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

Systems Thinking for Safety

ISSN: 2571-6913

Advisory board: Professor Erik Hollnagel, University of Southern Denmark; Professor Ragnar Löfstedt, King’s Centre for Risk Management, King’s College London, UK; Professor Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Captain Rogers E. Smith, NASA Dryden Flight Research, USA; Professor Washington Yotto Ochieng, Imperial College, London, UK; Professor Dominic Elliott, University of Liverpool Management School, UK; Captain Tim Berry, Jet2; Dr Robert Hunter, British Air Line Pilots Association (BALPA), UK; Dr Anne Eyre, Trauma Training Ltd, UK; Dr David Fletcher, University of Leicester, UK; Associate Professor David Ison, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, USA; Dr Terry Shevells, University of Leicester, UK; Associate Professor Tony Masys, University of South Florida, USA; Dr Simon Bennett, University of Leicester, UK. Series description: This series draws on the success of the systems-thinking approach to safety management in commercial and military aviation, with a view to improving safety performance in other complex socio-technical systems, such as health-care, nuclear power generation, chemicals production, oil and gas extraction, deep mining and sea and rail transportation. Following the 1977 Tenerife air disaster (that killed 583 people), a traumatised and vilified aviation industry resolved to improve its safety performance. The adoption of a systems-thinking approach to risk analysis and mitigation, expressed in innovations such as the teamworking protocol crew resource management, has benefited the industry. According to the International Air Transportation Association, in 2024 the global all-accident rate was 1.13 per million flights, equating to one accident for every 880,000 flights. You are much safer in a pressurised aluminium tube cruising at eighty per cent the speed of sound six miles above terra firma than you are driving up Britain’s M1 motorway on a sunny day in a modern automobile, fully alert and not under the influence. The series is aimed at practitioners as well as academics and students. To this end, it is written in an accessible style with jargon explained. This reflects its purpose: to leverage change.

3 publications