About the Book
This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics" in teaching and learning. The authors offer a generous, rigorous, difficult, and pleasurable image of what this term might mean in the living work of teachers and learners. In this book, Jardine, Clifford, and Friesen:
*sketch out some of the key ideas in the traditional, taken-for-granted meaning of "the basics";
*explain how the interpretive-hermeneutic version of "the basics" operates on different fundamental assumptions;
*show how this difference leads, of necessity, to very different concrete practices in our schools;
*illustrate richly how it is necessary for interpretive work to show, again and again, how new examples enrich, transform, and correct what one thought was fully understood and meaningful; and
*explore the challenges of an interpretive approach in relation to child development, mathematics education, science curriculum, teacher education, novel studies, new information technologies, writing practices in the classroom, and the nature of interpretive inquiry itself as a form of "educational research."
This text will be valuable to practicing teachers and student-teachers in re-imagining what is basic to their work and the work of their students. Through its many classroom examples, it provides a way to question and open up to conversation the often literal-minded tasks teachers and students face. It also provides examples of interpretive inquiry that will be helpful to graduate students and scholars in the areas of curriculum, teaching, and learning who are pursuing this form of research and writing.
Table of Contents:
Contents: Foreword. Preface. D.W. Jardine, P. Clifford, S. Friesen, Introduction: An Interpretive Reading of "Back to the Basics." P. Clifford, S. Friesen, A Curious Plan: Managing on the Twelfth. P. Clifford, S. Friesen, D.W. Jardine, "Whatever Happens to Him Happens to Us": Reading Coyote Reading the World. D.W. Jardine, The Profession Needs New Blood. D.W. Jardine, P. Rinehart, Relentless Writing and the Death of Memory in Elementary Education. P. Clifford, S. Friesen, Hard Fun: Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century. S. Friesen, P. Clifford, D.W. Jardine, Meditations on Classroom Community and the Intergenerational Character of Mathematical Truth. D.W. Jardine, S. Friesen, A Play on the Wickedness of Undone Sums, Including a Brief Mytho-Phenomenology of "X" and Some Speculations on the Effects of Its Peculiar Absence in Elementary Mathematics Education. D.W. Jardine, "Because It Shows Us the Way at Night": On Animism, Writing, and the Re-Animation of Piagetian Theory. P. Clifford, S. Friesen, The Transgressive Energy of Mythic Wives and Wilful Children: Old Stories for New Times. P. Clifford, S. Friesen, Landscapes of Loss: On the Original Difficulty of Reading and Interpretive Research. D.W. Jardine, A. LaGrange, B. Everest, "In These Shoes Is the Silent Call of the Earth": Meditations on Curriculum Integration, Conceptual Violence, and the Ecologies of Community and Place. D.W. Jardine, P. Clifford, S. Friesen, Scenes From Calypso's Cave: On Globalization and the Pedagogical Prospects of the Gift.
Review :
"This book is, by any standard, amazing. It plays, in a wonderfully hermeneutic manner, with common themes in an uncommon way. In seeing hermeneutically one looks to read any particular event in terms of its fullness, its wholeness, its richness in undeveloped, even unseen, potential....It is this reality, in all its marvelous complexity, that Jardine, Clifford, and Friesen ask us to accept. They show us...how this reality exists...in virtually every teaching situation....To look at an issue like 'the basics' interpretively....brings with it a host of ethical issues about how we treat the planet with which we live, how we treat those who are other to us...how we treat our children, and how we treat that which we call knowledge....This is an inspiring book, a book which asks the reader to deal with 'hard questions,' ones which probe the meaning of life. To read this book is to be transformed. I invite all readers to partake of that journey."
—William Doll
From the Foreword
"This book is engaging, well-informed, and a joy to read. Frequently I caught myself stopping to think, 'I wish I could meet these authors,' which is rare for me, but speaks to how well they develop fresh and provocative ideas....This book vividly illustrates how interpretive inquiry serves as a powerful way of relating to children, to our work as teachers, and to the world at hand....I came away with a new set of eyes...and renewed appreciation for reaching beyond our stereotypical conceptions of children, childhood, child development, literacy, classroom teaching, good, and evil."
—David Flinders
Indiana University
"The book's themes are important, clearly related to contemporary classroom practices, and soundly based on current research....Given the continuing domination...of 'skills' and 'behavioral outcomes' in the professional literature, [this book] provides a sound and well-argued contrast firmly based on an alternative epistemology and pedagogy....A very provocative, suggestive, and readable collection....It makes a significant contribution to the field."
—Geoffrey Milburn
University of Western Ontario
