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

Art and Thought / Art et pensée

If the past is continually retold in the present, as Walter Benjamin suggests, what can critical perspectives reveal and what do they obscure about the history of our modern time? Art and Thought: Histories of the Avant-Garde revisits and reconceptualises the histories of modernism, avant-gardism and postmodernism. Volumes in the series will each offer a critical perspective developed in response to specific cultural artefacts and their qualities. They will engage with literary, artistic and theoretical works, from the past as well as the present, and explore the interactions between literature, visual art, film and music, including the livre d’artiste. The series showcases work by new as well as established scholars, whether monographs, single- or multi-authored collections of essays, and new editions of salient or neglected primary texts in English or French, including original aesthetic works. Writing on translation as well as in translation is welcome. Walter Benjamin nous rappelle que le passé se dit au présent. Dans quelle mesure la pensée critique permet-elle d’illuminer notre histoire ? La collection Art et pensée : histoires des avant-gardes se propose de penser à nouveaux frais les problématiques liant les esthétiques de la modernité, de l’avant-garde et du postmoderne. Chaque volume répondra aux qualités ponctuelles d'objets esthétiques et culturels considérés par une perspective critique propre. Des œuvres de littérature, d’art et de réflexion y seront abordées, qui souligneront les rapports intimes de l’écriture, du visuel, de la musique, du cinéma. Les livres d’artistes ne seront pas oubliés. La collection présentera, en langue française ou anglaise, le travail critique de chercheurs établis ou en début de carrière. Elle offrira à ses lecteurs des monographies, des collections d’essais, des volumes collectifs, et des éditions nouvelles d’œuvres marquantes ou jusqu’à présent négligées, y compris les œuvres littéraires et esthétiques. Les œuvres en traduction nouvelle tout comme les travaux sur la traduction même seront vivement accueillis.

8 publications

Art – Knowledge – Theory

ISSN: 2235-2759

Art Knowledge Theory is a book series that explores artistic modes of expression as forms of knowledge production. It focuses on transdisciplinary, epistemological and methodological approaches to contemporary art. Linking artistic and scientific practices, tools, techniques and theories, the volumes investigate the cultures of aesthetics and science studies as they relate to works of art. Art Knowledge Theory analyzes the role of art in contemporary culture by probing the philosophical, historical and social parameters by which images are accessed and assessed. As an amplification - as well as intervention or even a correction to historical research, this series questions the state of the art and knowledge within a culture, characterized by technology and science.

8 publications