Learning to Confront Ecological Precarity


Book Description

This volume presents innovative approaches for confronting environmental issues and socio-ecological inequality within Outdoor Environmental Education (OEE). Through experimentation with alternative pedagogical possibilities, it explores what OEE can do in response to ecological precarity. Drawing upon posthumanist theory, it focuses on the enactment of more-than-human pedagogies that foster affirmative environmental relationships while challenging problematic cultural perspectives. The 12 chapters explore various topics, including place-responsive pedagogies, environmental stories, new materialist theoretical insights and waste education practices, engaging with complex environmental issues such as species extinction and climate change in the context of OEE. This book provides practical examples and conceptual creativity to extend contemporary theoretical currents. It offers innovative pedagogical strategies and methodological insights for OEE. Researchers, students, and practitioners of OEE interested in applying posthumanist ideas to their work will find this volume most interesting.




Learning to Confront Ecological Precarity


Book Description

This volume presents innovative approaches for confronting environmental issues and socio-ecological inequality within Outdoor Environmental Education (OEE). Through experimentation with alternative pedagogical possibilities, it explores what OEE can do in response to ecological precarity. Drawing upon posthumanist theory, it focuses on the enactment of more-than-human pedagogies that foster affirmative environmental relationships while challenging problematic cultural perspectives. The 12 chapters explore various topics, including place-responsive pedagogies, environmental stories, new materialist theoretical insights and waste education practices, engaging with complex environmental issues such as species extinction and climate change in the context of OEE. This book provides practical examples and conceptual creativity to extend contemporary theoretical currents. It offers innovative pedagogical strategies and methodological insights for OEE. Researchers, students, and practitioners of OEE interested in applying posthumanist ideas to their work will find this volume most interesting. .




Youth, Education and Wellbeing in the Americas


Book Description

This book explores ways in which education supports or negates the wellbeing and rights of young people in or from the Americas. It shows how young people diagnose problems and propose important new directions for education. A collective chronicle from researchers working alongside young people in Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and the Caribbean and Latin American diaspora in Canada, the authors embrace the work in terms of justice: intergenerational, racial, cultural and ecological with/by/for various groups of young people. This book delves into the wide gap between the expressed rights of young people in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the ways in which education operates. In so doing, it examines the entrenched colonial legacies which persist, including systemic racism, flabby curriculum, hyper-surveillance and broken promises for care and human relationships needed to support youth. The resourceful young people shown here – who identify as Latin American, Black, Indigenous and/or diasporic – are diagnosing and negotiating these injustices in revolutionary moves for education. Teachers, parents, communities and youth themselves could learn from these critical, transformative and anticolonial youthful pedagogies for being with education. This book will appeal to scholars, students, policymakers and practitioners in the areas of youth studies, education, social justice, sociology, human rights, wellbeing and social work.




Children, Citizenship and Environment


Book Description

In this significantly revised second edition of Bronwyn Hayward’s acclaimed book Children Citizenship and Environment, she examines how students, with teachers, parents, and other activists, can learn to take effective action to confront the complex drivers of the current climate crisis including: economic and social injustice, colonialism and racism. The global school strikes demand adults, governments, and businesses take far-reaching action in response to our climate crisis. The school strikes also remind us why this important youthful activism urgently needs the support of all generations. The #SchoolStrike edition of Children Citizenship and Environment includes all new contributions by youth, indigenous and disability activists, researchers and educators: Raven Cretney, Mehedi Hasan, Sylvia Nissen, Jocelyn Papprill, Kate Prendergast, Kera Sherwood O’ Regan, Mia Sutherland, Amanda Thomas, Sara Tolbert, Sarah Thomson, Josiah Tualamali'i, and Amelia Woods. As controversial, yet ultimately hopeful, as it was when first published, Bronwyn Hayward develops her ‘SEEDS’ model of ‘strong ecological citizenship’ for a school strike generation. The SEEDS of citizenship education encourage students to develop skills for; Social agency, Environmental education, Embedded justice, Decentred deliberation and Self-transcendence. This approach to citizenship supports young citizens’ democratic imagination and develops their ‘handprint’ for social justice. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to a wide audience, in particular teachers and professionals who work in Environmental Citizenship Education, as well as students and community activists with an interest in environmental change, democracy and intergenerational justice.




Outdoor Environmental Education in Higher Education


Book Description

This book brings together an international group of authors to discuss the outdoor environmental education (OEE) theory and practice that educators can use to support teaching and learning in higher education. The book contents are organised around a recently established list of threshold concepts that can be used to describe the knowledge and skills that university students would develop if they complete a major in outdoor education. There are six key sections: the theoretical foundations and philosophies of OEE; the pedagogical approaches and issues involved in teaching OEE; the ways in which OEE is a social, cultural and environmental endeavour; how outdoor educators can advocate for social justice; key approaches to safety management; and the need for on-going professional practice. The threshold concepts that form the premise of the book describe outdoor educators as creating opportunities for experiential learning using pedagogies that align their programme’s purpose and practice. Outdoor educators are place-responsive, and see their work as a social, cultural and environmental endeavour. They advocate for social and environmental justice, and they understand and apply safety principles and routinely engage in reflective practice. This book will provide clarity and direction for emerging and established outdoor educators around the world and will also be relevant to students and professionals working in related fields such as environmental education, adventure therapy, and outdoor recreation.




Green Schools Globally


Book Description

This book brings together stories of the green schools movement ((Eco Schools, Enviroschools, Green Schools, Sustainable Schools, ResourceSmart Schools etc) in several countries around the world, with a focus on the impact of the movement on the development and implementation of education for sustainable development in each of the countries. In particular, each story will explain the history of the movement per country, its current status, achievements, obstacles and broader impact. There have been a number of evaluations of these school movements at a national or more local level, and numerous articles and chapters have been published on aspects of these schools’ activities, but to date these have not been brought together in a single volume that focuses attention on the impact of the movement on education for sustainable development in each country. This is the purpose of this volume. The green schools movement focuses on a whole school approach which aims to include everyone (students, teachers and the local community), to improve school environments, including resource usage and the environmental footprint of the school, to motivate students to take on environmental problems and seek resolutions particularly at a local level but also thinking globally, and to improve students' attitudes and behaviours as part of developing a sustainable mind set.




The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods


Book Description

This Handbook explores the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies through a uniquely global lens. It focuses on enquiries and investigations into the everyday lives of young children in the age range of birth to 8 years of age, giving space to their voices and involving interrogations about the various aspect of their lives. This Handbook engages with the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, education, cultural studies, ethnography, and philosophy, with contributions from scholars from across the globe who have focused their work on the complexities of childhoods in contemporary times. By considering a range of epistemologies, ontologies and perspectives to present the contemporary & systematic research on the topic from a wide range of academics and authors in the field, this Handbook provides a significant contribution to the international dialogue of Global Childhoods. Part 1: Global Childhoods Part 2: Researching Global Childhoods Part 3: Contemporary Childhoods Part 4: Pedagogies and Practice Part 5: Creating Communities for Global Children




Design, Ecology, Politics


Book Description

Design, Ecology, Politics links social and ecological theory to design theory and practice, critiquing the ways in which the design industry perpetuates unsustainable development. Boehnert argues that when design does engage with issues of sustainability, this engagement remains shallow, due to the narrow basis of analysis in design education and theory. The situation is made more severe by design cultures which claim to be apolitical. Where design education fails to recognise the historical roots of unsustainable practice, it reproduces old errors. New ecologically informed design methods and tools hold promise only when incorporated into a larger project of political change. Design, Ecology, Politics describes how ecological literacy challenges many central assumptions in design theory and practice. By bringing design, ecology and socio-political theory together, Boehnert describes how power is constructed, reproduced and obfuscated by design in ways which often cause environmental harms. She uses case studies to illustrate how communication design functions to either conceal or reveal the ecological and social impacts of current modes of production. The transformative potential of design is dependent on deep-reaching analysis of the problems design attempts to address. Ecologically literate and critically engaged design is a practice primed to facilitate the creation of viable, sustainable and just futures. With this approach, designers can make sustainability not only possible, but attractive.




Horizons of the Future


Book Description

Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.




Pathways of Reconciliation


Book Description

Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its Calls to Action in June 2015, governments, churches, non-profit, professional and community organizations, corporations, schools and universities, clubs and individuals have asked: “How can I/we participate in reconciliation?” Recognizing that reconciliation is not only an ultimate goal, but a decolonizing process of journeying in ways that embody everyday acts of resistance, resurgence, and solidarity, coupled with renewed commitments to justice, dialogue, and relationship-building, Pathways of Reconciliation helps readers find their way forward. The essays in Pathways of Reconciliation address the themes of reframing, learning and healing, researching, and living. They engage with different approaches to reconciliation (within a variety of reconciliation frameworks, either explicit or implicit) and illustrate the complexities of the reconciliation process itself. They canvass multiple and varied pathways of reconciliation, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives, reflecting a diversity of approaches to the mandate given to all Canadians by the TRC with its Calls to Action. Together the authors — academics, practitioners, students and ordinary citizens — demonstrate the importance of trying and learning from new and creative approaches to thinking about and practicing reconciliation and reflect on what they have learned from their attempts (both successful and less successful) in the process.