Back to the basics of teaching and learning : thinking the world together

This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics." Essays detailing everyday, lived events in classroom life are presented to help readers see beneath the surface ordinariness of these events to uncover and examine the underlying complex and contested meanings they contain. Readers are invited to imagine what would happen to our understanding of teaching and learning if we stepped away from the image of basics-as-breakdown under which education labors today - an image of fragmentation, isolation, and the consequent dispensing, manipulation and control of the smallest, simplest, most meaningless bits and pieces of the living inheritances that are entrusted to teachers and learners in schools. By involving readers in re-thinking the idea of the "basics" in educational theory and practice, this book offers a more generous, rigorous, difficult, and pleasurable image of what this term might mean in the living work of teachers and learners.

This is a valuable text for practicing teachers and student-teachers interested in re-imagining what is basic to their work and the work of their students. It also provides examples of interpretive inquiry that will be helpful for graduate students and scholars in the areas of curriculum, teaching, and learning who are interested in pursuing this form of research and writing.

The Second Edition:

is guided by the view that thinking the world together is a form of ecological thinking adds chapters that take up the ecological aspects of this vision, the hermeneutic aspects, and curricular aspects in the areas of mathematics, reading and writing, and social studies; included also are chapters on child development, information and communications technologies, and more proposes a version of "the basics" that asks teachers to be public intellectuals who think about the world, who think about the knowledge we have inherited and to which we are offering our students living, breathing access

Author Notes

Dave Jardine was raised in Urbandale, Iowa. After graduation from high school he enlisted in the U. S. Army & became a paratrooper. He served in North Carolina & France, then returned to attend Drake University, graduating in 1962. He then joined the U. S. Navy, serving as chief engineer on several ships & captain of another, mostly in the Far East. He retired in 1980 & moved with his wife, Linda, to California's Napa Valley.

050

David W. Jardine and Patricia Clifford and Sharon FriesenPatricia Clifford and Sharon FriesenDavid W. Jardine and Michelle Bastock and Jennifer George and Judy MartinMichelle Bastock and David W. JardinePatricia Clifford and Sharon Friesen and David W. JardinePatricia Clifford and Sharon FriesenPatricia Clifford and Sharon FriesenDavid W. JardineSharon Friesen and Patricia Clifford and David W. JardineDavid W. Jardine and Sharon FriesenSharon FriesenDavid W. JardineDavid W. JardineDavid W. JardineDavid W. Jardine and Annette Lagrange and Beth EverestDavid W. JardineDavid W. JardineRahat Naqvi and David W. JardineDavid W. JardineDavid W. Jardine and Patricia Clifford and Sharon FriesenDavid W. Jardine

Foreword	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xxiii
Permission Acknowledgments	p. xxv
1 Introduction: An Interpretive Reading of ôBack to the Basicsö	p. 1
2 A Curious Plan: Managing on the Twelfth	p. 11
3 Cleaving with Affection: On Grain Elevators and the Cultivation of Memory	p. 31
4 Children's Literacy, the Biblia Pauperum, and the Wiles of Images	p. 59
5 ôWhatever Happens to Him Happens to Usö: Reading Coyote Reading the World	p. 67
6 The Transgressive Energy of Mythic Wives and Wilful Children: Old Stories for New Times	p. 79
7 Landscapes of Loss: On the Original Difficulties of Reading	p. 91
8 ôBecause It Shows Us the Way at Nightö: On Animism, Writing, and the Re-Animation of Piagetian Theory	p. 105
9 Meditation on Classroom Community and the Intergenerational Character of Mathematical Truth	p. 117
10 A Play on the Wickedness of Undone Sums, Including a Brief Mytho-Phenomenology of ôXö and Some Speculations on the Effects of Its Peculiar Absence in Elementary Mathematics Education	p. 131
11 Math: Teaching It Better	p. 135
12 ôThe Stubborn Particulars of Graceö	p. 143
13 Birding Lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas	p. 153
14 The Surroundings	p. 159
15 ôIn These Shoes Is the Silent Call of the Earthö: Meditations on Curriculum Integration, Conceptual Violence, and the Ecologies of Community and Place	p. 165
16 American Dippers and Alberta Winter Strawberries	p. 175
17 ôAll Beings Are Your Ancestorsö: A Bear Sutra on Ecology, Buddhism, and Pedagogy	p. 181
18 ôSome Say the Present Age Is Not the Time for Meditationö: Thoughts on Things Left Unsaid in Contemporary Invocations of ôTraditional learningö	p. 185
19 ôThe Profession Needs New Bloodö	p. 195
20 Scenes from Calypso's Cave: On Globalization and the Pedagogical Prospects of the Gift	p. 211
21 On the While of Things	p. 223
References	p. 243
Index	p. 251

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Table of Contents