A Pedagogy Of Responsibility

Drawing on the theories of author and conservationist Wendell Berry for the field of EcoJustice Education, this book articulates a pedagogy of responsibility as a three-pronged approach grounded in the recognition that our planet balances an essential and fragile interdependence between all living creatures. Examining the deep cultural roots of social and ecological problems perpetuated by schools and institutions, Martusewicz identifies practices, relationships, beliefs, and traditions that contribute to healthier communities. She calls for imaginative re-thinking of education as an ethical process based in a vision of healthy, just, and sustainable communities. Using a critical analytical process, Martusewicz reveals how values of exploitation, mastery, and dispossession of land and people have taken hold in our educational system and communities, and employs Berry’s philosophy and wisdom to interrogate and develop a "pedagogy of responsibility" as an antidote to such harmful ideologies, structures, and patterns. Berry’s critical work and the author’s relatable storytelling challenge taken-for-granted perspectives and open new ways of thinking about teaching for democratic and sustainable communities.

This book aims at answering pressing issues such as the neo-liberalization of the university, strategical solutions to the contemporary crisis, its multiple definitions and different pedagogical manifestations across disciplines and levels of education. Inspired by bell hooks' "transgressive school" and Haraway's "responsibility", it is an attempt at creating new forms of organizational practices that consequently promote a politics of care for each other. It addresses the challenges and possibilities of teaching students about women and gender by discussing the pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching with a three-dimensional perspective. First, it revisits how we can reconfigure a feminist politics of responsibility "able to respond" or engage with contemporary crises. Secondly, it conceptualizes crisis and explains how it is transforming contemporary societies and affecting individual vulnerabilities and institutional structures. And, thirdly, it offers practical cases from different European locations (Spain, Portugal, Austria, United Kingdom and Poland, as well as the complete journey of the Feminist Caravan) in which crisis and responsibility have served to reformulate contemporary feminist pedagogies, altering curriculums, reframing institutions, and affecting the process of teaching and learning

The current academic milieu displays a deep ambivalence about the teaching of Western culture and traditional subject matter. This ambivalence, the product of a unique historical convergence of theory and diversity, opens up new opportunities for what Pamela Caughie calls "passing":recognizing and accounting for the subject positions involved in representing both the material being taught and oneself as a teacher. Caughie's discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts--novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases--she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing. Astutely addressing the relevance of passing for pedagogy, Caughie presents the possibility of a dynamic ethics responsive to the often polarizing difficulties inherent in today's culture. Challenging and thought-provoking, Passing and Pedagogy offers insight and inspiration for teachers and scholars as they seek to be responsible and effective in a complex, rapidly changing intellectual and cultural environment.

Changing your mind to change the world is the general principle proposed to educate for responsibility. Using an interdisciplinary scientific approach, this book dissects the functioning of the ego, that is to say the belief in a self, an illusion that causes disharmony. After an original modeling of the notion of responsibility, the author deduces that it is incumbent on all of us to become aware of the relationship between our own minds and the world. Thus, gaining consistency and awareness, everyone would have the potential to free themselves from the illusion of the ego and contribute to a more harmonious world. This book therefore proposes psychospiritual skills, favored in particular by different forms of reflexivity and by meditation (and mindfulness), which can serve as a basis for a curriculum to educate for responsibility. This academic connection between meditation and ethics is a major innovative contribution.

In recent decades, public higher education has faced perpetual crises. As states slash investment in postsecondary education and for-profit entities seek to supplant public colleges and universities, these public institutions have tried to compete by maximizing efficiency, namely, by downplaying and outsourcing the labor of teachers. Responsible Pedagogy makes a fresh case for the importance and value of public higher education and the work of teaching. In making this case, Eric Detweiler surveys the history of rhetoric and writing in postsecondary education, looking in particular at the teacher-student relationship. He finds that from the Socratic method to medieval exercises, from MOOCs to remote, asynchronous learning, the balance of authority and agency in the classroom is often precarious. But the problem goes deeper. Underlying both authority and agency is the value of mastery, which the teacher is to impart to the student. It is this emphasis on mastery, Detweiler argues, that distorts the proper relation between the student and teacher, a relationship in which they are responsible for and vulnerable to each other. Drawing on contemporary ethics, rhetorical theory, and critiques of practices in the online classroom, Detweiler develops a pedagogy of responsibility and shows how it can be applied in writing and communication curricula, assignments, and teacher-student interactions. Rehabilitating the proper role of the teacher, Responsible Pedagogy calls into question our newfound trust in educational technology and points the way to a better, more effective pedagogy.

Contemporary Studies in Environmental and Indigenous Pedagogies: A Curricula of Stories and Place. Our book is a compilation of the work of experienced educational researchers and practitioners, all of whom currently work in educational settings across North America. Contributors bring to this discussion, an enriched view of diverse ecological perspectives regarding when and how contemporary environmental and Indigenous curriculum figures into the experiences of curricular theories and practices. This work brings together theorists that inform a cultural ecological analysis of the environmental crisis by exploring the ways in which language informs ways of knowing and being as they outline how metaphor plays a major role in human relationships with natural and reconstructed environments. This book will be of interest to educational researchers and practitioners who will find the text important for envisioning education as an endeavour that situates learning in relation to and informed by an Indigenous Environmental Studies and Eco-justice Education frameworks. This integrated collection of theory and practice of environmental and Indigenous education is an essential tool for researchers, graduate and undergraduate students in faculties of education, environmental studies, social studies, multicultural education, curriculum theory and methods, global and comparative education, and women’s studies. Moreover, this work documents methods of developing ways of implementing Indigenous and Environmental Studies in classrooms and local communities through a framework that espouses an eco-ethical consciousness. The proposed book is unique in that it offers a wide variety of perspectives, inviting the reader to engage in a broader conversation about the multiple dimensions of the relationship between ecology, language, culture, and education in relation to the cultural roots of the environmental crisis that brings into focus the local and global commons, language and identity, and environmental justice through pedagogical approaches by faculty across North America who are actively teaching and researching in this burgeoning field.

Combining video analysis with the well-known Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model, this book offers teacher educators a fresh perspective and a new tool for supporting teachers’ learning and reflection. The clearly articulated and useful framework shifts the focus away from children and toward teachers’ thinking about their own teaching practice. Interwoven with practical examples of the framework in use, this book identifies ways that teachers and teacher educators can foster more productive kinds of reflection about video-recorded classroom interactions and support preservice and inservice teachers. Offering key tools such as templates for reflection, video viewing guides, self-analysis checklists, and activities, this book moves the field forward and establishes video reflection and the GRR process as critical tools for teacher reflection, professional development, and effective teaching and learning.

The purpose of this text is to elicit discussion, reflection, and action specific to pedagogy within education, especially higher education, and circles of experiential learning, community organizing, conflict resolution and youth empowerment work. Vulnerability itself is not a new term within education; however the pedagogical imperatives of vulnerability are both undertheorized in educational discourse and underexplored in practice. This work builds on that of Edward Brantmeier in Re-Envisioning Higher Education: Embodied Pathways to Wisdom and Transformation (Lin, Oxford, & Brantmeier, 2013). In his chapter, “Pedagogy of vulnerability: Definitions, assumptions, and application,” he outlines a set of assumptions about the term, clarifying for his readers the complicated, risky, reciprocal, and purposeful nature of vulnerability, particularly within educational settings. Creating spaces of risk taking, and consistent mutual, critical engagement are challenging at a moment in history where neoliberal forces impact so many realms of formal teaching and learning. Within this context, the divide between what educators, be they in a classroom or a community, imagine as possible and their ability to implement these kinds of pedagogical possibilities is an urgent conundrum worth exploring. We must consider how to address these disconnects; advocating and envisioning a more holistic, healthy, forward thinking model of teaching and learning. How do we create cultures of engaged inquiry, framed in vulnerability, where educators and students are compelled to ask questions just beyond their grasp? How can we all be better equipped to ask and answer big, beautiful, bold, even uncomfortable questions that fuel the heart of inquiry and perhaps, just maybe, lead to a more peaceful and just world? A collection of reflections, case studies, and research focused on the pedagogy of vulnerability is a starting point for this work. The book itself is meant to be an example of pedagogical vulnerability, wherein the authors work to explicate the most intimate and delicate aspects of the varied pedagogical journeys, understandings rooted in vulnerability, and those of their students, colleagues, clients, even adversaries. It is a work that “holds space.”