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Dancing Teachers Into Being With a Garden, or How to Swing or Parkour the Strict Grid of Schooling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2018

Susan Gerofsky  and
Julia Ostertag
Susan Gerofsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Julia Ostertag
Affiliation:
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Susan Gerofsky, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2125 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, CanadaV6T 1Z4. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The co-authors, collaborators in garden-based teacher education, question the hegemony of grids in Western time, space and relationship structures in education, while also delving into our own complicity and entanglement with these grids. We ask: (1) Can we reject the grid in environmental education and in garden-based learning when it is an intimate part of our way of being in the world? (2) Can we be teachers who are at once within and not-within the regime of the Western Enlightenment/Modernist grid? (3) How can we take a ludic approach to the grid? Can we ‘swing’ and ‘parkour’ the strict grid of schooling? Pleasures and failures of the grid and experiences of alternatives to the grid are documented and exemplified through stories from garden-based teacher education. Considering parallels with principles of the alter-global movement and with the performative, embodied practices of swing dance, parkour and clowning, we meditate on becoming ecological teachers together beside the grid — neither within nor without it, but with a deep awareness of its presence and structure. In uncertain, unchanging times, we want to take a playful, artistic approach to the old certainties and structures, swinging and parkouring from them rather than accepting or rejecting binary formulations.

Keywords

teacher educationgarden-based learningenvironmental educationgridCartesianludicalter-globalembodiedperformativearts-basedswingparkour
Type
Feature Articles
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 34 , Special Issue 2: Ecologising Education: Storying, Philosophising and Disrupting , July 2018 , pp. 172 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2018 

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