This paper describes the key principles of an ecojustice approach to adult education. The author describes the cultural roots of the ecological crisis, the difference between ecological and ...individual intelligence and the linguistic colonization of the present by the past. The dangers of an overreliance on print are described and the need for a revitalization of the cultural commons is included.
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This landmark collection by Third World activists highlights two major world changes which, they argue, have been neglected by Freire and his many followers: the Third World grass-roots cultural ...resistance to economic globalization, and the ecological cr.
Do computers foster cultural diversity? Ecological sustainability? In our age of high-tech euphoria we seem content to leave tough questions like these to the experts. That dangerous inclination is ...at the heart of this important examination of the commercial and educational trends that have left us so uncritically optimistic about global computing.
Contrary to the attitudes that have been marketed and taught to us, says C. A. Bowers, the fact is that computers operate on a set of Western cultural assumptions and a market economy that drives consumption. Our indoctrination includes the view of global computing innovations as inevitable and on a par with social progress--a perspective dismayingly suggestive of the mindset that engendered the vast cultural and ecological disruptions of the industrial revolution and world colonialism.
In Let Them Eat Data Bowers discusses important issues that have fallen into the gap between our perceptions and the realities of global computing, including the misuse of the theory of evolution to justify and legitimate the global spread of computers, and the ecological and cultural implications of unmooring knowledge from its local contexts as it is digitized, commodified, and packaged for global consumption. He also suggests ways that educators can help us think more critically about technology.
Let Them Eat Data is essential reading if we are to begin democratizing technological decisions, conserving true cultural diversity and intergenerational forms of knowledge, and living within the limits and possibilities of the earth's natural systems.
The commons, as historically understood and as they exist today in a more attenuated condition, represent the aspects of the physical environment and symbolic world that are shared in common-that is, ...shared in the sense that has not been privatized and monetized. The current requirements for a university degree, regardless of how they vary from university to university, do not provide the basic understanding of how cultural beliefs and practices are contributing to the rapid changes now occurring in the natural systems we all depend upon. That understanding now must become our basic priority-and in doing so, it will require an entire degree program that has as its central focus the challenges we face in revitalizing our commons and in avoiding the destruction of the commons of other cultures. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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The paper frames the discussion of children's education in terms of cultural charac teristics that appear to be shared by ecologically sustainable cultures. These charac teristics include cultural ...practices based on mythopoetic narratives that are "eco centric" rather than anthropocentric; an inclusive sense of community that extends the moral responsibility of humans to the rest of the biotic community; a sense of time where the past and future are sources of authority in the decision-making pro cesses of the present; and an ideological orientation that can best be described as cultural/bio-conservatism. The paper explores how these characteristics, essential to long-term sustainability, would lead to fundamental changes in the formative pro cesses of primary socialization of children, notions of intelligence and educational practices. The paper also explores how "progressive" ideas and values that have guided the education of children in recent decades encode cultural assumptions that have contributed to ecologically destructive forms of human progress.
Contrary to computer advocates' globalism = empowerment rhetoric, the dominant globalization pattern involves relentless commodification of knowledge, skills, and interdependent relationships. Few ...consider the ecological implications of commodifying (digitizing) leisure, education, health care, or communications. Posing community regeneration questions would foster a more ecologically sustainable understanding. (MLH)
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9.
Rethinking Freire Bowers, C. A; Apffel-Marglin, Frédérique
2005.
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... if administrators exercised leadership, they might motivate otherwise indifferent faculty to reframe the content of their courses and scholarship in ways that clarify the connections between ...cultural and environmental issues that stand in the way of achieving a sustainable future. ... the problem becomes one of identifying the sources of authority that university presidents and administrators will take seriously-even when they personally fail to understand that humankind is at a turning point and that daily life is undergoing fundamental changes that have their roots in the degradation of natural systems.
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