Education Commons^™

Finding Wonder In The Everyday, Annabel Connelly

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Good morning and welcome to my capstone presentation, Finding Wonder in the Everyday. Humans have lived, traveled through, and told stories here in the North Cascades for thousands of years, particularly those in the Sauk and Suiattle tribes. Today I hope to honor that tradition as I tell a few stories while exploring the possibilities inherent in storytelling.

The Red Pill: Environmental Education Wakes Up To The Real World, Elissa Kobrin

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Growing up, I loved going to camp. My parents who are here today will attest to the fact that going to Camp Wilani was the center of universe around which I revolved. We were always one of the very first cars in line before they opened the gate. I couldnʼt wait to snag my bunk, and meet my new counselor and cabin mates. Camp Wilani had a particular smell: Oregon Coastal Mountain forest, the riparian foliage next to the lagoon, old wooden cabins and bunks. I loved that place, and my summers there fostered my deep love of nature and …

Interconnectedness: The Roots Of Inspiration, Katie Komorowski

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

This paper explores the question of: Why is nature so inspiring? Ultimately the answer is that we are connected to and a part of a greater system. It is through nurturing this relationship with the Earth that we can be inspired. Our western culture has created a dichotomy between human and nature. As problematic as this is, our humanity is reflected back at us and can be a source of inspiration. Our desire to explore the unknown comes from our humanity. When faced with nature we can be taken into a state of awe where preconceived mental frameworks need to …

Mudpies & Dragonflies: The Value Of Unstructured Play In Environmental Education, Tyler Chisholm

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Hello everyone and thank you for coming to the very first open house of Mudpies & Dragonflies Nature Preschool where our kids spend everyday, rain or shine, wind or snow outside exploring the natural world! I’m Tyler Chisholm, the director and lead teacher here at Mudpies. I, for one, am incredibly excited to be here today because opening this school has been a dream of mine since graduate school at Western Washington University where I received my Master’s of Education in Environmental Education. But before we get started with what a nature preschool is and why I think this type …

Doing. Myself. Justice., Kaci Darsow

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

The titles for these capstones were due five weeks ago. Five weeks ago I had no idea what this presentation would look like. I still don’t know. I had, and have, so many ideas, so many things I want to share with you. But these three words kept showing up in my journal, over and over. Just like this: Doing. Myself. Justice. When Nick asked for my title, all I could do was write this on the chalkboard. I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t know what it means. But so far I’ve spent 26 years finding out, …

Rare Or Well Done? A Waitress Wonders How To Best Serve Environmental Education, Katherine Renz

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Environmental education (EE) promises to facilitate the transformation of attitudes and behavior on a broad scale. Yet the field has not fulfilled its potential. This article takes an auto-ethnographical approach in considering the reluctance of environmental educators to discuss environmental problems. How is the discipline weakened by equating critical thinking and ecologically motivated despair with a negative attitude rather than honestly acknowledging the grief and promoting resiliency and empowerment instead? Through the lens of a professional waitress, this article argues that the service industry offers a privileged though overlooked venue for EE. Rather than framing EE as an isolated event …

A Francophile In The North Cascades, Sarah Stephens

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

The fields of cultural studies and environmental studies are often disconnected. Even the tagline, ‘act locally, think globally’ tends to refer to realizing how local ecological processes are related to global processes (Thomashow, 2002). Culture is left out of this interpretation of the phrase. I believe that in order to address global environmental issues cultural awareness needs to be part of the solution. My experience with learning French language and culture has convinced me that second language acquisition can be an effective way to bring cultural studies into the world of environmental studies.

What Came First, The Love Or The Learning?, Samantha J. Hale

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Today I’ll be talking about identity and a sense of home. Before I start, let me briefly tell you a bit about myself. I am 1⁄4 Irish, 1⁄4 Italian, 1⁄4 German and 1⁄4 English. I don’t know where my Irish, German or English relatives originated, but my Italian side of the family comes from Bergamo, Italy; I still have family there to this day. I was born in Weymouth Massachusetts, a suburb just south of Boston. I was raised and educated in Weymouth until high school, when I opted to go to a private school a few towns over. At …

Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences In A Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom, Anne E. Crampton

Journal of Educational Controversy

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-- or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater …

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Education Policy And Paradox Of Consequences In Rural Ethnic China, Jinting Wu

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper provides a situated critique of how evidence-based, “best practices”-oriented research can result in unanticipated consequences and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophesy at the expense of deeper understanding of educational problems. I structure the paper along two analytical steps. First, I explore the sociology of unintended consequences through German Sociologist Max Weber and his contemporary critic Mohamed Cherkaoui. Second, I draw from an ethnographic study in rural ethnic communities of Southwest China to illustrate how best intentions at providing free compulsory education go awry, and how the controversial policy both fails and succeeds in fabricating its intended outcome. The ethnographic …

Big Data And Technologies Of Self, Bernadette Baker

Journal of Educational Controversy

The entry of Big Data into the educational field has generated noticeable binary reactions and a recycling of criticisms already directed at the quantification of reality, datafication in the social sciences, standardization in education, and neoliberalism in the West. This paper reapproaches Big Data’s entry into education from a curriculum studies perspective, which deploys interdisciplinary approaches from philosophy, history, sociology and politics of knowledge and wisdom. The analysis of key definitional debates, binary reactions, and systematization are considered from the point of view of historically shifting technologies of self, as core conditions of possibility for the controversies that emerge when …

Introduction To The Special Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, John G. Richardson

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue addresses the uneasy relation between 'best practices' in educational research and the consequences that often follow from efforts to implement practices deemed best. This relation is often complicated by the social phenomenon long recognized as "unintended consequences". It is proposed that controversies in education, as well as practices advanced as best, are shaped as the consequences -subsequently revealed as the very product of the good intentions that underlie prevailing theory and methods.

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

About the Authors

Is “Best Practices” Research In Education Insufficient Or Even Misdirected? An Issue Dedicated To John G. Richardson, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Editorial and Dedication for Volume 11, Issue 1

Is “Best Practices” Research in Education Insufficient or even Misdirected?

AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO JOHN G. RICHARDSON

A Violence Of “Best Practice” And Unintended Consequences?: Domestic Violence And The Making Of A Disordered Subjectivity, Tracey Pyscher

Journal of Educational Controversy

Often, efforts by schools to standardize marginalized children with histories of domestic violence have alarming effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religious-like adherence to behavioral data driven frameworks. This article traces how children and youth with histories of domestic violence (or HDV youth) navigate and resist deficit laden school subjectivities shaped by special education discourses of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity with detrimental effects. The article …