The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning

The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning
Author: C. A. Bowers
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780820478845

In The False Promises of Constructivist Theories of Learning: A Global and Ecological Critique, C. A. Bowers examines why constructivist-based educational reforms fail to take into account these current critical issues: the deepening ecological crisis, globalization, and undermining of the world's diverse cultural commons. Special attention is given to the ethnocentrism and Social Darwinism that created the foundations for the ideas of Dewey, Piaget, and Freire. Also considered is how the neo-liberal promoters of economic globalization share their taken-for-granted assumptions. Additionally, Bowers explains how teachers in different cultures can contribute to the revitalization of their cultural and environmental commons without engaging in the cultural imperialism that characterizes constructivist approaches to educational reform.

University Reforms in an Era of Global Warming

University Reforms in an Era of Global Warming
Author: C. A. Bowers
Publisher: Eco-Justice Press LLC
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2011
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0966037049

This book is especially timely for reasons related to the current efforts on the part of several national organizations to promote sustainability reforms in courses in all academic disciplines. The American Association for Sustainability in Higher education is in the forefront of this reform effort. Replacing an inefficient campus infrastructures was easy when compared to the challenges of engaging faculty in discussions of how the content of their courses continue to reinforce the deep cultural assumptions that gave conceptual direction to the individualistic/consumer-dependent lifestyle that that is now widely recognized as unsustainable. The chapters address a number of especially daunting challenges, with the main one being that many faculty who were graduate students in the last decades of the 20th Century continue to think within the same conceptual frameworks they acquired from their mentors. Their mentors were unaware of environmental limits, as well as the metaphorical nature of language that reproduces the ecologically problematic cultural assumptions that, in turn, have become part of today’s students’ taken for granted world. Several chapters address such limitations of these 20th Century conceptual frameworks as the way academic freedom in now being use by many faculty in the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools to justify ignoring not only the ecological crisis, and the failure to ask whether such traditional areas of inquiry, such as the thinking of Western philosophers and other abstract theorists, will be useful to students as they face the life-changing environmental impacts of climate change. Two other key issues that must be taken into account if sustainability reforms are to be introduced in courses across the academic disciplines include the need for faculty to understand the many ways in which the emphasis on print-based theory fosters abstract thinking, thus further strengthening the long-held myth of individual intelligence. The need to understand cultures as ecologies and the difference between individual and ecological intelligence are also discussed. The book also contains a discussion of the university administrators’ essential role in holding faculty accountable for engaging in extended discussions of the language issues such as the linguistic colonization of the present by the past, the recursive cultural patterns that are being represented as the latest progressive ways of thinking that are the basis of many of today’s conceptual double binds, and how to foster the students’ awareness of the different ways that ideologies, technologies, and silences are undermining what remains of the cultural and environmental commons. The critique of current misconceptions that underlie different disciplines, as well as the resistance of many faculty to taking the ecological crisis seriously, are balanced with extended discussions of alternative ways of thinking about language, the connections between print-storage (which is amplified by computer-mediated learning and communication) and the ways in which oral traditions foster awareness of contexts and patterns of moral reciprocity (and thus ecological intelligence). In effect, the book provides the conceptual framework that needs to be the focus of faculty discussions, if these discussion are going to help faculty avoid the misconception that adding a couple of readings by environmental writers or learning about ecologically sustainable community practices will enable students to make the transition to a post-industrial way of thinking.

Revitalizing the Commons

Revitalizing the Commons
Author: C. A. Bowers
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2006
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780739113356

Champions the cultural and environmental commons as sites of resistance to economic globalization. This book explains the nature of educational reforms that promote ecological sustainability, conserving of cultural and linguistic diversity, local democracy, and greater community self-sufficiency.

Back to the Basics of Teaching and Learning

Back to the Basics of Teaching and Learning
Author: David W. Jardine
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351574841

This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics." Essays detailing everyday, lived events in classroom life are presented to help readers see beneath the surface ordinariness of these events to uncover and examine the underlying complex and contested meanings they contain. Readers are invited to imagine what would happen to our understanding of teaching and learning if we stepped away from the image of basics-as-breakdown under which education labors today – an image of fragmentation, isolation, and the consequent dispensing, manipulation and control of the smallest, simplest, most meaningless bits and pieces of the living inheritances that are entrusted to teachers and learners in schools. By involving readers in re-thinking the idea of the "basics" in educational theory and practice, this book offers a more generous, rigorous, difficult, and pleasurable image of what this term might mean in the living work of teachers and learners. This is a valuable text for practicing teachers and student-teachers interested in re-imagining what is basic to their work and the work of their students. It also provides examples of interpretive inquiry that will be helpful for graduate students and scholars in the areas of curriculum, teaching, and learning who are interested in pursuing this form of research and writing. The Second Edition: is guided by the view that thinking the world together is a form of ecological thinking adds chapters that take up the ecological aspects of this vision, the hermeneutic aspects, and curricular aspects in the areas of mathematics, reading and writing, and social studies; included also are chapters on child development, information and communications technologies, and more proposes a version of "the basics" that asks teachers to be public intellectuals who think about the world, who think about the knowledge we have inherited and to which we are offering our students living, breathing access

Education and Poverty in Affluent Countries

Education and Poverty in Affluent Countries
Author: Carlo Raffo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009-12-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135272034

For the first time, researchers, policymakers and practitioners across the world will have access to a comprehensive mapping of research evidence and policy strategies about education and poverty in affluent countries. Although there is widespread agreement that poverty and poor educational outcomes are related, there are competing explanations as to why that should be the case. This is a major problem for practitioners, policy makers and researchers who are looking for pointers to action, or straightforward ways of understanding an issue that troubles education systems across the world. This unique book brings scholarship and analysis from some of the most influential researchers and writers on education and poverty within one text. The authors provide a synthesising framework that will help researchers and policy makers to examine future educational policy in a holistic and comprehensive fashion.

Re-Rooting the Learning Space

Re-Rooting the Learning Space
Author: Jennifer S. Thom
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9004406182

To understand a living system, such as a tree, in an ecologically systemic way involves more than simply reducing the tree down to its parts or by analyzing the tree from part to whole. Not only does one need to study the tree’s leaves, stems, branches, trunk, root system, and its interaction with the environment but from many vantage points to make sense of how each part exists in dynamic relationship with the others as an integrated system. The same is true about the purpose of this book. It is not meant to be a recipe for how to teach mathematics well or to serve as simply a descriptive account of a teaching practice. It is in essence, a systemic exploration into the embeddedness and co-emergence of theory and practice in mathematics teaching. This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematics education and curriculum studies. With its up close and contextual forms of data and a variety of interpretive methods used for the analyses, this book is highly suitable for courses in research. The audience includes professors, teacher educators, and in-service teachers who are interested in ecological theories and how these inform mathematics teaching and learning.

Do We Know What We Are Doing? Reflections on Learning, Knowledge, Economics, Community and Sustainability

Do We Know What We Are Doing? Reflections on Learning, Knowledge, Economics, Community and Sustainability
Author: Rolf Jucker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1443869864

The discourse of education for sustainability has been severely limited by the fact that it largely refuses to acknowledge important insights from other fields of learning and knowledge. This reluctance to engage with central insights regarding how the world and, more specifically, how human interactions with both the human and non-human world work, ensures that it has remained a largely self-centred discourse. It is tangled up with reflections on education without contextualising them in the...

Teaching and Learning in Context

Teaching and Learning in Context
Author: Richard Tabulawa
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013
Genre: Education
ISBN: 2869785690

Since the 1990s, sub-Saharan Africa has experienced unprecedented attempts at reforming teacher and student classroom practices, with a learner-centred pedagogy regarded as an effective antidote to the prevalence of teacher-centred didactic classroom practices. Attempts at reform have been going on all over the continent. In fact, learner-centred pedagogy has been described as one of the most pervasive educational ideas in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Research has revealed that the major attempts have largely failed mainly because teachers have not been able to adopt instructional innovations to technical problems. This failure is also related to lack of resources, and poor teacher training programmes which lead to poor teacher quality, among others. This book attempts to explain why pedagogical change has not occurred in spite of the much energy and resources that have been committed to such reforms.The book also takes us inside what the author calls 'the socio-cultural world of African classrooms' to help us understand the reasons teachers dominate classroom life and rely disproportionately on didactic methods of teaching. Its conceptual analyses capture the best of both the sociology and the anthropology of education in contexts of poverty, as well as the politics of education.The book concludes that a socio-cultural approach should be the basis for developing culturally responsive indigenous pedagogies, though these may or may not turn out to be in any way akin to constructivist learner-centred pedagogies.

Connecting Lives and Learning

Connecting Lives and Learning
Author: Brenton Prosser
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1862548927

CONNECTING LIVES AND LEARNING is a project dedicated to connecting learning to student lives, connecting teachers with the latest middle years research, and better connecting primary and secondary schools to keep students at school longer. Based in Adelaide's lower socio-economic northern urban fringe, the project helps teachers use students' everyday experience and expertise to develop new ways of teaching and learning that involve students in intellectually challenging tasks. This book tells the stories of real teachers, in real classrooms, making real attempts for change, and not always succeeding. It is a book about teachers making a difference in difficult times and tough places. But most importantly, this book reaffirms that being an educator is inherently about adopting socially just practices, building community capacity and contributing to a more socially sustainable world.

A Pedagogy of Place

A Pedagogy of Place
Author: Brian Wattchow
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0980651247

A Pedagogy of Place offers an alternative vision for outdoor education practice. This timely book calls into question some of the underlying assumptions and ‘truths’ about outdoor education, putting forward alternatives to current practice that are responsive to local conditions and cultural traditions. In this renewal of outdoor education philosophy and practice, the emphasis is upon responding to, and empathising with, the outdoors as particular places, rich in local meaning and significance. Current outdoor education theory and practice is influenced by cultural ideas about risk and adventure, and by psychological theories of personal and social development. However, in recent decades the professional discourse of outdoor education has made a noticeable shift to include education for the ‘environment’ and ‘nature’. This has resulted in a mismatch between theory and practice: traditional notions of proving oneself ‘against’ the challenges of the outdoors are antithetical to the development of an empathetic relationship with outdoor places, which growing concern with today’s environment demands. This book is the first of its kind to articulate a renewal of philosophy and practice for outdoor education that is in keeping with the educational needs of today’s young people as they grapple with considerable social and ecological changes in a rapidly changing world. The authors draw extensively on international, national and local literature and provide compelling case studies drawn from the Australian and New Zealand contexts.