Associate Professor, Chairperson of UNC Charlotte's Undergraduate Research Conference, Director of Cato COED Prospect for Success, Department of Reading and Elementary Education, UNC Charlotte, Cato College of Education, Charlotte, NC, USA.

Erik Jon Byker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Erik has a Ph.D. in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy from Michigan State University (MSU). Erik is a former fellow with the Global Teacher Education Fellowship, which is supported by the Longview Foundation and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE). He has over 20 years of teaching experience at all levels including elementary, middle, high school, and the university. Erik’s fields of specialization include educational technology integration and global citizenship education. His research agenda is comparative and international in scope. He has conducted ethnographic field studies in Cuba, England, Germany, India, South Africa, South Korea, and across the United States. From his research studies, Erik has developed two conceptual frameworks related to the intersection of digital technology, global citizenship, and the development of global competencies. One framework is called Critical Cosmopolitan Theory, which is a theory that maps the Asia Society’s global competency matrix to Paulo Freire’s work about the development of critical consciousness. The second conceptual framework—called Global Telephony Theory—examines the intersection of globalization, education, locality, and technology.