Transcript Politics, policy, & practice in ESD

POLITICS, POLICY, &
PRACTICES OF ESD
Marcia McKenzie
University of
Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan
Ministry of
Education
• The provincial Ministry of Education prioritizes
“environment, conservation, and sustainability” as a key
focus for inclusion across K-12 schooling (MOE, 2009)
• “I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but we’ve switched to
using the language of ‘Education for Sustainable
Development’” (Curriculum development manager,
Saskatchewan Ministry of Education, 2010)
• Province-wide workshop on incorporating ESD in K-12
Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan
Environment
Education
Social
Community
Outreach
Community
Governance
Research
Economic
Operations
Our Definition: Sustainability is the conservation and restoration of the environment in a socially and economically responsible manner.
Our Mission: Ensure that the university and our extended community are fully engaged in all aspects of sustainability.
Our Vision: Our actions in all areas of campus life – education, research, operations, governance and community outreach – will be sustainable, modeling
our commitment to leaving a positive legacy for future generations.
Draft—May 20, 2009
The Politics
of Policy Mobility
• The politics and ethics of
global policy mobility
• The conditions and effects of neoliberal globalization,
including on environment-related policy in education
The Emergence of
Global Neoliberal
“common sense”
i) individuals as rational optimizers of their own economic selfinterests,
ii) an emphasis on free-market economics as the most efficient
and morally superior way to allocate resources and opportunities,
iii) a commitment to a laissez-faire approach to market selfregulation versus via government intervention, and
iv) a commitment to free trade without tariffs, subsidies, fixed
exchange rates, or other state-imposed measures.
(Olssen & Peters, 2005)
Neoliberalism and
Global Educational
Policy?
Millennium Development Goals:
i) eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, ii) achieving
universal primary education, iii) promoting gender equality
and empowering women, iv) reducing child mortality, v)
improving maternal health, vi) combatting HIV/AIDS,
malaria, and other diseases, vii) ensuring environmental
sustainability, and viii) developing a global partnership for
development.
The Bonn Declaration, April 2009
UNESCO World Conference on ESD
…3. The impacts of unsustainable development, priorities, responsibilities
and capacity differ between regions and between developing and developed
countries. All countries will need to work collaboratively to ensure sustainable
development now and in the future. Investment in education for sustainable
development (ESD) is an investment in the future, and can be a life-saving
measure, especially in post-conflict and least developed countries.
4. Building on the Jomtien, Dakar and Johannesburg promises, we need a
shared commitment to education that empowers people for change. Such
education should be of a quality that provides the values, knowledge, skills
and competencies for sustainable living and participation in society and
decent work. The Education for All agenda underlines that the availability of
basic education is critical for sustainable development. It similarly
emphasizes pre-school learning, education for rural people and adult literacy.
Achievements in literacy and numeracy contribute to educational quality, and
will also be critical to the success of ESD…
The Bonn Declaration, April 2009
UNESCO World Conference on ESD
…9. ESD emphasizes creative and critical approaches, long-term thinking,
innovation and empowerment for dealing with uncertainty, and for solving
complex problems. ESD highlights the interdependence of environment,
economy, society, and cultural diversity from local to global levels, and takes
account of past, present and future.
10. Linked to different needs and the concrete living conditions of people, ESD
provides the skills to find solutions and draws on practices and knowledge
embedded in local cultures as well as in new ideas and technologies. (Bonn
Declaration, April 2009)
“‘Global guidelines’ for ESD, which should be
more or less independent of culture, are very hard
to formulate” - the tension between such guidelines
and allowing for local context must be addressed.
(Nyberg & Sund, 2007, “Drivers and Barriers to ESD”)
Policy Mobility at Home
Asking
Ourselves:
To the extent that we (as researchers, teachers,
policy-makers, networkers, citizens..) facilitate
rather than probe the uptake of the language
and ideals of sustainability to further these types
of directions; are we in fact cogs in the wheels
of continued expansion of neoliberal forms of
governance and development both in our own
countries and globally?
Interscaler Local “Good
Sense”
Vernacular cosmopolitanism (Appadurai, 1996): To be
context generative as well as context produced
But “collective memory must be dereified and viewed as
a product of individual and institutional memories, as
well as their precursor” (Legg, 2007, p. 459).
Still communities “score by being able to interrogate the
universal with the particular and by being able to use
their cosmopolitanism to press the limits of the local”
(Rizvi, 2008)
Some studies in EE/ESD: Breidlid (2009), Mueller &
Bentley (2009), and Takano, Higgens, & McLaughlin
(2009) , Down & Nurse (2007)
From ideas to pedagogical reality
International
conventions
National policy
National
framework
Local ”space” and
manoeuvrability
National steering
documents, e.g. curricula
Pedagogical and organisational
approach
(Torstensson, May 2011)
Examining
Interscaler Local
“good sense” and
Educational Policy
SSHRC Standard Grant, 2010-2014
Youth Identifications with Place and Sustainability:
Implications for Environment-related Education
SSHRC Partnership Grant LOI, 2011
The Sustainability and Education Policy Network: Leading
through
Multi-Sector Learning
Sustainability & Education Policy Network
(SEPN)
• ..
Politics & the Local-Global in ESD
Research
“How do we better probe the
uptake of the language and
ideals of sustainability in
order to challenge and
disrupt unsustainable
development, including under
neoliberal forms of
governance and
development in our own
regions and countries, and
globally?”