Critical learning, community, and engagement: elements for creating positive learning environments and opportunities for positive change

While I am writing this hundreds of educators from across the state of Kentucky where I live are rallying in the state capital demanding that the legislature overturn its recent vote undermining still further the pension system for state workers including public school teachers. Teachers in the states of Oklahoma and West Virginia have also been demanding higher salaries and more funding for education. Similarly, in the United Kingdom university professors have been on strike for weeks to protest changes in their pension system. Meanwhile students, educators, and community members here in the US have been walking out of schools and staging marches in cities across the country to protest the lack of governmental action to curtail gun violence and prevent future school shootings like the recent episode in Parkland, Florida that killed seventeen people. Setting this all aside for a moment to read the articles in this issue of EAR has gone a long way to restoring a feeling of hopefulness and a sense of common purpose among educators from around the world to bring our knowledge, our passion for teaching, and our dedication to our students to bear in addressing critical issues facing our communities and to improving educational outcomes for all learners.

Themes of critical learning, trust, empowerment, and positivity run through all of these articles as the authors challenge the attempts to narrow the goals of education and learning to what Biesta refers to as ‘learnification’, cited here by authors Thingstrup, Schmidt, and Andersen. O’Brien and Blue make a similar point in their distinction between the notions of education and schooling. Drawing upon work by Dewey and Kemmis, they suggest that ‘education, as opposed to schooling, aims to develop children’s self-awareness, agency and experience of full human capacities’. Author Call-Cummings in her article on the educational experience of Latino/a high school students in rural Idaho and pre-service teachers in the US and authors Kalungwizi, Gjøtterud, Krogh, Mattee, and Ahmad in their discussion of local environmental education efforts in Tanzania cite Freire’s notion of conscientization as a way to frame a discussion of more critical, emancipatory approaches to learning.

Another theme which emerges in many of these articles is one of community and the importance of honoring and supporting the everyday lived experience of our students. Moreno and Routledge connect this to Fals Borda’s notion of vivencia, ‘the essence of treating people as actors in their own lives and recognizing that what they bring to the table is integral to all research for social change’ (Barbera 2014, 805). In a similar vein, Weinronk, Wexler, Trout, Rowlett, Klakegg, Zhen, Valenzuela, Henry, and Moses in their article discuss the importance of community, family, leadership, and culture and those they refer to as ‘quiet leaders’, those ‘who make powerful change within the community without holding formal leadership roles or stealing the spotlight.’

And a final common theme that relates closely to those noted above is engagement, which according to Pino-James is grounded in ‘meaningfulness, empowerment, competence, peer socialization and positive teacher–student relationships’. The importance of these positive teacher-student relationships is apparent throughout these articles and brings us back to the issues noted at the opening of this editorial essay – the very real day-to-day challenges facing teachers throughout the world and our shared responsibility to be willing to take what Laudonia, Mamlok-Naaman, Abels, and Eilks refer to in their article as the ‘risk for change’. But as the authors of all of these articles also make clear we do not take these risks alone but in collaboration with our students, colleagues, and community partners.

This special issue is organized around these themes of critical learning, community, and engagement beginning with Signe Hvid Thingstrup, Lene S. K. Schmidt and Randi Andersen’s article titled ‘The purpose of education: pedagogues’ and teachers’ negotiations in Danish primary schools’. Drawing upon Critical Utopian Action Research and Story Workshops as methodologies these authors explore strategies for opening dialog and improving relationships between teachers and pedagogues, educators with an orientation toward social orientation and community, in schools. By bringing these two groups together in the research process the authors uncover tensions between traditional Danish educational goals around well-being, democracy, and social development and the current educational focus on formal learning tied to testing which weighs heavily on the teachers. This provides the opportunity for the two groups of educators to come together to reclaim these more critical educational values. Echoing many of these themes, Mia O’Brien and Levon Blue introduce the concept of ‘positive pedagogies’ in their article ‘Towards a positive pedagogy: designing pedagogical practices that facilitate positivity within the classroom’, which discusses the distinction between education and schooling. Based on work in an Australian primary school setting and drawing upon Dewey’s notion of felt concerns and a critical participatory action research (CPAR) methodology these researchers and their teacher partners identify pedagogical strategies for increasing positive social, cognitive, and psychological learning. Meagan Call-Cummings offers a clear operational definition of the concept of empowerment and two examples of the ways in which classrooms can provide powerful sites for critical learning in her article ‘Claiming power by producing knowledge: the empowering potential of PAR in the classroom’. Based on two projects, one with Latino/a high school students in rural Idaho and the other with pre-service teachers at a large Midwestern university, Call-Cummings draws upon participatory action research and Freire’s notion of conscientization to suggest ways in which classrooms can encourage students to engage in critical reflection and action. V. J. Kalungwizi, S. M. Gjøtterud, E. Krogh, A. Mattee and A. K. Ahmad in their article ‘Participative planning of environmental education activities: experiences from tree planting project at a teacher training college in Tanzania’ also use participatory action research in their work with pre-service teachers to establish a tree planting initiative in an area of Tanzania challenged by water shortages and environmental degradation. Their findings reinforce the importance of building relationships and establishing trust in creating sustainable partnerships to address pressing environmental issues.

The theme of community raised in many of the articles described above also informs the work of German Alonso Moreno and David Rutledge in their article ‘A response to strategies and tactics through participatory action research in a developmental mathematics course’. The notion of building upon the everyday experiences of students in order to bring relevance and understanding to learning – for example by developing curriculum around strategies for choosing the best cell phone plan – provides a powerful model for designing curriculum around students’ needs and interests. Community also features as a central element in Hannah Weinronk and her co-authors’ work, ‘New understandings of communities and ourselves: community-based participatory research with Alaska Native and Lower 48 youth’. This project focuses on the development of opportunities for intergenerational dialog and action through a variety of participatory methods including photovoice, digital storytelling, focus groups, and interviews and demonstrates the potential for research to contribute to deepening understanding within and across communities.

The final theme of engagement, which again is reflected throughout the articles included in this issue, is the focus of Nicholás Pino-James’ article, ‘Evaluation of a pedagogical model for student engagement in learning activities’, which looks at ways of increasing student engagement among Spanish language students in a secondary school in England. Using an action research model to explore strategies for increasing student engagement in learning, this study highlights the importance of meaningfulness, empowerment, competence, peer socialization, and positive teacher-student relationships as key aspects of positive learning environments. And finally, in their article ‘Action research in science education – an analytical review of the literature’, which provides a review of 149 articles related to action research and science education, Ivano Laudonia and his colleagues point to the critical shift from factual learning to conceptual understanding of science and the importance of establishing and maintaining vibrant communities of practice in order to support on-going teacher reflection and pedagogical development.

Also included is a review of Rene Loewenson, Asa C. Laurell, Christer Hogstedt, Lucia D’Ambruoso, and Zubin Shroff’s book Participatory action research in health systems: a methods reader (2014) by Thomas Pyrch.

I hope you have the same feeling after reading these articles that I did – a renewed belief in the possibility of positive change and an appreciation for all those engaged in the work of creating positive, creative, and critical spaces for learning.

Mary Brydon Miller