A Review of “Fields of Green: Restorying Culture,Environment, and Education”

This essay describes an educational initiative that used environmentally themed (green) hip-hop to stimulate learning in an environmental science classroom. Students were then challenged to compose their own green hip-hop and their lyrics demonstrated skills that have thematic consistency around what is called a Critical Ecological Literacy (CEL). An analysis of more than 200 creative pieces collected from eight runs of this curriculum over four years shows that CEL can be used as a guiding concept for the creation of curriculum targeting urban areas and racially diverse learners. Several examples of this student-produced green hip-hop are shared to delineate elements of CEL that can help educators evaluate student learning as well as their own teaching materials.     

Pedagogy and Post-coloniality: Teaching “Education” online

The academic study of Education1 1. A capital E is used when Education refers to Education as an academic subject or discipline. A lower case e is used to refer to education as a process. View all notes (as a social, historical, and theoretical phenomenon) is complicated by the fact of our immersion in it. This paper combines Said's idea of “contrapuntal reading” with Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity to explore what happens when students on an Education course directly confront the fact of their everyday involvement in their object of study, Education. How do the questions raised by post-colonial and other critical social writers “appear” from such a position? How does the fact of our involvement complicate our theoretical or scientific knowledge of these? By means of an episodic, narrative form of writing, this paper describes a life history pedagogy for teaching a compulsory “social issues” course online to New Zealand pre-service teacher education students. As data I draw on online conversations with and between students as they engage in the production of contextualized life history interview narratives.     

“The Environment”: Power,Pedagogy, and American Urban Schooling

Drawing on participant-observation research conducted in one core urban and one affluent suburban public school, the author argues that critical educational theorists should devote more attention to differential structural constraints on pedagogic choice. Teachers at the urban North End Community School make pedagogic choices that reinforce social hierarchies. They do so, in part, in order to enable their students to manage a series of risks and dangers associated with concentrated urban poverty. The evidence presented suggests that changing the role power plays in urban public schooling requires changing not only the choices individual teachers make, but also educational and other institutional constraints on pedagogic practice.