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The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

The historical evolution of the economy of Ireland's South East region is traced, highlighting Waterford's key role as the region's leading urban centre and port. What had been a rather traditional regional economic structure underwent considerable modernisation in the last two decades, but lacks the sectoral specialisation which provides a strong economic base in other Irish regions. The National Spatial Strategy, launched in 2002, sought to promote regional specialisation in exporting sectors, but lacked the governance structures required to drive the process. The current National Planning Framework is more focused on building up the main regional centres, but is likely to leave Waterford City well short of the scale required to be competitive in global markets. An alternative strategy is proposed, whereby Waterford would work in collaboration with the South East's unique set of strong county towns to create a distinctive and coherent, region-wide and sectorally focused, urban system. The success of such a project, however, would be dependent on the creation of a strong regional government tier and the devolution to the regions of a wide range of powers and functions currently concentrated at national level.

Chapter 1 overviews the purposes, organization, and various contributions in the volume, “Smudging composition lines of identity and teacher knowledge: Cross-cultural narrative inquiries into teaching and learning.” Through these inquiries, we unpack the complexities of teachers and students engaging in cross-cultural classroom contexts. We present narrative inquiry as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts. Such a methodological approach reveals details of the kinds of cross-cultural perspectives that might unfold in the implementation of curriculum, and explores ways in which teachers' sense of teacher knowledge are shaped by experiences of teaching and learning. We recognize complexities revealed through a comparative cross-cultural narrative approach as a way of highlighting the educational significance of this work. We organized chapters of this volume into sections, using Schwab's (1973) curriculum commonplaces as a framework for examining some of these complexities. The four section headings are: Section I: “Becoming a cross-cultural teacher: Developing teacher knowledge from cross-cultural experiences;” Section II: “Learner experience informing teacher knowledge;” Section III: “Subject matter/curriculum informing teacher knowledge;” and Section IV: “Milieu informing teacher knowledge.”

In this chapter, we outline the research presented by each of the contributors, who used narrative inquiry approaches that were grounded in long-term research, to examine teacher experiences of cross-cultural teaching. The authors write about cross-cultural experiences that cross temporal, spatial, and social-personal dimensions. Woven into teaching and learning experiences set across time and context were interactions with colleagues, peers, and community members that offered insight into rationale for pedagogical decisions about ways in which practices and curricular materials may be mismatched or well aligned, or unfolded with tension in their current professional contexts. This crossing of time, context, and across social-personal interactions added complexity in ways that highlight the need for research methodologies that support examination of experience that unfolded across time, space, and social-personal dimensions. The authors elaborate upon ways in which a narrative inquiry approached provided a theoretical foundation to highlight complexities and reveal nuances of cross-cultural teacher experiences. The cross-cultural features in these chapters, whereby teachers cross cultural boundaries when they assumed teaching positions in communities culturally different from those in which they themselves were educated and certified. We argue for the need for cross-cultural comparative narrative inquiry approach, that help to reveal complexities of these cross-cultural teaching and learning as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

Cultural heritage and memory are essential mechanisms for the formation of individual and group identity, contributing to a sense of belonging in society. More specifically, built heritage (the buildings, structures and monuments associated with our cultural history) reflect our individual and collective decisions about what is important to preserve and remember into the future, further shaping our identities as citizens of Waterford. Thus, our relationship with heritage is just as much about looking forward into our social imagination for the future of Waterford city as it is about reflecting on our past.

Sites of Conscience are a specific type of built heritage which signify a society's belief that by remembering difficult pasts we can interrogate our current lived realities and create meaningful change in the future (International Coalition for Sites of Consciousness, 2022). Sites of Conscience are akin to what French historian Pierre Nora (1989) referred to as ‘les lieux de mémoire’, or places of memory. These physical spaces can connect past traumas and struggles to our present lives. As places of memory which ask us to acknowledge the past, Sites of Conscience can prevent the erasure of historical traumas and stand as an act of restorative justice, providing safe spaces for citizens to engage with difficult memories.

One such site of conscience in Waterford is the complex of buildings located at the College Street Campus of the South East Technological University. The site comprises the former convent of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers (commonly known as the Good Shepherd Sisters); the St Mary's Good Shepherd (Magdalene) Laundry; and St Dominick's Industrial School. The site was occupied in 1884 and the Laundry operated until its closure in 1982 (Department of Justice, 2013). This chapter will consider the former Magdalene Laundry and Industrial School's cultural and heritage significance to Waterford as a site of conscience, which encourages the citizens of Waterford not only to connect our past to our present, but to connect these memories to current actions to create a more just society into the future.

The built heritage of this complex acts as a powerful memory aide of a shared local history, allowing citizens to connect this past to related contemporary human rights issues. In this way, the former Laundry and Industrial School can stimulate discussions on gendered violence today, or to interrogate modern forms of institutionalisation such as Direct Provision. The chapter will further consider how these connections are even more important when our need to remember and recognise past atrocities are met with social, political, economic or cultural pressure to forget. Sometimes the desire for erasure is understandable; we want to commit events to the past and move on. However, such erasure can further disempower survivors of these institutions; prevent current and future generations from learning critical lessons; and dismantle future opportunities for healing and reconciliation. In this context, Sites of Conscience offer an opportunity to connect a difficult past to visions of a more socially just city of the future.