Posts com a Tag ‘DARLING Linda Farr (Res)’
El Salvador: The Land. Philippines: The Land. Vietnam: The Land – NICKLES (CSS)
NICKLES, Greg. El Salvador: The Land. Crabtree Publishing: New York, St. Catherines, ON, Oxford, 2002. 32p. NICKLES, Greg. Philippines: The Land. Crabtree Publishing: New York, St. Catherines, ON, Oxford, 2002. 32p. KALMAN, Bobbi. Vietnam: The Land (Revised Ed.). Crabtree Publishing: New York, St. Catherines, ON, Oxford, 2002. Pp. 32p. LIOR, Noa; STEELE, Tara. Spain: New York: The Land. Crabtree Publishing; St. Catherines, ON, Oxford, 2002. 32p. Resenha de: DARLING, Linda Farr. Canadian Social Studies, v.38, n.2, p., 2004.
What do elementary students and their teachers want to discover in a geography book? We could start with engaging and authoritative descriptions of places, stunning photography of landscapes and human activity, and a sensitive portrayal of what makes the cultures of a country unique and dynamic. In the four books I examined in this new geography series for young students-The Land, Peoples, and Cultures Series which includes twenty-two titles to date-vibrant pictures, straightforward text, and a well-organized layout introduce the natural features and resources, the industries and architectures, and the past events and pastimes that shape the diverse countries of El Salvador, Vietnam, Spain, and the Philippines. All four books have been produced with a keen eye for colour, design and sensible layout in an 8 by 11 inch format. The contents of each volume cover a lot of ground in about thirty pages, so understandably we see a few slices of life, and not a great amount of detail. I was pleased to see that modern urban areas are represented alongside more traditional rural communities, and that an appealing mix of photographs includes children at play as well as loaded ships at port (a staple it seems in geographical archives). Each book begins with a ‘facts at a glance’ box and ends with a brief index (very helpful) and glossary with brief definitions (not as helpful). Leia Mais
Education Denied: Costs and Remedies – TOMASEVSKI (CSS)
TOMASEVSKI, Katarina. Education Denied: Costs and Remedies. London and New York: Zed Books, 2003. 205p. Resenha de: DARLING, Linda Farr. Canadian Social Studies, v.39, n.1, p., 2004.
It is difficult to imagine a person in a better position to write a book on the immense, complex, and heart wrenching matter of the denial of children’s rights to education. Katarina Tomasevski is presently the UN Special Rapporteur on rights to education and she is charged with the exhausting task of cataloguing and assessing the impact of abuses and violations across the globe. Her latest book (adding to her full length treatments of several other human rights issues) is a penetrating analysis of a persistent and perplexing problem that affects millions of children, their families, their communities, their societies, and ultimately, she would argue, the future direction of human civilization. Tomasevski has documented a powerful narrative about what could be called a worldwide social and political epidemic.
The book is divided into three sections, each intended to frame, and then answer a different set of questions. Part 1, Why the Right to Education? presents philosophical and historical contexts and important background material, including the initial intergovernmental blueprint for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Importantly, this section also addresses the question, What is education for? from several perspectives, including the author’s own. She carefully notes the difference that can exist between education and schooling, and between brainwashing and teaching, as she puts it, for freedom. She believes that by protecting the right to education, other human rights can be guaranteed to children, including the right not to be exploited as laborers or soldiers. Part 2, called Rupturing the Global Consensus, is a discussion of the enormous obstacles (including corruption) that prevent change on an international scale, even when governments have repeatedly promised action on human rights. Here, Tomasevski is at her fighting best, arguing passionately that we pay an unacceptable social price by allowing the impoverishment of education to continue at the expense of the world’s children. The title of the third section is Putting Human Rights Back In. For Tomasevski, this is a threefold demand: the topic of children’s rights needs to move from the margins of public consciousness back into the center of public dialogue about discrimination and assaults to freedom, back into decisions about school curriculum and school policies, and finally, back onto the main stage of national and transnational agendas. In this final section, she sketches what she calls mobilization for change. It is based, in part, on examples of remedies from around the world that have effectively ensured children’s rights to education, even against enormous odds, such as culturally entrenched attitudes about girls and women.
This is a gripping account. It is one thing to be aware that all human rights are violated daily and in vast numbers; it is another thing to be boldly confronted with multiple cases, figures and tables that tell this story with such intensity, authority and detail. Especially because children are the victims, it is, at times, overwhelmingly shocking and sad. There are occasional triumphs for the right to education, including those of the human spirit, and less often triumphs of public policy and government enforcement. But as Tomasevski writes in her introduction, progress in protecting the right to education moves at glacial speed, it is a matter of chipping away (p. 1). Tomasevski never gives up on the possibility that the world could be a better place, but one wonders how she can retain any sense of hope given the struggles and defeats she daily witnesses. In fact, part of the book’s value is that it chronicles a chapter in the lifework of a truly remarkable, perhaps indefatigable champion of human rights. Her contribution has been important, and our students should know about her. In her key roles as advocate, witness to violations and abuses, and policy analyst, Tomasevski has watched the world history of children’s rights unfold. With this book, she extends her commitment to education and human rights by explaining their relationship to each other, to all of us, and to the eventual realization of global social justice. By so doing Tomasevski further demonstrates her belief that education transforms lives. If we learn what she knows, we cannot help but act.
Teachers can act on this knowledge in significant ways. Human rights education continues to be a core component in social studies curriculum aimed at developing a global perspective, and Education Denied presents important lessons for classrooms. While the book is probably best used as an authoritative background resource, secondary and some upper elementary students could capably work with a number of concepts central to Tomasevski’s argument about rights-based education, as well as work with the data she presents in the form of graphs and charts. Students could also engage in independent research about positive education initiatives in Canada and around the world using examples from the last chapters as starting points. Although Tomasevski places her discussion within the context of human rights history, she does not set her arguments within the even larger political frame of democratization movements since WW II. Teachers will recognize that this larger context may provide students with richer understandings of the right to education and its relationship to the realization of social justice, everywhere in the world.
Linda Farr Darling – Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education. University of British Columbia. Vancouver, BC.
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Line Dancing: An Atlas of Geography Curriculum and Poetic Possibilities – HURREN (CSS)
HURREN, Wanda. Line Dancing: An Atlas of Geography Curriculum and Poetic Possibilities. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.152p. Resenha de: DARLING, Linda Farr. Canadian Social Studies, v.36, n.1, 2002.
When Professor of Geography Derek Gregory began work on his landmark book on geography as discipline and more importantly, discourse, he tentatively called it, The Geographic Imagination. By the time he finished mapping human geography into contemporary social theory, he had changed the title to Geographic Imaginations, an explicit reference to the diversity of perspectives, positions, and subjectivities embodied in any study of human understandings of place, space, landscape, and self. Leia Mais
Spaces of Hope – HARVEY
HARVEY, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. 293p. Resenha de: DARLING, Linda Farr. Canadian Social Studies, v.36, n.1, 2002.
Spaces of Hope is by no means the first book in which Geography Professor David Harvey has thoughtfully and dynamically discussed the themes of economic equality, social justice, and urban experience. (Beginning with Social Justice and the City in 1973 through to Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference in 1996, these have been powerful themes in Harvey’s many books). Nor is it the first time he has brought Marx to the foreground of his analysis of the human condition. As Harvey explains in the first chapter of Spaces of Hope, he has been teaching Capital for thirty years, and Marxist theory may well have more relevance now, in the Age of Globalization, than it ever did, despite its present unpopularity. Spaces of Hope is not simply about revisiting places Harvey has gone before; it is an invitation for all of us to participate in the architecture of a wholly new way of life. To do this we need more than understanding of where we are now with regard to political, social, and economic failures that define our cities and towns, and in fact, our entire earthly environment. We need social vision and political will.
The first five chapters provide a stunning explanatory backdrop of the human condition, the units of analysis being as micro as the individual self and as macro as the globe. Harvey’s range is wide; from the application of Marxist theory to problems of postmodernity, to a conceptual analysis of globalization, to a discussion of the dilemmas we have faced since articulating universal human rights in 1946. In the sixth and seventh chapters (Part Two) he turns to the recent resurrection of ancient interest in the body as the irreducible locus for the determination of all values, meanings and significations (p. 97). Yet even crossing such a range, Harvey rarely leaves the reader breathless; his pace is measured and his approach to the journey is companionable and largely conversational. I did find several points of disagreement along the way. For example, I question Harvey’s willingness to view as much as he does through the Marxist lens; there are important reasons many academics stopped enthusiastically embracing this perspective, reasons into which Harvey does not delve.
The eighth chapter begins the section of the book Harvey calls, The Utopian Moment. Baltimore, an awful mess (p. 133) of a city, is the case study that brings into sharp relief the analyses he walks us through in Parts One and Two. Accompanied by a few well-chosen photographs, Harvey’s descriptions of Baltimore are both arresting and insightful. (They provide, in fact, a useful template for teaching about case studies of place.) By the time he opens our eyes to the array of utopian visions that have been created through history, we are well-aware of the great (unbridgeable?) divide between ideals of public space and the crumbling, gritty realism of urban life. Yet Harvey does not abandon us in the decay and the ruins, or even in the soulless suburbs of Baltimore that are eating into the countryside. Part Four is all about possible versions of the future and even, though it’s wrapped in a cautionary tale of risk and uncertainty, hope for change. Once again he leads us back to Marx:
What Marx called the ‘real movement’ that will abolish the ‘existing state of things’ is always there for the making and for the taking. That is what gaining the courage of our minds is all about (p. 255).
The courage of our minds is found in collective deliberation, participation in the construction of spaces of hope using (among other resources) every dialogical tool we have at our disposal. Harvey does not provide a blueprint, but an invitation to participate in the construction. What makes his invitation persuasive is that he has brought us to a place where alternatives to this work seem decidedly bleak. And the appendix (which can be read on its own as allegory) will spark many a conversation about just what spaces might be created, hopeful or otherwise.
Linda Farr Darling – University of British Columbia.
[IF]All About Canadian Geographical Regions – McDERMOTT; McKEOWN (CSS)
McDERMOTT, Barb; McKEOWN, Gail. All About Canadian Geographical Regions. Edmonton: Reidmore Books, 1999. 28p. Resenha de: DARLING, Linda Farr. Canadian Social Studies, v.37, n.1, 2002.
I’m always delighted to find engaging and informative nonfiction books for primary students. Children who are just beginning to read independently appreciate (and need) a wide variety of literature to explore. The All About Series was designed to give new readers a nonfiction reference series they can read, and to develop an awareness of what Canada is, and what it means to be Canadian. The first goal is fairly straightforward and not too hard to reach. The second is more complex and demanding, if only because there are so many different senses of what it means to be Canadian. Nevertheless, these seven paperbacks on Canada’s six geographical regions (and one overview on all of Canada) are sensibly organized, full of basic but generally important (and accurate) facts, along with unusually well-reproduced photographs and illustrations.
Each booklet (they range from 29-49 pages) is made to look like a series of postcards. On each page a color photograph or illustration is paired with descriptive text about the region. The booklets include geologic history and natural features, climate, flora and fauna, people and resource-based occupations, and more. Yes, this is a lot to cover, and that’s both the strength and a possible weakness of the set I saw. The sheer breadth and diversity of this country is truly amazing, and at times these small booklets strain at the seams to contain it. There is a detailed glossary and an index at the back of each book to offer helpful pointers, but young readers will still need the guidance of teachers and parents to make sense of the wealth of facts. Taken together, the books make a small encyclopedia on Canada’s regions.
The postcard theme could have been used to even better advantage as a focus for some of the information, which in its present form may simply be overwhelming for some young readers. Perhaps a young traveler could have been created to visit the six regions and write about what she noticed in particular. Or a resident of each region could speak about the place he calls home. Or, the authors could have scaled back their use of specialized vocabulary. Even with the excellent definitions presented at the back, there is quite a bit of new vocabulary in each booklet. This will challenge many, and frustrate some. But these are relatively small worries. In fact, just before reviewing the series, I was browsing in a local children’s bookstore and recognized their distinctive covers on a wall display. Two seven or eight year-old girls were flipping through The Cordillera and exclaiming about places that looked familiar, and a few that just looked awesome. Surely that’s the kind of endorsement the authors are looking for from their audience. Barb McDermott and Gail McKeown have given primary teachers of social studies a rare treat: a visually appealing, nicely produced, and above all, accurate geographical resource for curious learners.
Linda Farr Darling – Faculty of Education. University of British Columbia. Vancouver, B.C.
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