The Role of Education for Democracy in Linking Social Justice to the ‘Built’ Environment: The Case of Post-Earthquake Haiti

Abstract

The manner in which the built environment is constructed has a tremendous effect on the degree to which health, wealth and social outcomes are distributed within a society. This is particularly evident when a crisis of the natural environment affects the built environment, as was the case after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Understanding the consequences of the earthquake as socially precipitated rather than a natural occurrence requires a paradigm shift, a project for educational policy, pedagogy and epistemology. In particular, education for democracy in its broadest sense can serve to re-align thinking towards understanding the connection between the built environment and social justice. In this article the authors present their research with teacher-education candidates and the candidates' perspectives and experiences of education for democracy at a Canadian university. In relating these perspectives to the possibilities for contextualizing the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, the authors propose educational policy solutions that highlight a thick democracy, social justice, the role of context and history, and a more concrete connection with public health.

Pedagogías contra el Despojo: Principios de una Eco/Demopedagogía Transformativa como Vehículo para la Justicia Social y Ambiental

“…En consecuencia, hablamos de una educación enfocada a gestar transformaciones para construir sociedades más equitativas, más justas, más humanas, con una visión de mundo y una manera de habitarlo distintas. Para llegar a estas transformaciones, será también necesario adoptar la concepción densa de la democracia (Carr, 2008;Carr, Pluim y Thésée, 2014) que hace referencia al compromiso social enfocado a la emancipación social.…”

Engagement with the Mainstream Media and the Relationship to Political Literacy

“…We have elaborated elsewhere about the perceptions of the teacher-education candidates from these university campuses on democracy in reference to a list of twelve countries. While their opinions and rationale varied somewhat on the degree of democracy in their own country and abroad, what stood out was that they justified their responses largely through "what they learned from the media" (see Carr, Pluim & Thésée, 2014). In many cases the teacher candidates had strong views on the levels of democracy in these countries, however the ways in which they substantiated it portrayed a lack of media literacy, with many openly acknowledging that they were "guessing".…”