Using Literature to Teach Global Citizenship

The theme for this series of “En la Clase” posts is how to bring multiculturalism into our classroom in authentic ways. As I mentioned in the previous post, one of my most important goals each year was to help my students learn what it meant to be a global citizen. One of the first steps in doing this was to expand the focus of our classroom beyond its four walls. I needed to begin to encourage all of us (myself included) to think beyond the narrow focus of our own lives. Bringing literature from around the world into the classroom was one of the easiest ways I found to accomplish this.

In order for this to really work, meaning I wasn’t just picking random books that caught my interest throughout the year, I had to have a plan of attack. Now, there are numerous ways to go about this, much of it depending on the age level of your students and the organization of your curriculum instruction and your daily schedule. The suggestions below are just that, you will probably have to modify them to make them work for your classroom.

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