Linda Symcox - Böcker

The concept of "standards" seems antithetical to the ways critical educators are dedicated to teaching, but what would "standards" look like if they were generated from social justice perspectives and through collaborative and inclusive processes? Such is the central question posed by the contributors of this groundbreaking collection on the interconnectivity of social justice, peace, and environmental preservation. Challenging education that promotes consumerism, careerism, and corporate profiteering, they boldly offer examples of a new paradigm for practicing a transformative critical pedagogy. Rather than just talking about coalition building within and across educational communities, they demonstrate how we might communicate from different vantage points and disciplinary boundaries to create a broader picture of social and eco-justice. Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education will be required reading for educators and students who want to envision and practice living, acting, and teaching for a better world.

The concept of "standards" seems antithetical to the ways critical educators are dedicated to teaching, but what would "standards" look like if they were generated from social justice perspectives and through collaborative and inclusive processes? Such is the central question posed by the contributors of this groundbreaking collection on the interconnectivity of social justice, peace, and environmental preservation. Challenging education that promotes consumerism, careerism, and corporate profiteering, they boldly offer examples of a new paradigm for practicing a transformative critical pedagogy. Rather than just talking about coalition building within and across educational communities, they demonstrate how we might communicate from different vantage points and disciplinary boundaries to create a broader picture of social and eco-justice. Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education will be required reading for educators and students who want to envision and practice living, acting, and teaching for a better world.

As educators in the United States and Europe develop national history standards for K-12 students, the question of what to do with national history canons is a subject of growing concern. Should national canons still be the foundation for the teaching of history? Do national canons develop citizenship or should they be modified to accommodate the new realities of globalization? Or should they even be discarded outright? These questions become blurred by the debates over preserving national heritages, by so-called 'history wars' or 'culture wars,' and by debates over which pedagogical frameworks to use. These canon and pedagogical debates often overlap, creating even more confusion. A misconceived “skills vs. content” debate often results. Teaching students to think chronologically and historically is not the same as teaching a national heritage or a cosmopolitan outlook. But what exactly is the difference? Policy-makers and opinion leaders often confuse the pedagogical desirability of using a ‘framework’ for studying history with their own efforts to reaffirm the centrality of national identity rooted in a vision of their nation's history as a way of inculcating citizenship and patriotism. These are the issues discussed in this volume.Today's students are citizens of the world and must be taught to think in global, supranational terms. At the same time, the traditionalists have a point when they argue that the ideal of the nation-state is the cultural glue that has traditionally held society together, and that social cohesion depends on creating and inculcating a common national culture in the schools. From an educational perspective, the problem is how to teach chronological thinking at all. How are we to reconcile the social, political and intellectual realities of a globalizing world with the continuing need for individuals to function locally as citizens of a nation-state, who share a common past, a common culture, and a common political destiny? Is it a duty of history education to create a frame of reference, and if so, what kind of frame of reference should this be? How does frame-of-reference knowledge relate to canonical knowledge and the body of knowledge of history as a whole?