"Part of the Peter Lang Education list"--P. facing t.p.

Celebrates the work of educators who explore ecological issues in school and non-school settings. Gives examples of ways to impact the thinking of children and adults in order to affirm the values of sufficiency, mutual support, and community.

In Ecological Thinking, Shoshana Keiny relates the arguments of this book to the new ecological paradigm, based on open instead of closed systems, which see humans not as outsiders but as part of the system. Keiny uses the term ecological thinking as a holistic framework for thinking about ways in which teachers need to be engaged in participatory interactive learning processes, which seek to generate new understanding and knowledge that changes their professional context. Ecological Thinking is based on several projects in which teacher educators, researchers, parents and/or other members of the community collaborated in order to jointly transform education. Written as a personal narrative, Keiny illustrates an Action Research process that emphasizes the interplay between praxis and theory.

Recent worldwide education policy has reinvented teachers as agents of change and professional developers of the school curriculum. Academic literature has analyzed changes in how teacher professionalism is conceived in policy and in practice but Teacher Agency provides a fresh perspective on this issue, drawing upon an ecological theory of agency. Using this model for understanding agency, Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson explore empirical findings from the 'Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change' project, funded by the UK-based Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Drawing together this research with the authors' international experiences and perspectives, Teacher Agency addresses theoretical and practical issues of international significance. The authors illustrate how teacher agency should be understood not only in terms of individual capacity of teachers, but also in respect of the cultures and structures of schooling.

This book illustrates how to connect students to the natural world and encourage them to care about a more sustainable, ecologically secure planet.