Back to the Basics of Teaching and Learning Thinking the World Together

This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics" in teaching and learning. The authors offer a generous, rigorous, difficult, and pleasurable image of what this term might mean in the living work of teachers and learners. In this book, Jardine, Clifford, and Friesen:
*sketch out some of the key ideas in the traditional, taken-for-granted meaning of "the basics";
*explain how the interpretive-hermeneutic version of "the basics" operates on different fundamental assumptions;
*show how this difference leads, of necessity, to very different concrete practices in our schools;
*illustrate richly how it is necessary for interpretive work to show, again and again, how new examples enrich, transform, and correct what one thought was fully understood and meaningful; and
*explore the challenges of an interpretive approach in relation to child development, mathematics education, science curriculum, teacher education, novel studies, new information technologies, writing practices in the classroom, and the nature of interpretive inquiry itself as a form of "educational research."

This text will be valuable to practicing teachers and student-teachers in re-imagining what is basic to their work and the work of their students. Through its many classroom examples, it provides a way to question and open up to conversation the often literal-minded tasks teachers and students face. It also provides examples of interpretive inquiry that will be helpful to graduate students and scholars in the areas of curriculum, teaching, and learning who are pursuing this form of research and writing.

"This book is, by any standard, amazing. It plays, in a wonderfully hermeneutic manner, with common themes in an uncommon way.... As one wanders through the book (this is a book to journey in) one questions not only the basics but many educational slogans and shibboleths. One does indeed re-imagine the whole concept of schooling and the potential power that exists in a classroom filled with the fullness and richness of creative experience.... This is in many ways an inspiring book – a what-can-be book– but more than that, it is a book which asks the reader to deal with ‘hard questions,’ ones which probe the meaning of life. To read this book is to be transformed. I invite all readers to partake of that journey."
William E. Doll, Louisiana State University, From the Foreword

 "Jardine, Clifford and Friesen juxtapose the concreteness of specific students and specific classrooms to the abstraction of theory: in that respect alone, this book exemplifies curriculum at its most poignant and sophisticated."
William F. Pinar, University of British Columbia

"Back to the Basics of Teaching and Learning audaciously challenges the appropriation of the idea of basics in/of education by conservative thinkers. Much of the beauty of this book lies in its refusal to lose sight of the stubborn particulars of classroom life – real children – and sail away into the lofty clouds of theory and philosophical reflection.... No one in education can read this book and be unmoved by it, nor, perhaps, be unchanged by it."
Paul Ernest, University of Exeter