Local
Place and Pedagogy
In “Place and Pedagogy,” David Orr contemplates education and community experience and posits that education has been reduced to an activity that occurs in “a collection of buildings” (183), that learning has been siloed into disciplines, and that we are alienated from the place we live in. “Place is nebulous to educators because to a great extent, we are a deplaced people for whom our immediate places are no longer sources of food, water, livelihood, energy, materials, friends, recreation, or sacred inspiration” (184). He describes our environment—the shopping mall, apartment, neon strip, glass office tower, freeway—as consisting of architectural expressions of deplacement, “none of which encourage much sense of rootedness, responsibility, and belonging” (184). Nomadism has been around for a long time but today it exists at a much larger scale, which leads Orr to question how long it takes to cultivate a sense of place. He proposes we work against social and ecological “degeneracy” by exploring the place where we live and work.
Orr, David. 2013. “Place and Pedagogy.” NAMTA Journal 38 (1): 183–88. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1078034.
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The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times
Through The Transition Companion book Rob Hopkins seeks to answer the question, “What would it look like if the best responses to peak oil and climate change came not from committees and Acts of Parliament, but from you and me and the people around us” (13)? Hopkins proposes that waiting for government takes too long and is not enough, and acting as individuals does not make enough of a difference, “but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time” (12). Community engagement is at the heart of the book’s message. Hopkins focuses on five years of practical experience based on the transition movement (also transition theory) with projects that occurred primarily in the UK. Transition theory focuses on localized and resilient communities. It makes its point by featuring a diversity of projects that used transition as a grassroots organizing methodology but also offers a handbook approach with practical ‘how tos’ of transitioning with guidance on starting out, deepening and connecting one’s organizing, building, and dream casting for looking ahead.
Hopkins, Rob. 2011. The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times. Green Books.
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Now That We Know the Critique of Global Capitalism Was Correct
Colombian American anthropologist, Arturo Escobar, moves beyond the critique of capitalism to map out strategies for transitioning post pandemic. He proposes we need a “radical eco-social, economic, political, and cultural transition in every country and in the world at large” (157). Escobar offers five principles for thinking about strategies which can be applied to design or other forms of collective action. First, we must return the communal to social life, a move against individual solutions. Oaxacan activists talk of the ‘we-condition of being’ (condición nosótrica de ser, 157) which is an orientation of compartencia (“sharingness”, 157) of thoughts and actions to understand what makes a resilient community/person. Second, we must return the local to social, economic, and cultural activities through food sovereignty, agroecology, seed saving, commoning, and urban gardens to name a few-- innovations that break with patriarchal, racist, and capitalist ways of living. The third principle focuses on the strengthening of political autonomy and in engaging in “dream-designing” (disoñación, 158) helping us to redesign our lives in a partial, but still substantial movement toward de-globalization. The fourth principle suggests we incorporate “feminist and radical [] relational politics into many, if not all, of our designing practices” (159). Lastly, we need to consider the “re-earthing” of life (159). We are in a relationship of interdependence with the planet where new forms of life are always in the process of co-arising.
Escobar, Arturo. 2021. “Now That We Know the Critique of Global Capitalism Was Correct.” In The New Possible: Visions of Our World beyond Crisis, edited by Philip Clayton, Kelli M. Archie, Jonah Sachs, and Evan Steiner, 157–61. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
In What is to What If, UK-based Rob Hopkins, founder of the international Transition Towns movement, engages our imagination to envision an alternative reality where all parts of daily life in one’s community intersect to produce a harmonious and scaled-down local network of systems. He argues for the need for visioning to create hopeful narratives, where the future exists as we would like it. He models visioning in his first chapter titled “What If Things Turned Out Ok?” (2). Through a detailed and multisensory account, Hopkins describes a day in his future fifteen years from now, from his straw-bale-walled apartment, his quiet walk with the kids to school, the education department’s decision to eliminate testing, and a school that greets you with the smell of baking bread…Hopkins paints a picture for us of a whole day in his future. The purpose of this exercise is to counteract narratives of ecological doom-and-gloom and to consider imagination as a crucial steppingstone to action. Each cha. Each chapter focuses on one “what if” scenario and case study, and through a storytelling approach, supported by research studies, Hopkins shows how others have transitioned from the dream stage to actualization. The focus is on individual and community-led rather than political action. Play and imagination are at the core of the case studies presented. Hopkins explores questions such as: “What if we took play seriously? What if we considered imagination vital to our health? What if we fought back to reclaim our attention?” This book is a call to action to reconnect to our communities and to revive and reclaim them by asking different questions.
Hopkins, Rob. 2019. From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to the Future We Want. Chelsea Green Publishing.