Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice: Narration, Place, and the Social ([Re]thinking Environmental Education) - Softcover

McKenzie, Marcia; Bieler, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1433115042 ISBN 13: 9781433115042

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2015

Synopsis

Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice presents a situated approach to learning that suggests the need for more explicit attention to sociomaterial practice in critical education. Specifically, it explores social, place and narrative dimensions of practical experience as they unfold in schools, in place-based learning, and teacher education contexts. Such an orientation to practice both links social and material conditions (social relations, other species, physical context, objects) to human consciousness and learning, and considers the relationship between such learning and broader cultural change. The core of the book is an examination of critical situated learning undertaken through three separate empirical studies, each of which we use to elaborate a particular domain or dimension of practical experience. In turning to the sociomaterial contexts of learning, the book also underscores how social and environmental issues are necessarily linked, such as in the production of food deserts in cities or in the pollution of the drinking water in Indigenous communities through oil development. More social movements globally are connecting the dots between sexism, heteronormativity, racism, colonization, White privilege, globalization, poverty, and climate justice, including with issues of land, territory and sovereignty, water, food, energy, and treatment and extinction of other species. As a result, categorizing some concerns as ‘social justice’ or ‘critical’ issues and others as ‘environmental,’ becomes increasingly untenable. The book thus suggests that more integrative and productive forms of critical education are needed to respond to these complex and pressing socio-ecological conditions.

About this title

About the Author:

Marcia McKenzie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Director of the Sustainability Education Research Institute at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada (www.seri.usask.ca). She is Principal Investigator of the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (www.sepn.ca) and the Digital Media Project: Youth Making Place; and co-author of Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (2015) and co-editor of Fields of Green: Restorying Culture, Environment, and Education (2009).
Andrew Bieler completed his PhD at York University, examining the role of arts-sciences collaborations in the development of public pedagogy about climate change. Currently, he is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sustainability and Education Policy Network in the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Review:

«In their ground breaking book, McKenzie and Bieler breathe new life into the practice of critical education. Their cogent analyses of criticality through the frameworks of social and ecological education revive the intersection as a meaningful and generative space. They carry this approach through their careful, ethnographic work across diverse school settings in a way that brings new meaning and shape to how we understand critical education as an engaged, embodied, and emplaced practice. This book is a must read for all educators seeking to support students as the critical interlocutors of their own lives. Their work provides hope for everyone searching for more meaningful approaches to relational solidarity and collective action.»
(Sandy Grande, Centre for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Connecticut College)

«McKenzie and Bieler make a crucial step toward addressing the urgent need to invent alter-narratives for what educators take to be «critical education.» In response to mounting evidence that many of our material practices for living as humans on this planet are not viable – including many practices of education – McKenzie and Bieler steer us away from oversimplified accounts of «agency» and «critical practice» that have dominated discourses of critical education. They turn us toward concepts and stories that can assist us in attuning our pedagogical imaginations and projects to emerging material conditions of the Anthropocene.»
(Elizabeth Ellsworth, Professor of Media Studies, The New School University)

«The textures, patterns, sounds and meanings of sociomaterial learning are brought together with critical pedagogy in this ground breaking book. Through examining the living relational curriculum of the summer institutes, temporality, embodiment and power are mobilised as core concepts of a critical education for the millennial generation. The unique scholarship of the authors has brought «an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life,» offering new possibilities for rethinking pedagogy beyond the binaries of human and non-human in issues of justice.»
(Margaret Somerville, Centre for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1433115042
• ISBN 13: 9781433115042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184