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This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
expand your understanding of various components of social and environmental education, and how they interweave
affirm your capacity to influence, act on and change your world (in conjunction with Chapter 4)
critically investigate related teaching ideas.
Introduction
Globalisation is not new. To speak of a beginning of globalisation is, to some extent, meaningless. The world has never been anything other than global! The difference is that we have become more aware (that is, educated) about the phenomenon in recent times. Vast empires existed in the past, long before the age of European colonisation, including the Mongol Empire, arguably the biggest empire in history, and various Chinese and Islamic empires.
In Australia’s region, the empires of Majapahit (based in present-day Java, around the 14th and15th centuries CE) and Srivijaya (centred in Sumatra, as early as the 8th century CE) covered considerable areas and exercised influence, if not control, more widely again over land and sea. Many of us in Australia are only vaguely, if at all, aware of them. The Khmer Empire, with its capital Angkor, might be more familiar. In our extended region, the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius and Hinduism were being spread long before the birth of Christianity. More recently, the teachings of Islam came to the region. Depending on your dei nition of slave trading, such trades have existed for centuries, if not millennia. Large migrations of people are not new; migrations across the Pacific and around the Indian oceans occurred long before Europeans colonised the region. Aboriginal spirituality asserts that Indigenous people have been in present-day Australia since the Beginning, the Dreaming. Some archaeological evidence suggests, however, that migrations occurred more than 45000 years ago, perhaps even 60000 years ago.
outline the major components of socio-environmental education
demonstrate the centrality of socio-environmental issues to all aspects of life, and to education
familiarise you with the ways in which this book reflects socio-environmental thinking and education.
Introduction
… supporting all young Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens.
(ACARA, 2010, p. 7)
The future wellbeing of human society and its environment depends on the quality of people’s interactions with each other and with their cultural, social and physical environments as they strive to meet each other’s needs.
(Board of Studies NSW, 1998, p. 7)
Cambodian leader Pol Pot makes a fascinating character study. Compared to the Holocausts of World War II against Jews, Romani, gay people and others, his Killing Fields in Cambodia are closer to us in time and place. One criterion for being chosen and forced by Pol Pot to work as a farm labourer was wearing glasses. The ‘logic’ behind that was that such people were deemed to be intellectuals and, as such, were a threat to the new regime. They were sent to farms because in Pol Pot’s mind the work of greatest worth was food production. In reality, most of these people, from the cities and therefore unaccustomed to farm labour, worked themselves to an exhausted, undernourished, possibly disease-ridden death, hence the name ‘The Killing Fields’.
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
understand the ‘big picture’ – that is, the importance of consistency between the goals or outcomes we set for our teaching and those achieved (known as constructive alignment).
become familiar with some creative teaching approaches and ideas.
critically investigate assessment and evaluation techniques and the appropriateness of their use.
assemble the big picture by choosing and aligning intended learning, teaching approaches, resources and assessment and evaluation strategies.
develop a critical understanding of the role assessment and evaluation play in the process of making teaching and learning more effective.
Introduction
The world offers itself to your imagination.
(Oliver, 1986, p. 14)
If you don’t know what port you’re sailing to, no wind is favourable.
(Attributed to Seneca ‘the Younger’)
Understanding the fields of study that you need to teach (the focus of the previous chapters), at least to a level that allows you to survive in the classroom, is perhaps a less demanding task than devising how to make these fields of study comprehensible, engaging, relevant and thought-provoking for your students. We now turn our attention to these processes of socio-environmental education.
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
understand the links between built, natural and managed environments, and between people and their environments
become familiar with opportunities for specific and incidental environmental teaching and practices
understand physical geography, including mapping skills, as well as numeracy opportunities in Geography (and elsewhere in the humanities)
gain or expand a sense of wonder in response to the environment’s beauty and complexity.
Introduction
Nature is a restless sleeper; sometimes we wake her up.
(Personal musing)
Geography essentially focuses on how we describe and make sense of, use, divide up and imagine places. Consider some of the following:
an urban gang’s graffiti-tagged territory or ’hood
a sometimes-there-and-sometimes-not surf break, and the ephemeral ‘geography’ of an individual wave
a ski run that is seasonally snow-covered
sport-related issues such as being offside, out of your crease, hitting the ball out of play, the psychology of home and away matches, and football team and club ‘territories’
a Jewish eruv, in which Conservative and Orthodox Jews can push a pram or wheelchair, otherwise forbidden to them on Shabbat/the Sabbath
a wine variety terroir
the habitat or range of animals and plants
one’s environmental or carbon footprint
personal space
urban sprawl, and ribbon development along coastlines and transport corridors
tribal or traditional versus government boundaries
a World Heritage site or national park
migrations of animals and people
the three-dimensional globe ‘pressed’ into two-dimensional maps
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
become aware of how the media manipulate you
develop knowledge and understanding of ways in which you can manipulate media for your teaching and learning purposes
become familiar with related teaching and learning possibilities
understand the texts produced and consumed by you and your students
become aware of opportunities for informal learning outside the classroom, for both you and your students.
Introduction
Education is nothing if not communication. This chapter deals not only with appropriating news stories of the day as a resource for your teaching; it also concerns:
choices of text, based on criteria such as audience and purpose, that you use as stimulus material to prompt and advance your students’ thinking, understanding, feelings and action
your students’ choices in producing documents to demonstrate their understanding (also dealt with in Chapter 7).
The word ‘text’ is used broadly here to include oral, written, pictorial and electronic texts, sites of interest and learning, guest speakers, relections and the like. The chapter is largely practice-oriented. All the activities and materials you use in your classroom should be strategic, emerging from your informed theories and rationales about sound education. A medium (plural, media) is a means or a way of conveying, transporting or connecting. It is linked with the sense of medium meaning ‘in the middle’. A medium connects people to ideas, information, opinion, bodies of knowledge, each other and sometimes themselves.
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
understand some of the educational, personal and vocational advantages of studying history (beyond just ‘knowing about the past’)
sharpen your interest in and awareness of pasts and futures, and explore where you fit in (or refuse to fit in)
explore and evaluate some ‘entry points’ for history in your teaching, and some teaching ideas.
Introduction
History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.
(Turner, 1976, p. 129)
To understand history is to understand people, including yourself, and how we came to be the way we are. As the NSW History Syllabus states, ‘History is a disciplined process of inquiry into the past that helps to explain how people, events and forces from the past have shaped our world’ (NSW Board of Studies, 2012, p. 9). Ask yourself, for example: ‘If I had been US President Harry Truman in 1945, would I have dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan?’ Why or why not? What if you had been Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, would you have dropped atomic bombs on US or Australian cities to end the war? If you had found out that ‘September 11’ was about to happen, whom would you have told, and how would you have convinced them? Would you have shot Osama bin Laden? Why or why not?
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
re-view the world and your place, privileges, freedoms and responsibilities in it
consider again the how and why of bringing topics to life or getting them to ‘jump off the page’ for your students.
A pedagogical credo
Give me a firm place to stand on, and I will move the world.
(Archimedes)
This claim (or something like it in Greek) was made by Archimedes more than 2000 years ago. He wasn’t a social worker, but a mathematician, and he was actually talking about physically moving the world. What are your metaphorical firm places to stand on, and how, why and in what direction might you move the world?
In education we have often spoken of the so-called ‘three Rs’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Education is arguably more dominated and populated by Cs. In deference to the basics, my personal and provisional statement of faith will start with an A-B-C.
A worthwhile education is one that assists people to become creative, compassionate (or caring) and critically literate big-thinkers, dreamers and visionaries. In short, education exists for the purpose of creating citizens. Your students will need a certain measure of courage to achieve these things, and commitment.
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
understand the importance of democratic education and practices in the classroom, as well as practical implications for local, national and global citizenships
become familiar with some of the background context to the development of democracy in Australia (for example, why we have two houses of parliament) and internationally
acquire knowledge of and opinions about some related classroom activities.
Introduction
Thinking activities
Before continuing, think of four or fi ve adjectives to describe the world and society you would like your children, your grandchildren and their descendants to be born into.
This could be interesting as a class exercise. You could create a wordle or other joint construction of everyone’s adjectives, or simply distribute the bits of paper on which you have written your adjectives. It would be interesting to see how frequently words like ‘peaceful’, ‘safe’, ‘free’, and the like arose. How might ‘prosperous’ contribute to, derive from or confl ict with these? What might be required to make and maintain the world in this ideal condition? Could you ever allow a temporary suspension of peace and freedom in order to attain them? Or is that absurd and a hypocritical way of thinking?
This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:
enhance your understanding of culture, and how it operates
further develop your powers of observation and perception about subtle aspects of your own and others’ cultures
develop empathy towards those who might experience intercultural mis/understanding, culture shock and alienation (if you don’t experience this routinely)
explore critical understanding of teaching strategies and opportunities for teaching about cultures
develop your awareness of opportunities for using languages other than English, and reinforcing literacy in your social and environmental teaching.
Introduction
A life unlike your own can be your teacher.
(Source unknown; attributed to St Columban)
This chapter will contribute to and perhaps challenge your understanding of what makes us ‘tick’. It will add to your understanding of human nature in negotiating new circumstances, as a student, citizen and teacher. It will focus specifically at times on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island cultures and worldviews.
Intercultural Understanding is not a subject area in the Australian Curriculum, but it is one of the seven General Capabilities. The Curriculum describes intercultural understanding, in part, as, ‘engaging with people of diverse cultures in ways that recognise commonalities and differences, create connections and cultivate respect between people’ (ACARA, 2012b, p. 21).