Curriculum Geographies and Global Sustainability: A Project for a Precarious Age

• In Event: Place and Sustainability Education for the Anthropocene: A Transnational Inquiry of Generative Tensions and Innovative Practices

Abstract

Acknowledging that we are currently living through an unprecedented age of climate change and environmental stress means that, more urgently than ever before, we need to rethink our prevailing forms of educational theory and practice. To a significant extent, the current historical conjuncture calls forth an educational response. This is because the contemporary conditions of the Lifeworld are largely predicated on, and constituted out of, the philosophical legacies of the West, realised crucially in and through our educational systems and practices. More precisely, this is to be understood as a curriculum challenge.

This paper will present an emergent account of curriculum with reference to key concepts of place, sustainability, knowledge, and representation (Gough, 2009; Green, 2010a, 2010b). Curriculum itself will be understood as bringing together knowledge, identity and pedagogy. This extends beyond traditional, mainstream schooling, to take in different constituencies, institutions and agencies, and forms of life. Understanding environmental education in the broadest sense, the paper will trace a growing interest in issues of environmentality and globalisation in the increasingly transnational field of curriculum studies (Pinar et al, 1995; Pinar, 2004; Helfenbein, 2010) and make particular reference in this context to the scalar dynamics of places and spaces. Exploring such curriculum geographies becomes an important resource in re-thinking education for global sustainability.

Author

• Bill Green, Charles Sturt University