All books using the keywords: C. A. Bowers

As people across the country are now experiencing the extreme weather conditions––droughts, tornados, floods, record breaking temperatures–– predicted in scientific reports, it is now time for teacher education and curriculum studies faculty to begin introducing reforms that enable classroom teachers to recognize when students are being socialized to take for granted ecologically unsustainable patterns of thinking. In addition to the toxic chemicals introduced by our consumer-dependent lifestyle, there is another major change that is altering the life prospects of students that also needs to be addressed in reforming teacher education and curriculum studies. That is, the long-standing tr ...

It is widely acknowledged that Gregory Bateson’s ideas have been influential in a number of fields. Unfortunately, the importance of his ideas for understanding why public schools and universities continue to perpetuate ecologically unsustainable ways of thinking has not been adequately recognized. Given the deepening ecological and economic crises, this book is particularly timely as it clarifies how Bateson’s five key ideas, when taken as a whole, provides the conceptual framework for introducing educational reforms that address both problems. That is, he explains why educators unconsciously continue to perpetuate the deep cultural assumptions that were constituted before there was ...

This latest book by Chet Bowers, The Way Forward: Educational Reforms that Focus on the Cultural Commons and the Linguistic Roots of the Ecological/Cultural Crises, provides a more in-depth examination of several themes he has introduced before, as well as an introduction to issues that other environmental and educational writers have ignored. The former includes understanding cultures, including daily cultural practices, as ecologies—and how these micro-ecologies affect the life-sustaining viability of natural ecologies. Also explored in greater depth are how the community-centered cultural commons represent the early stages of a post-industrial future, as well as how public schools, un ...