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4.56 AVERAGE
4.56 AVERAGE
This is a great resource with background info for teachers and many resources and ideas to use for students. As the book notes, it is really important that all teachers are integrating and/or highlighting these issues in their classrooms from Early Childhood and beyond.
This book took me a long time to read. The authors need to be commended for setting it out in shortish, to the point articles interspersed by pictures, cartoons, poems and quotes so that it is a book you could dip in and out of. In the beginning it depressed me a lot, and I felt an irony between the authors constantly asserting that they didn't want to depress and paralyse children with these facts and yet the facts are overwhelming and bleak. We may need to face them but I don't see how not to be depressed in the face of them.
I persisted and toward the end of the book there is a turn toward some positivity (however it seems as too little and too late as in reality what humans can do). Nevertheless I gave the book 4 stars as this is crucial stuff that we (teachers, parents, the world) should be thinking about and talking about and teaching about. All the ideas in the book are practical, creative, adaptable and specific. You could take one of the ideas and just do it...I read it more as a way of gathering ideas to help me with my own pedagogical creativity.
Bigelow seems to have quite a lot of voice in the book and at first I was suspicious of anyone who gets quite that much air time (and yeah the gender thing comes into my hermeneutics of suspicion every time) but I am concurrently reading [b:Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism|7330265|Revolutionizing Pedagogy Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism|Sheila Macrine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1315687303s/7330265.jpg|8969152] (another must-read for educators) and one of the authors in that cites Bigelow in a way that makes it pretty clear Bigelow is someone who has just gone out and taught transformatively for long enough, and written about it for long enough in a significant enough way to have earned some air time. Fair enough...maybe some more of us should follow his lead and put our ideas out there.
So an important and worthwhile book, nevertheless I will list my gripes. Firstly and most of all the American centrism made it less useful to me than a more international work would have been. I forgive that to some degree, because I think the primary target audience for the book is American educators but there are a couple of slip ups in the book where they do that American thing of writing about their own national experiences and perspectives as if it is global; as if this is the only possible perspective. It is very, very important (and especially in view of the politics expressed so eloquently in the book and the way colonial and capitalist thinking affects the environment and education) for people to really try to get that sort of common-sense absolute thinking out of themselves ESPECIALLY when they are a privileged section of one of the most privilege holding cultures of the world.
Having said that the American setting is fair enough given the target audience and the ideas and techniques in the book for the most part WOULD adapt to (for example) an Australian context.
My second gripe with the book was that really it was a middle-school book. To be honest I am not sure I would have spent the money to order an expensive thick book if I knew it was essentially a middle-school American book. It would be helpful if they said so. There were two early childhood articles, one republished from another book I already have. I wonder if this indicates that the team at rethinking schools desperately need more early childhood writers. If they want some international writers as a way of broadening their view then pick-me, pick-me, pick-me!!!!!!
In all seriousness though Early childhood environmental education is DESPERATELY needed. We need more books for us overworked-underpaid EC educators to grab cool, easy to implement ideas out of as well!
So well done team. Now write one with international perspectives and more early childhood ideas. However I am glad I read it. More educators should!
I persisted and toward the end of the book there is a turn toward some positivity (however it seems as too little and too late as in reality what humans can do). Nevertheless I gave the book 4 stars as this is crucial stuff that we (teachers, parents, the world) should be thinking about and talking about and teaching about. All the ideas in the book are practical, creative, adaptable and specific. You could take one of the ideas and just do it...I read it more as a way of gathering ideas to help me with my own pedagogical creativity.
Bigelow seems to have quite a lot of voice in the book and at first I was suspicious of anyone who gets quite that much air time (and yeah the gender thing comes into my hermeneutics of suspicion every time) but I am concurrently reading [b:Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism|7330265|Revolutionizing Pedagogy Education for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-Liberalism|Sheila Macrine|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1315687303s/7330265.jpg|8969152] (another must-read for educators) and one of the authors in that cites Bigelow in a way that makes it pretty clear Bigelow is someone who has just gone out and taught transformatively for long enough, and written about it for long enough in a significant enough way to have earned some air time. Fair enough...maybe some more of us should follow his lead and put our ideas out there.
So an important and worthwhile book, nevertheless I will list my gripes. Firstly and most of all the American centrism made it less useful to me than a more international work would have been. I forgive that to some degree, because I think the primary target audience for the book is American educators but there are a couple of slip ups in the book where they do that American thing of writing about their own national experiences and perspectives as if it is global; as if this is the only possible perspective. It is very, very important (and especially in view of the politics expressed so eloquently in the book and the way colonial and capitalist thinking affects the environment and education) for people to really try to get that sort of common-sense absolute thinking out of themselves ESPECIALLY when they are a privileged section of one of the most privilege holding cultures of the world.
Having said that the American setting is fair enough given the target audience and the ideas and techniques in the book for the most part WOULD adapt to (for example) an Australian context.
My second gripe with the book was that really it was a middle-school book. To be honest I am not sure I would have spent the money to order an expensive thick book if I knew it was essentially a middle-school American book. It would be helpful if they said so. There were two early childhood articles, one republished from another book I already have. I wonder if this indicates that the team at rethinking schools desperately need more early childhood writers. If they want some international writers as a way of broadening their view then pick-me, pick-me, pick-me!!!!!!
In all seriousness though Early childhood environmental education is DESPERATELY needed. We need more books for us overworked-underpaid EC educators to grab cool, easy to implement ideas out of as well!
So well done team. Now write one with international perspectives and more early childhood ideas. However I am glad I read it. More educators should!