[HOME] Critical Pedagogy in Action: Building a Walking Classroom and Walking Teacher Global Community

Environmental ecological education and the cultivation of global citizens with critical thinking have become an urgent challenge in this century. COVID 19 shows how personal health and local epidemic prevention are closely linked to the global vaccine industry, race, poverty and international politics; the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict shows us how the butterfly effect of war is transferred from international to social and people's livelihood , and how hatred, prejudice, and fake news are manipulated by politicians and media, applying simple binary logic and online discourse to create a tear between different sociocultural racial classes. In the face of the fragmented and drastic changes in the international order of the economy, health and restructuring in the epidemic/post-epidemic era, textbook-style teaching has been unable to satisfy education as a tool for critical thinking about the real world. However, as educators, are we aware of these changes in the macroscopic environment, and the over-reliance on online learning, that has forced us to rethink the relationship between education and the real world: if the world is not static or controllable, if this The divided world is what students will face in the future. How should teachers reflect on and change our teaching so that students can fully understand the complexity of global environmental issues and seek more dialogue and understanding instead of confrontation and prejudice? How do we lead students to regain their intimacy with the land, the environment and people in all networked learning cultures? In Taiwan, where "localization" is emphasized, how do we introduce different teaching methods and worldviews so that students can Cultivating a more diverse and inclusive vision and understanding of the world while focusing on places Putting students in the greenhouse of learning, the classroom must be placed in the real world, and the critical consciousness of students can be cultivated through continuous dialogue to establish a real relationship between people and the world. Henry Giroux (1985) provides a theoretical perspective to think about The role of teachers in facing education and society. He rejects the idea of ​​teaching as merely a profession with certified standard skills, arguing that education should be seen as a set of social and political practices that interact with the world, not requiring standardized skills or top-down authority , but educators who are able to act across a variety of social and cognitive boundaries. He distinguishes teachers from traditional intellectuals who possess and transmit knowledge and specific intellectuals who represent a certain culture or profession. Teachers should be seen as "transformative intellectuals" who use their professional roles to create a space for public dialogue that connects different social, cultural, transnational or religious communities. Based on this concept, we created "Teaching in Action: Teacher Community in Day Classroom and Walking", which currently has 8 members from different disciplines teaching at six universities in Taiwan and the United States. In our respective teaching practices, we found that "walking" is a common classroom experience: anthropologists take students into urban and rural farms, aboriginal tribes, and participate in friendly farming and environmental justice movements with community residents; engineering educators Take students into the community for engineering design; geographers lead students into mountains and forests; cultural researchers lead students to investigate industrial tourism and cultural assets. These walks with different purposes and different ways constitute the way we lead students to understand and intervene in the world. Through walking, we see a real world that cannot be presented in textbooks, a continuous time and space of people, places, things, things and scenes, a place full of classes , Race, the Classroom of Power Relations. However, we also have more teaching questions and reflections in the process of walking: What kind of learning experience do these walking experiences bring to students? How is this learning different from learning sitting in front of a desk and computer? What is its role? How to face the doubts of students and schools about stepping out of their academic comfort zone? How do we interact with the environment and society in the process of walking? Whose knowledge is conveyed by these observations and interactions? When the classroom is opened, how do we Facing and dealing with the power relations and ideology within the knowledge system, making education a tool to liberate rather than oppress the mind? Obviously, walking teaching/learning is not an easy task, and conscious and mindful walking requires physical strength , curiosity, keen observation, perception of culture and society, and interaction with the local community can implement walking as a practice of critical teaching. Our thinking on these issues has already started, but many times it still remains at the individual level of thinking and practice, each individual is trying out innovative teaching methods on their own, these methods are usually based on informal dialogues with colleagues, rarely A multinational, cross-school, and cross-disciplinary community systematically explores teaching field issues and develops a library of reliable teaching methods. From preliminary discussions with each other, we found that although the higher education systems and teaching concepts in Taiwan and the United States have cultural differences, they also face many similar challenges, such as relying on increasingly standardized assessments, and increasingly pursuing "performance" and Marketability is the goal of education, and these tendencies make education gradually detached from the emancipation of individuals and society, and produce teachers who are less interested in teaching and prefer to devote themselves to research, and students who regard class as a burden. However, solving these problems is not only about individual teachers' teaching concepts, but is closely related to higher education culture, institutional administration, and educational policies. It is necessary to rely on collective reflection and action to clarify problems, empower teachers, and break through existing teaching bottlenecks and blind spots. . The formation of the Action/Walk Teaching Community is our first initiative to improve the current local global environment and civic education. In the future, through the establishment of this teaching community, we will begin to explore how to use walking as a teaching method​​, regard traveling through nature and the environment as the source of enlightenment, and re-understand the classroom, knowledge and teacher-student relationship. Based on the teaching experience of teachers across schools, fields, and borders, we will start from their respective teaching sites and share the changes and challenges of teachers in stepping out of their academic comfort zone, including discovering common problems in teaching, and institutional issues. How barriers to experimental, critical pedagogy hinder experimental, critical pedagogy as the focus of this community discussion and development of research on teaching practice. At the same time, we will also explore how to conduct more cross-border and cross-school cooperation among teachers, so that education not only goes out of the classroom, but also goes out of the place, to cultivate students' more diverse care and vision, and their collaboration with different biological and material materials relation. Our experience will provide a theoretical and practical approach to the global environment and critical education, as well as a reference for higher education institutions to develop better educational policies.