[Commlist] New Book: Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education

Published this week by The MIT Press:

Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in 
American Education

By Katie Day Good (Miami University)

Available for order here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bring-world-child


      Summary:

How, long before the advent of computers and the internet, educators 
used technology to help students become media-literate, future-ready, 
and world-minded citizens.

Description:

Today, educators, technology leaders, and policy makers promote the 
importance of “global,” “wired,” and “multimodal” learning; efforts to 
teach young people to become engaged global citizens and skilled users 
of media often go hand in hand. But the use of technology to bring 
students into closer contact with the outside world did not begin with 
the first computer in a classroom. In this book, Katie Day Good traces 
the roots of the digital era's “connected learning” and “global 
classrooms” to the first half of the twentieth century, when educators 
adopted a range of media and materials—including lantern slides, 
bulletin boards, radios, and film projectors—as what she terms 
“technologies of global citizenship.”

Good describes how progressive reformers in the early twentieth century 
made a case for deploying diverse media technologies in the classroom to 
promote cosmopolitanism and civic-minded learning. To “bring the world 
to the child,” these reformers praised not only new mechanical 
media—including stereoscopes, photography, and educational films—but 
also humbler forms of media, created by teachers and children, including 
scrapbooks, peace pageants, and pen pal correspondence. The goal was a 
“mediated cosmopolitanism,” teaching children to look outward onto a 
fast-changing world—and inward, at their own national greatness. Good 
argues that the public school system became a fraught site of global 
media reception, production, and exchange in American life, teaching 
children to engage with cultural differences while reinforcing hegemonic 
ideas about race, citizenship, and US-world relations.

Endorsements:

“The internet was hardly the first classroom technology of 
‘connectedness.’ In this history of educational media, Katie Day Good 
traces earlier claims about technology and global citizenship, and 
reminds us that as much as these devices were supposed to show students 
the world, so too were they about extending American power and influence.”

– Audrey Watters, founder of Hack Education; author of The Monsters of 
Education Technology

“This history of educational media offers a vivid, fascinating, and at 
times sobering, picture of teachers, industry, and NGOs coming together 
a century ago to engage children in America’s emerging and presumed 
moral leadership on a global stage. The reverberations continue to be 
felt, as Katie Day Good also makes clear, in today’s media-saturated 
classrooms.”

-John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor of Education, Stanford 
University; author of//The Intellectual Properties of Learning

“/Bring the World to the Child /is an original and compelling history of 
school media use in the first half of the twentieth century. Through 
deft and thoughtful readings of pageants, stereoscopes, and other 
neglected forms of media, Good provides a brilliant new interpretation 
of schools’ efforts to promote global citizenship through media. This 
book is a unique contribution to our understanding of the intertwined 
histories of media technology and education in the United States.”

-Victoria Cain, Associate Professor, Northeastern University; coauthor 
of Life on Display: Revolutionizing US Museums of Science and Natural 
History in the Twentieth Century

“Katie Day Good radically expands our understanding of educational 
technology, tracing its history back to the early twentieth century, and 
broadening its definition to include lantern slides, scrapbooks, pen 
pals, pageants, and toy exchanges. In the retelling, Good uncovers 
omissions and anxieties that continue to plague the introduction of new 
media to schools, from fears of children being rendered passive by too 
much staring at screens, to the prejudice embedded in Eurocentric ideas 
about tolerance and diversity.”

-Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood: How the Material 
World Shapes Independent Kids


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