Whose place,whose history? Outdoor environmental education pedagogy as ‘reading’ the landscape

Outdoor education practice around the world occurs in diverse circumstances, environments and cultures. The application of outdoor education to specific cultural and environmental issues in particular places and communities has received little attention in research. While research in fields such as cultural geography has addressed the relationships between cultures, communities and geographical places, this is largely overlooked in outdoor education research. In this paper I draw on literature from cultural history and environmental history to explore how these disciplines might inform outdoor education research and pedagogy that addresses current cultural and environmental issues of specific communities and geographical places. With the aid of the rhizome metaphor for (re)structuring knowledge, I use examples from my practice in Australia to demonstrate how reading the landscape and the use of stories, or historical accounts, can assist outdoor educators and participants to probe and reflect on the relationships between personal experience and the complex cultural-ecological processes that have shaped the places in which we live and work.     

Why school-based narrative inquiry in physical education research? An international perspective

While conducting a comparative research study in secondary Physical Education in South Korea and the United States, the question arose as to why the narrative inquiry research method we employed was chosen to study the experiences of teachers teaching the particular subject area to youth enrolled in four secondary schools (middle and high) in South Korea and the United States. This article takes up the query by probing the roots of school-based narrative inquiry and the tight connections between our specific research method and the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image of teaching. Six qualities of narrative inquiry are elaborated through the use of narrative fragments excerpted from our Korea Research Foundation-sponsored study. These characteristics include: (1) justification for inquiry, (2) research in the midst, (3) research on the boundaries, (4) knowing through relationship, and (5) narrative truth, and (6) following where the story leads. Finally, the article returns to the intimate relationship between our chosen version of narrative inquiry and the teacher-as-curriculum-maker image and the kinds of contributions that the union of these robust orientations can make to the study of Physical Education in classroom settings.     

Whose voices are being heard? Mechanisms for community participation in education in northern Ghana

This article reports on a study of community participation in School for Life, a complementary education programme operating in northern Ghana. The researchers investigated three components of community participation: the nature of the mechanisms used to engage community members as participants in the education process; the actors who engage as participants in education; and the factors that enhance or inhibit an individual’s involvement. They found that this programme uses five approaches that work together to make it a viable mechanism to engage communities, and that community members are engaged at various levels, depending on each person’s previous exposure to education. Moreover, regardless of the level at which members participate, doing so empowers the individual and the community.     

Heterotopias in physical education: towards a queer pedagogy?

This article sets out to outline how prevailing gender structures can be challenged in physical education (PE) by exploring queer potentials in an event that took place during a dancing lesson in an upper secondary PE class. The event and its features were documented through video recording and post-lesson interviews with the teacher and some of the students. It is argued that the event can be seen as a heterotopia, according to Michel Foucault a ‘counter-site’ enabling the resistance to authority, where the production of normalcy was challenged. Furthermore, even though the event happened spontaneously, the authors suggest that it can show a way towards a queer pedagogy for PE through teaching paradoxically; it indicates a preferred ethos of the lesson and the use of conceptual tools by teachers and students that make them able to intervene in the production of normalcy.     

Whose public,which public? The challenge for public education

Contemporary campaigns for public education rest upon an assumption that public schools are fundamental to an equitable and inclusive society. In this paper, I reflect on this presumption by exploring the inherent tensions of the meaning and practice of ‘public’ education, especially when the ‘public’ in public schooling is linked to political contestation and change in relation to the nation state. In particular, this discussion considers the ways in which the contemporary heightened racial politics of fear of ‘Muslim radicalisation’ structures the ways in which the state creates boundaries surrounding ‘public’ schooling. Here, analysis of recent governmental attempts to addresses the concern of ‘radicalisation’ in schools reveals the difficulties the nation state faces in defining what exactly is the ‘public’, and demonstrates how the politics of race and fear become overarching logics in the constitution of the Australian ‘public’. These logics risk creating exclusions and boundaries in public schooling, which, I argue here, have repercussions for the defence and claim to public education more broadly.     

Environmental education in Costa Rica: Building a framework for sustainable development?

Environmental education is commonly claimed to be at the centre of efforts to achieve sustainable development. Since the 1980s, Costa Rica has been one of the acknowledged leaders in efforts to promote environmental learning, and national policy includes a three-fold national development strategy which simultaneously promotes education, conservation and ecotourism. As of yet, however, what is happening ‘on the ground’ has not been examined in much detail. This article addresses this gap in the literature by providing an overview of the diverse programmes and actors involved in environmental education in Costa Rica, as well as analysing the politics of its implementation.     

How democratic is higher education for sustainable development?

We wondered how ‘democracy’ was being used and communicated within the higher education discourse of ‘education for sustainability’, or ‘for sustainable development’ (ES/ESD). We used a philosophical hermeneutic approach to explore the sense or senses in which the concept of democracy is used within this literature and supported our analysis by incorporating text about democracy from other disciplines. We conclude from our analysis that the concept of democracy within ES/ESD texts has evolved to suggest many meanings that in their entirety do not support our shared research mission towards ES/ESD. At the pens of ES/ESD scholars, democracy may have become one of Sartori's intolerably blunted conceptual tools.     

Instruction or pedagogy? The need for a transformative conception of education

Greater governmental control over the curriculum and an increasing emphasis on education as instruction towards pre-determined outcomes have generated new interest in the question whether schools should only instruct or also have a pedagogical task. In this paper, it is argued that schools do have a pedagogical task but that this task should not be understood as the teaching of norms and values. A transformative conception of education is presented in order to argue that the pedagogical task, conceived as a concern for the whole person of the student, is the proper and all-encompassing task of education.     

General education. Homogenised education for the globalized world?

Societies need to make sure that the next generation is ready and capable to take over in due time, be it in working life, culture, civil society, politics or families. Therefore, society at large and specifically state governments need to assist the efforts of families and local communities. Such provisions have been the basic premise for general educational theories for centuries, when education was often named Democratic and Comprehensive Bildung. At present, this premise needs re-conceptualization, because societies are moving dramatically towards opening up for interactions and relations with the widest possible area: the globe. Many societal challenges have effects across nations, calling for trans-national coordination, management and solutions,—for homogenized and standard based policy making. At the same time, inspiration from multiple sources produce conflicting visions and rival discourses about what the purposes of and the means for education should be.In this paper we analyze and discuss two contemporary, fundamentally dissimilar discourses on education and their theoretical and societal roots. Our main method is discourse analysis. We argue for inclusion of a global world-view in national education. We shall be critical, however, to the technocratic turn and the homogenization of education per se and argue for a Democratic Bildung perspective in education for world citizenship.     

A novel model for extending international co-operation in science and education

INTRODUCTIONInternationalcooperationisahottopicintheworldtodayandnetworkingacrossbordershasbecomepartofsociety.Intheprivatesectorthenumberofinternationalalliancesisgrowing;whileintheworldofhighereducationtheneedforin-ternationallinkagesandexchangesisbeingrecog-nizedaswell.Inordertokeeppacewiththechangingandeverexpandingfrontiersofknowledgeandtech-nologyuniversitiesareactivelyseekingforpartners.Withotheruniversitiestheycanaccomplishgoalstheycouldnotaccomplishbythemselves.Thein-tentiontocoo…     

Still no pedagogy? principle,pragmatism and compliance in primary education

This article revisits Brian Simon's 1981 Simon B (1981) Why no pedagogy in England? in: B. Simon & W. Taylor (Eds) Education in the eighties: the central issues (London, Batsford) 124 145  [Google Scholar] judgement that for deep‐seated historical reasons English education lacks a coherent and principled pedagogy. Given that since 1997 the tide of educational centralisation has added teaching methods to those aspects of schooling which the UK government and/or its agencies seek to prescribe, it is appropriate to test the continuing validity of Simon's claim by reference to a major policy initiative in the pedagogical domain: the government's Primary Strategy, published in May 2003. This article defines pedagogy as both the act of teaching and its attendant discourse and postulates three domains of ideas, values and evidence by which both are necessarily framed. It then critically assesses the Primary Strategy's account of some of the components of pedagogy thus defined, notably learning, teaching, curriculum and culture, and the political assumptions which appear to have shaped them. On this basis, the Primary Strategy is found to be ambiguous and possibly dishonest, stylistically demeaning, conceptually weak, evidentially inadequate and culpably ignorant of recent educational history. The article is an extended version of the last in the 2002–2003 Research Lecture series at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, and preserves some of the style of its initial mode of presentation.     

Teaching ‘community engagement’ in engineering education for international development: Integration of an interdisciplinary social work curriculum

This article reviews the literature on challenges faced by engineering faculty in educating their students on community-engaged, sustainable technical solutions in developing countries. We review a number of approaches to increasing teaching modules on social and community components of international development education, from adding capstone courses and educational track seminars to integrating content from other disciplines, particularly the social sciences. After summarising recent pedagogical strategies to increase content on community-focused development, we present a case study of how one engineering programme incorporates social work students and faculty to infuse strategies for community engagement in designing and implementing student-led global engineering development projects. We outline how this interdisciplinary pedagogical approach teaches students from the two disciplines to work together in addressing power balances, economic and social issues and overall sustainability of international development projects.     

Vocational education and training for development: A policy in need of a theory?

The current decade has seen a significant return of interest in vocational education and training (VET) amongst the international policy community. This rise in policy and programmatic interest in VET's role in development, however, stands in contrast to the state of the academic debate. Whilst there have continued to be both policy and academic developments in VET in OECD countries; in the South there has been a paucity of VET research and little in the way of theoretical exploration. Rather, the academic orthodoxy in the international education and development field is dismissive of VET's possible contribution. Given the return of the policy interest in VET for development, and the possibilities of a broader vision of education–development relations beyond 2015, when the MDGs end, it is time to revisit the role of VET in development from an explicitly theoretical stance. In this article, I argue that the current approach to VET is grounded in an outmoded model of development, whilst the academic critique of VET in developing countries is clearly long outdated. In contrast, I examine the implications for VET of recent trends in thinking about development through the exploration of three particular theoretical approaches: human rights, capabilities and integrated human development. I conclude by considering the purposes, natures and possibilities of VET as a means of human development.