Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice

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)

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.