The Boiled Down Juice

Rethinking Globalization:Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World textbook

I just read about this textbook from Rethinking Schools. It was published in 2002. This resource textbook teaches students 4th-12th grades social justice issues as an interconnected web. As the authors say in the introduction (which can be found online as well),

“For example, in the Huaorani Indian struggle in eastern Ecuador (depicted in the role play, “Oil, Rainforests, and Indigenous Cultures,” p. 268), the debt crisis forces the government to aggressively seek sources of cash - like oil - to make interest payments to international banks. Transnational oil companies take advantage of widespread poverty to pay starvation wages to workers in terribly unsafe conditions. And like a bull in a china shop, they maraud through fragile rainforest ecosystems. In the quest for profits, oil companies treat people and the environment simply as resources to exploit. But not only are rainforests being ravaged, the indigenous cultures that depend on those rainforests are also in danger of being wiped out.

If oil companies successfully sucked all the oil out of the Huaorani’s territory in Ecuador - perhaps as much as $2 billion worth - it would power cars in the United States for only 13 days. Thus, the more we taught about issues in the Third World, the more it brought us home - home to an epidemic of consumption that links us to the poverty of others around the world, and links us to the growing ecological crisis that threatens the very existence of life on earth.”

The book includes exercises that address math, science, reading comprehension and problem solving skills. I have not read this textbook (other than the example essays and lesson plans online), but plan on interlibrary loaning it. Is anyone else familiar with it?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Uncategorized, cultural conservation, economic justice, environment, k-12 education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.