Radical-Local Teaching and Learning

Seth Chaiklin, Mariane Hedegard

• Publisher: Aarhus University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9788779348837
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the community and of Puerto Rican immigration, and the study describes how it helped students become both more positive and more critical about their backgrounds. By acquiring basic academic skills in a theoretical framework the children learn how to analyse their own local situation, addressing not only immediate issues (housing conditions, family life, community dynamics) but also historical issues. Unlike apparently similar culturally responsive approaches to teaching underprivileged children, radical-local teaching explicitly uses subject matter teaching to encourage children's development in relation to their social conditions. Hedegaard and Chaiklin detail how they developed concrete lesson plans in a radical-local perspective, and enumerate the accomplishments as well as the difficulties they encountered in implementing this approach.

Table of contents

• Front Matter
• Chapter 1. Radical-Local Teaching and Learning for Education and Human Development
• Chapter 2. Education in a Societal Perspective
• Chapter 3. An Introduction to Radical-Local Teaching and Learning
• Chapter 4. The Relation of Knowledge to Teaching and Learning from a Radical- Local Perspective
• Chapter 5. Child Development and Learning
• Chapter 6. The Double Move Approach to Instruction
• Chapter 7. The East Harlem Community from a Cultural- Historical Perspective
• Chapter 8. Puerto Ricans and Education in New York City
• Chapter 9. Organization, Content, Participants and Evaluation of the Teaching Programme
• Chapter 10. The Goal Formation Phase
• Chapter 11. Researching Family Life and Living Conditions in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico
• Chapter 12. Researching the History of their City and Starting Model Formulation
• Chapter 13. Community Modelling and Model Use
• Chapter 14. Discussion of the Teaching Experiment
• Chapter 15. Radical-Local Teaching and Learning and Educational Practice
• References
• List of Figures
• Index