Educational Reforms for the 21st Century: How to Introduce Ecologically Sustainable Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

As people across the country are now experiencing the extreme weather conditions droughts, tornados, floods, record breaking temperatures predicted in scientific reports, it is now time for teacher education and curriculum studies faculty to begin introducing reforms that enable classroom teachers to recognize when students are being socialized to take for granted ecologically unsustainable patterns of thinking. In addition to the toxic chemicals introduced by our consumer-dependent lifestyle, there is another major change that is altering the life prospects of students that also needs to be addressed in reforming teacher education and curriculum studies. That is, the long-standing tradition of replacing workers and their craft knowledge with machines has now reached a new stage of development where computer-driven production processes, as well as the outsourcing of work to the low-wage regions of the world, are now eliminating the need for workers who perform routine tasks in offices and on factory floors. Life-time employment and traditional careers, according to recent studies in the United States and Europe, will only be available for the small class of highly educated individuals. Work for the rest of the population will be low paying and characterized by continual uncertainty. This book suggests how teacher education and curriculum studies programs can begin to address both of these life-altering changes. First, it provides an extensive discussion of the language issues that should be part of every classroom teachers professional knowledge; particularly how the taken for granted interpretative frameworks constituted before there was any awareness of environmental limits are reproduced in curriculum materials including educational software. How to enable teachers to recognize that most words are metaphors, that they have a history that is culturally specific, and how to engage students from different ethnic backgrounds in reframing the analogs that reproduce earlier ways of thinking, are a primary focus of several chapters. Second, there are also chapters that address how to introduce from the earliest grades through graduate level classes the nature of the intergenerational knowledge and skills that are the basis of the community s cultural and environmental commons. The importance of teachers being able to introduce students to the complex and culturally varied nature of the local cultural commons is that it provides students with alternative lifestyles that are less dependent upon the money economy that is increasingly unreliable. The book contains an extensive discussion of the teacher s mediating role in helping students recognize the various forms of enclosure (that is, the take-over by market forces) of the cultural commons. Becoming engaged in various cultural commons activities enables students to discover talents and interests that may become the basis of life-long interests that also strengthen their sense of community. There is also a chapter on how the Social Darwinian thinking of Dewey and Freire reproduce many of the same deep cultural assumptions shared by today s market-liberals, as well as a chapter that clarifies what classroom teacher should understand about the ideological and religious tensions within local communities and how the use of language can neutralize their anti-democratic and anti-environmental agendas. The adoption of these reforms are in line with the 10 year agenda of UNESCO to promote educating for sustainability in teacher education programs around the world, as well as with the goals of the American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education.

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