Culture, Curriculum and Education

0 publications

Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides

The Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides is a curriculum-based series reflective of theory creating praxis. The series targets not only undergraduate and graduate audiences, but also tenured and “experienced” teachers of all disciplines. Research suggests that teachers need to have well-designed, thematic-centered curricula and lessons at their disposal. This is accomplished when the school works as a community to meet their own needs. Community in this sense includes working collaboratively with students, parents, and local community organizations to help build the curriculum. Practically, this means that time is devoted to professional development workshops, not exam reviews or test preparation pointers, but real learning. Together with administrators, teachers form professional learning communities (PLCs) to discuss, analyze, and revise curricula and share pedagogical strategies that meet the needs of their particular school demographics. This communal approach was found to be more successful than requiring each individual teacher to create lessons on her/his own. Ideally, we would love it if each teacher could create their own authentic lessons because only s/he truly knows her/his students – and we encourage it, because it is possible! However, as educators ourselves, we understand the realities our colleagues in public schools face, especially when teaching in high needs areas. The Critical Praxis and Curriculum Guides provides relief for educators needing assistance in preparing their lessons. When possible, and in the spirit of communal practices, the series welcomes co-authored books by theorists and practitioners or solo-authored books by an expert deeply informed by the field. Because we strongly believe that theory guides our practice, each guide will blend theory and curriculum chapters creating a praxis. All, of course, in a critical pedagogical framework. Ultimately, the guides will serve as resources for teachers to use, expand upon, revise, and re-create.

13 publications

Ecological Pedagogy, Curriculum and Scholarship

This book series is premised on the ecological understanding that all of education– all of the living fields of knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools, all of the gestures of teaching and learning itself – is full of relations, interdependencies, ancestries, places, voices animated by lived and learned experiences. Ecological pedagogy, curriculum and scholarship understands that all living fields of knowledge must be taught and learned as such, with all of their intrinsic and animate rigours, complexities, interrelatedness, and earthly responsibilities. In these ecologically sorrowful times, our individual and collective impulse to raise voices of commiseration and encouragement to those working inside and outside of schools bristles with urgency. And this just at a time when the world also seems to be churning with increasing distractions and fakeries whose beneficiaries are not of this earth. Schools and schooling are caught up in ongoing yet ever-shifting inheritances of place and displacement, privilege, colonialism, gender and so on. They are also subject to legacies of indiscriminate standardization, efficiency, fragmentation and all of the ramped-up, exhausting and exhausted distractions of our current age. Education often drags along with its tenacious legacies of thinking and practice that are mostly silent, often silencing, simply taken for granted as just the way things are. Schooling itself, in so many quarters, has become an ecological disaster. Many teachers have studied and voiced these matters, while pursuing more venturous, ecologically sound work in their classroom, all this in deliberate resistance to the marginalization of such work. The series invites scholarly, enlivening and healing ways of researching and writing that attempt to live up to the ecologies of the topics themselves, each in their own ways and languages, each laden with their own ancestries, troubles, and insights – eco-hermeneutics, interpretive research, poetic inquiry, autobiographical and life writing, currere, Indigenous research, arts-based inquiry, storytelling and emergent ways and means of knowing. None of these are merely methodologies. Each involves myriad encounters, myriad relationships, myriad possibilities. In trying to find the measure of what is written within the things written about, these ways are in themselves ecological and pedagogical. They are locales where our relations are worked out, our songs are sung, our silences are shared, and our individual and collective stories are lived, contested, shaped and re-told. The logo for this book series is a Celtic Knot drawn by Eric Jardine in 1992. It became the cover illustration of a self-published book that year. It is a reminder of how long-standing is this current stream of work in education, stretching far back from there. These stretches are part of the ecological imagination itself. This book series is premised on the ecological understanding that all of education– all of the living fields of knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools, all of the gestures of teaching and learning itself – is full of relations, interdependencies, ancestries, places, voices animated by lived and learned experiences. Ecological pedagogy, curriculum and scholarship understands that all living fields of knowledge must be taught and learned as such, with all of their intrinsic and animate rigours, complexities, interrelatedness, and earthly responsibilities. In these ecologically sorrowful times, our individual and collective impulse to raise voices of commiseration and encouragement to those working inside and outside of schools bristles with urgency. And this just at a time when the world also seems to be churning with increasing distractions and fakeries whose beneficiaries are not of this earth. Schools and schooling are caught up in ongoing yet ever-shifting inheritances of place and displacement, privilege, colonialism, gender and so on. They are also subject to legacies of indiscriminate standardization, efficiency, fragmentation and all of the ramped-up, exhausting and exhausted distractions of our current age. Education often drags along with its tenacious legacies of thinking and practice that are mostly silent, often silencing, simply taken for granted as just the way things are. Schooling itself, in so many quarters, has become an ecological disaster. Many teachers have studied and voiced these matters, while pursuing more venturous, ecologically sound work in their classroom, all this in deliberate resistance to the marginalization of such work. The series invites scholarly, enlivening and healing ways of researching and writing that attempt to live up to the ecologies of the topics themselves, each in their own ways and languages, each laden with their own ancestries, troubles, and insights – eco-hermeneutics, interpretive research, poetic inquiry, autobiographical and life writing, currere, Indigenous research, arts-based inquiry, storytelling and emergent ways and means of knowing. None of these are merely methodologies. Each involves myriad encounters, myriad relationships, myriad possibilities. In trying to find the measure of what is written within the things written about, these ways are in themselves ecological and pedagogical. They are locales where our relations are worked out, our songs are sung, our silences are shared, and our individual and collective stories are lived, contested, shaped and re-told. The logo for this book series is a Celtic Knot drawn by Eric Jardine in 1992. It became the cover illustration of a self-published book that year. It is a reminder of how long-standing is this current stream of work in education, stretching far back from there. These stretches are part of the ecological imagination itself.

3 publications