This paper offers reflections on two transformative teacher education projects. The first a global communities module is set in a university in Vancouver and utilizes the lens of social ecology to examine the roles of teachers in bringing an awareness of local/global issues to their students' learning experiences. The second, a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) teacher education project located in rural Peru, involves the collaboration of universities in Canada, Mexico and Peru. The projects are united in their use of 'critical place-based' transformative teacher education agendas and democratic participatory methods. We use our experiences in these projects combined with relevant literature to explore three questions: (1) What inspirations might be drawn from our critical place-based participatory approaches? (2) What might these approaches offer in response to the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development [UNDESD]? (3) Does the UN Decade provides a conceptual framework to instigate and support social and ecological transformation?
This paper explores the possibilities of discovering, sharing, and transforming school-community linkages through proactive outreach programs that are of particular relevance to public elementary schools catering to a large refugee and immigrant population. The authors argue that community-school linkages, as currently understood and discussed in the literature, are primarily focused on unidirectional relations, but certainly have the potential of furthering the particular needs of these children and their families in more productive ways. A wealth of untapped opportunities and creative capacities exist in the community that provide the potential for ‘bridging and bonding’ social capital where the response is sensitive to power relations that can arise from hegemonic interactions. School-community linkages are crucial for displaced communities further isolated and stigmatized in underserved and deprived pockets of the city. These are particularly evident in Toronto’s post-war suburbs, such as Scarborough, where the concentration of neighbourhood poverty is well documented, but where the energy and creativity in the production of its social and cultural landscape, and the commitment of its citizens, are less noted. Based on an outreach workshop held in one such school, the potential of a sustainable emancipatory school-community framework is explored.
Cet article porte sur les possibilités de découvrir, partager et transformer les liens entre l’école et la communauté par le biais de programmes de communication proactifs qui soient particulièrement pertinents pour les établissements élémentaires publics recevant une large population d’immigrés et de réfugiés. Les auteurs affirment que ces liens, tels qu’ils sont actuellement compris et étudiés dans les publications universitaires, sont avant tout focalisés sur des relations unidimensionnelles, mais qu’ils pourraient certainement servir les besoins particuliers des enfants et de leurs familles de manière plus productive. Dans ces communautés, une abondance d'occasions inexploitées et de capacités créatives sont susceptibles de procurer un capital social «affectif et relationnel», là où il y a une réponse réceptive aux relations de pouvoir qui peuvent naître d'interactions hégémoniques. Les liens école-communauté sont cruciaux pour les populations encore plus isolées et stigmatisées, déplacées dans des secteurs non desservis et défavorisés de la ville. Ceci est particulièrement évident dans les banlieues d’après-guerre de Toronto, telles que Scarborough où la concentration de quartiers pauvres est bien documentée, mais où l’énergie et la créativité dans l’éclosion de son paysage social et culturel et l’engagement des citoyens ne sont pas autant pris en note. Un atelier de communication qui a eu lieu dans une de ces écoles, a permis d’explorer le rôle potentiel d’un cadre école-communauté émancipateur durable.
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