Abstract
This chapter offers an activist-based socially critical perspective on the UNESCO-driven agenda to reorient schools and universities towards sustainability. In it, I have bared a range of tensions and constraints that lurk behind sustainability education policies, curriculum documents and local initiatives. I show that in practice, sustainability education is a messy, contested picture with overlays of contradictory visions, oxymoronic objectives and often only barely masked neoliberal agendas. To contextualize this depiction, I sketch issues in the literature around sustainability education, to show that the idea is fraught with a heavily contested, ambivalent centre: one that is challenged from inside and out by a range of vested interests. Nonetheless, a large number of academics struggle to keep alive a notion of sustainability as a radical idea, one that could potentially destabilize the status quo. To illustrate this viewpoint, in a respectful way, I incorporate a place-based story of political quandary and local practice. The outcome of working with people also committed to making the world a better place, and students who think and act from a standpoint of compassion, care and commitment, is worth my personal struggle.
Keywords
- Teacher Education
- Teacher Education Programme
- Ecological Footprint
- Practical Knowledge
- Active Citizenship
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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- 1.
- 2.
By a double bind, I mean pressure from two sources such that a choice of one precludes or constrains the other.
- 3.
There is however an excellent ‘Sustainability Curriculum Framework’ produced by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (2010) that does not appear to be acknowledged by ACARA.
- 4.
www.myschool.edu.au
- 5.
Due to the need for brevity, I have folded the terms sustainability and sustainable development together. These days, sustainability is usually the preference for general use due to the assertion that sustainable development is an oxymoron.
- 6.
Interestingly, a strong politically shaped version of sustainability is informed by the ethos of ecological democracy, which is often regarded as a theoretical framework for sustainability reorientation. Ecological democracy references its social critique to conceptions of ecological feminism, social democracy and deep ecology (Dryzek, 2005; Merchant, 2005).
- 7.
People of the early Australian suburban working classes probably saw themselves as producers—of food, clothing, meat, water, waste disposal and cottage industries, as they were quite self-reliant and independent. Thus, over time, a shift has occurred in how we see ourselves (Davison, 2006, p. 205).
- 8.
AuSSI is an Australian government programme of support for sustainability education that operates through joint funding with each state and territory.
- 9.
- 10.
See, for example, Energy Challenge Project (n.d.). Corporate support is not without criticism due to the issues around the moral and sometimes explicit condition upon acceptance of funds to positively represent the corporation to the community.
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Wooltorton, S. (2012). Sustainability: Ambiguity and Aspiration in Teacher Education. In: Down, B., Smyth, J. (eds) Critical Voices in Teacher Education. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3974-1_18
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