Director
of the Center for European Studies, at Rutgers University. This
course is designed to explore the impact of American perceptions
of non-Western regions of the world on Western educators' ability
to understand and teach global society. The course will include
lectures by area study experts at Rutgers and other universities,
visual resources, including art and photography, and a wide variety
of contacts with teachers and students in other cultures. Each
of the course's three core instructional units offers a set of
lectures accompanied by visual materials, course related contacts,
and assignments.
Unit I contains
three sections. The first describes the dominant stereotypes that
prevail in American culture about specific regions of the world.
This section of the course includes stereotypes on Africa, East
Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Russia and Eastern Europe.
The second section is historical. Lectures explain how stereotypes
about specific regions of the missionary activities and the organizing
of world's fair expositions, e.g. the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial
Exposition, during the later 19th and early 20th centuries are
studied for their impact on popular understanding of non-Western
regions. The third section describes stereotypes that non-Americans
hold of American society. This section of the course allows teachers
to develop curricula enabling students to experience stereotypes
from the "receiving end" thereby making them more sensitive
to their potentially negative impact.
Unit II includes
two sections. The first studies the negative impact of stereotypes
and how stereotypical thinking has limited or even distorted conceptual
frameworks in history and the social science making comprehensive
understandings of non-Western societies and global culture more
difficult to obtain. The second section offers case studies of
how stereotypes can provide the basis for forcefully argued in
Orientalism, the process of cultural denigration is almost always
a critical prerequisite for the physical occupation of economic
exploration of another society.
Unit III offers
lecturs on strategies for transcending the negative impact of
stereotypical thinking. This unit incorporates discussions of
the core values of an emerging global civil society and international
legal culture that has been developing since the end of World
War II in response to the horrors of the Holocaust, the Stalinist
Gulag, massive human in the Balkans and Rwanda, and the suppression
of democracy activists in China, just to name some of the more
egregious examples of recent forms of oppression during the later
20th century. This section of the course will include innovative
pedagogies that have already been developed at the university
and secondary school level designed to confront the central issues
surrounding stereotypes and prejudice.
This course
will be offered through the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers
University and can be taken for graduate or other forms of credit.
For further information, please contact the director of the Global
Citizen 2000 Project, Dr. Eric Davis, at (732)932-9322.
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