Today’s post is by Stephen Scoffham and Steve Rawlinson who made a presentation to NAEE’s 2022 AGM in November. Their latest book Sustainability Education A Classroom Guide (Bloomsbury 2022) explores the issues raised in this blog and offers practical advice on teaching activities and curriculum organisation. As ever with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by the Association.
Harnessing the Momentum for Curriculum Change
Although there are lots of conflicting signs, there certainly seems to be a growing interest within and beyond the world of education in the environment and sustainability. Internationally, the United Nations SDGs have provided a powerful framework for action at both institutional and community level, whilst the UNESCO Berlin Declaration on ESD (2020) has articulated how education can be re-orientated towards planetary well-being. In a further encouraging development, the DfE Climate Change and Sustainability Strategy (2022) has empowered teachers in the UK who want to focus on environmental issues. The challenge now is to harness this momentum and find ways to innovate within the constraints of the current education system.
ESD has a number of distinctive features which means that it is difficult to characterise and fits uneasily in traditional curriculum frameworks. It:
- draws on a vast knowledge base which is fast-changing and difficult to define
- takes an interdisciplinary rather than a subject siloed approach
- is underpinned specific concepts such as connections, cycles and systems
- is sensitive to context and understood in various ways
- confronts uncomfortable truths about modern life
- can easily seem both daunting and overwhelming
- needs to be presented in terms of hope and opportunities
- involves practical activities and action
- addresses the whole person – head, hands and heart
- seeks to develop alternative mindsets and critical judgement
- suggests the need for novel forms of evaluation and assessment
- is predicated on values and moral responsibility.
These different elements are hard to accommodate but mean that ESD is potentially a dynamic and disruptive force which could catalyse educational reform. As Stephen Sterling points out, there is currently an astonishing disconnect between the pressing signs of global crisis, and the relatively closed world of education. Young people, he contends, are ‘fervently waiting for education to catch up and empower them’ (2022: 87). In short, we need to educate for the future not for the past. ESD has a valuable contribution to make here because it embraces both new ways of thinking and experiential learning.
Given the range of forces involved, educational change is never neat or simple. ESD is itself riddled with ambiguities and contradictions, not least the mismatch between the values it espouses and the principles which underpin modern life. However, we could consider this to be its strength. Some 50 years ago, Ernst Schumacher (1973) drew attention to the way ‘divergent problems’ force us to reconcile forces which cannot be reconciled in logical thought. Schumacher argued that grappling with them brings us closer to love and truth. A similar thought prompts illustrator Jackie Morris to extol the importance of beauty and imagination. ‘Everything I do, she declares, is ‘part protest, part prayer’ (2023: 23). Looking beyond measurable targets and compliance regimes makes it possible to consider questions of purpose and meaning which are central to what it means to be human and the way we live our lives today. ESD, when interpreted in its deepest sense, thus becomes a particularly powerful agent for change.
References
Morris, J (2023) The Primary Geography Interview, Spring 2023 No 110.
Schumacher, E. F. (1973) (2011) Small is Beautiful, London: Penguin.
Sterling, S. (2022) ‘Profound Concern, Fierce Hope’ in Kumar, S and Howarth, L (eds.) Regenerative Learning, Sutton, England: Global Resilience Publishing.
………………………………………………..
Stephen Scoffham is Visiting Reader in Sustainability and Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK and was President of the UK Geographical Association (2018-19). He can be contacted at s.scoffham848@canterbury.ac.uk .
Steve Rawlinson is a Geography Education Consultant and was President of the UK Geographical Association (2015-16). For many years he worked as an Initial Teacher Education Tutor at Northumbria University, UK. He can be contacted at geosteve7@live.co.uk