This book is about an ecological-interpretive image of "the basics." Essays detailing everyday, lived events in classroom life are presented to help readers see beneath the surface ordinariness of these events to uncover and examine the underlying complex and contested meanings they contain. Readers are invited to imagine what would happen to our understanding of teaching and learning if we stepped away from the image of basics-as-breakdown under which education labors today.

Table of Contents FOREWORD William E. Doll, Louisiana State University PREFACE David W. Jardine CHAPTER ONE Introduction: An Interpretive Reading of Back To the Basics David W. Jardine, Patricia Clifford and Sharon Friesen CHAPTER TWO: A Curious Plan: Managing on the Twelfth Patricia Clifford & Sharon Friesen CHAPTER THREE: Cleaving with Affection: On Grain Elevators and the Cultivation of Memory David W. Jardine, Michelle Bastock, Jennifer George & Judy Martin CHAPTER FOUR: Children's Literacy, the Biblia Pauperum and the Wiles of Images Michelle Bastock & David W. Jardine CHAPTER FIVE: Whatever happens to him happens to us: Reading Coyote Reading the World Patricia Clifford, Sharon Friesen and David W. Jardine CHAPTER SIX: The Transgressive Energy of Mythic Wives and Wilful Children: Old Stories for New Times Patricia Clifford and Sharon Friesen CHAPTER SEVEN: Landscapes of loss: On the Original Difficulties of Reading Patricia Clifford and Sharon Friesen CHAPTER EIGHT: Because it Shows us the Way at Night: On Animism, Writing and the Re-Animation of Piagetian Theory David W. Jardine CHAPTER NINE: Meditations on community, memory and the intergenerational Character of mathematical truth Sharon Friesen, Patricia Clifford & David W. Jardine CHAPTER TEN: A play on the wickedness of undone sums, including a brief mytho-phenomenology of x and some speculations on the effects of its peculiar absence in elementary mathematics education David W. Jardine and Sharon Friesen CHAPTER ELEVEN: Math: Teaching it better Sharon Friesen CHAPTER TWELVE: The stubborn particulars of grace. David W. Jardine CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Birding lessons and the Teachings of Cicadas David W. Jardine CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Surroundings David W. Jardine CHAPTER FIFTEEN: In these shoes is the silent call of the earth: Meditations on Curriculum integration, conceptual violence and the ecologies of community and place. David W. Jardine, Annette LaGrange and Beth Everest CHAPTER SIXTEEN: American Dippers and Alberta winter strawberries David W. Jardine CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: All beings are your ancestors: A bear Sutra on ecology, Buddhism and Pedagogy David W. Jardine CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Some say the Present Age is not the Time for Meditation: Thoughts on Things left Unsaid in Contemporary Invocations of Traditional Learning Rahat Naqvi and David Jardine CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Profession Needs New Blood David W. Jardine CHAPTER TWENTY: Scenes from Calypso's Cave: On Globalization and the Pedagogical Prospects of the Gift David W. Jardine, Patricia Clifford & Sharon Friesen CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: On the while of things David W. Jardine

David W. Jardine, University of Calgary, Canada

Patricia Clifford, Galileo Educational Network Association, Canada

Sharon Friesen, Galileo Educational Network Association and University of Calgary, Canada