Teacher education as or for social and ecological transformation: place-based reflections on local and global participatory methods and collaborative practices
Source: Journal of Education for Teaching, Volume 33, Issue 2 May 2007, pages 207 - 223
This paper offers reflections on two transformative teacher education projects. The first, a global communities module, is set in a university in Vancouver and utilizes the lens of social ecology to examine the roles of teachers in bringing an awareness of local/global issues to their students' learning experiences.
The second, a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) teacher education project located in rural Peru, involves the collaboration of universities in Canada, Mexico and Peru. The projects are united in their use of 'critical place-based' transformative teacher education agendas and democratic participatory methods.
We use our experiences in these projects combined with relevant literature to explore three questions:
(1) What inspirations might be drawn from our critical place-based participatory approaches?
(2) What might these approaches offer in response to the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development [UNDESD]?
(3) Does the UN Decade provides a conceptual framework to instigate and support social and ecological transformation?