DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

The State of Global Education in an Urban, Suburban, and Rural High School

World Class: Teaching and Learning in Global Times
By William Gaudelli. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. xxiii + 214 pp. Paper, $25.00.

Powerful teaching and learning in social studies classrooms should be meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active (National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS], 1993). World Class: Teaching and Learning in Global Times, which is based on William Gaudelli's findings from an ethnographic study of global studies classrooms in three high schools, epitomizes these principles of powerful teaching and learning. Gaudelli's research is personally meaningful because he is a former high school global studies teacher who now studies other teachers to better understand factors that describe powerful global or world studies teachers and teaching. This book is both meaningful and integrative because Gaudelli focuses on a few classrooms in three different types of schools to elucidate the connections between important knowledge, skills, and attitudes of global educators. Gaudelli's book is value based because he confronts the ethical issues and controversial topics he found in his research into global education classrooms. In fact, he reveals opposing perspectives and at the same time is sensitive to cultural differences in the school sites he studied, thus displaying social responsibility as a researcher. This book is also challenging because this research represents a seriousness of purpose and a respect for inquiry and exemplifies critical thinking from the design of the study to the presentation of the findings. Finally, Gaudelli's work is active because it is highly reflective and represents how a learner, in this case the author, constructs meaning by actively seeking to understand how real teachers in the field approach their work.