Culture, Curriculum and Education

0 publications

Federalism

ISSN: 2294-6969

The book series «Federalism», run by the Centro Studi sul Federalismo/Centre for Studies on Federalism (CSF), aims to disseminate knowledge in the field of studies on federalism, as well as to feed the academic and public debate and support the activity of decision-makers, confronted with demands for autonomy by local governments, along with forms of regional and world integration needed to govern global processes. The CSF is a think tank that carries out activities of interdisciplinary research, documentation, information regarding domestic and supra-national federalism, developments in the area of regional and continental integration first and foremost the European Union and problems related to the world order and the process of democratisation of the international system. The CSF has been founded under the auspices of the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Universities of Turin, Pavia and Milan.

20 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

Régionalisme & Fédéralisme / Regionalism & Federalism

The contemporary nation-state is undergoing a series of transformations which question its traditional role as a container of social, political and economic systems. New spaces are emerging with the rise of regional production systems, movements for territorial autonomy and the rediscovery of old and the invention of new identities. States have responded by restructuring their systems of territorial government, often setting up an intermediate or regional level. There is no single model, but a range, from administrative deconcentration to federalization. Some states have regionalized in a uniform manner, while others have adopted asymmetrical solutions. In many cases, regions have gone beyond the nation-state, seeking to become actors in broader continental and transnational systems. The series covers the gamut of issues involved in this territorial restructuring, including the rise of regional production systems, political regionalism, questions of identity, and constitutional change. It will include the emergence of new systems of territorial regulation and collective action within civil society as well as the state. There is no a priori definition of what constitutes a region, since these span a range of spatial scales, from metropolitan regions to large federated states, and from administrative units to cultural regions and stateless nations. Disciplines covered include history, sociology, social and political geography, political science and law. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. In addition to empirical and comparative studies, books focus on the theory of regionalism and federalism, including normative questions about democracy and accountability in complex systems of government. L’État-nation contemporain a subi une série de transformations qui remettent en cause son rôle traditionnel de cadre pour les systèmes sociaux, politiques et économiques. Des nouveaux espaces ont émergé avec la mise en place de systèmes de production régionaux, le développement des mouvements pour l’autonomie territoriale et la redécouverte des anciennes identités aussi bien que l’invention de nouvelles. Les États ont répondu à ces mutations par la restructuration de leurs systèmes de gouvernement territoriaux, le plus souvent par l’instauration d’un niveau intermédiaire ou régional. Il n’y a pas de modèle unique mais bien une gamme allant de la décentralisation administrative à la fédéralisation. Certains États se sont régionalisés de manière uniforme, tandis que d’autres ont adopté des solutions asymétriques. Dans plusieurs cas, les régions ont dépassé le cadre des États-nations, cherchant à devenir des acteurs au sein des systèmes continentaux et transnationaux. La collection s’intéresse à toute étude concernant cette restructuration territoriale, incluant le développement des systèmes de production régionaux, le régionalisme politique, les questions d’identité et les changements constitutionnels. Elle prend également en compte l’émergence de nouveaux systèmes de régulation territoriale et l’action collective au niveau de la société civile aussi bien que de l’État. Il n’y a pas de définition a priori de ce qui constitue une région, celle-ci pouvant embrasser un éventail de niveaux territoriaux, des régions métropolitaines aux grands États fédérés et des unités administratives aux régions culturelles et aux nations-sans-État. La collection comprend des études dans des disciplines variées telles que l’histoire, la sociologie, la géographie sociale et politique, la science politique et le droit. Les approches interdisciplinaires sont particulièrement bienvenues. Enfin, parallèlement aux études empiriques et comparatives, certains ouvrages s’intéressent à la théorie du régionalisme et du fédéralisme, incluant des questions normatives sur la démocratie et la responsabilité dans les systèmes complexes de gouvernement. The contemporary nation-state is undergoing a series of transformations which question its traditional role as a container of social, political and economic systems. New spaces are emerging with the rise of regional production systems, movements for territorial autonomy and the rediscovery of old and the invention of new identities. States have responded by restructuring their systems of territorial government, often setting up an intermediate or regional level. There is no single model, but a range, from administrative deconcentration to federalization. Some states have regionalized in a uniform manner, while others have adopted asymmetrical solutions. In many cases, regions have gone beyond the nation-state, seeking to become actors in broader continental and transnational systems. The series covers the gamut of issues involved in this territorial restructuring, including the rise of regional production systems, political regionalism, questions of identity, and constitutional change. It will include the emergence of new systems of territorial regulation and collective action within civil society as well as the state. There is no a priori definition of what constitutes a region, since these span a range of spatial scales, from metropolitan regions to large federated states, and from administrative units to cultural regions and stateless nations. Disciplines covered include history, sociology, social and political geography, political science and law. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. In addition to empirical and comparative studies, books focus on the theory of regionalism and federalism, including normative questions about democracy and accountability in complex systems of government.

14 publications

Complicated Conversation

ISSN: 1534-2816

Reframing the curricular challenge educators face after a decade of school deform, the books published in Peter Lang's Complicated Conversation Series testify to the ethical demands of our time, our place, our profession. What does it mean for us to teach now, in an era structured by political polarization, economic destabilization, and the prospect of climate catastrophe? Each of the books in the Complicated Conversation Series provides provocative paths, theoretical and practical, to a very different future. In this resounding series of scholarly and pedagogical interventions into the nightmare that is the present, we hear once again the sound of silence breaking, supporting us to rearticulate our pedagogical convictions in this time of terrorism, reframing curriculum as committed to the complicated conversation that is intercultural communication, self-understanding, and global justice.

100 publications