Encouraged by transnational organisations, curriculum policy makers in the UK have called for curricula in schools and higher education to include a global dimension and education for global citizenship that will prepare students for life in a global society and work in a global economy. We argue that this call is rhetorically operating as a 'nodal point' in policy discourse -a floating signifier that different discourses attempt to cover with meaning. This rhetoric attempts to bring three educational traditions together: environmental education, development education and citizenship education. We explore this new point of arrival and departure and some of the consequences and critiques.
There has been on-going interest in education for improved human-environment relations and a recent resurgence in the use of a variety of contexts and encounters for these purposes, including those to be found outside the traditional school classroom. The curriculum making involved in these areas is more or less supported by discussions of epistemology and ontology. This article considers what Tim Ingold's account of 'dwelling' might have to offer in support of some of the kinds of curriculum making involved in improving human-environment relations. Ingold's work insists on a flat, continuous and processual ontology of dwelling and becoming. It also examines how this can be reconciled with development, growth, knowledge and skill, and the passing of capacities between generations. The article highlights implications for an understanding of curriculum making in general, and for revised understandings of place and agency therein, which bear particularly on environmental education.
Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) appears to support learning outside the classroom but there remains no statutory requirement for Scottish pupils to learn outdoors during their school careers. Commentators have asserted the apparently strong resonance between CfE and outdoor learning but there has been little explanatory argument to support this. This paper argues that the variable provision of school-organised outdoor learning in Scotland is the result of, among other things, the perceived high cost and perceived lack of curricular relevance of such learning. We go on to show how the combination of CfE and a particular kind of outdoor learning pedagogy might tackle these problems. The pedagogy is cross-curricular and place-based; we illustrate it with a case study of a low cost programme that involves pupils planning and undertaking journeys from their school grounds as a means of learning about socio-cultural and geophysical elements of their local landscape. In considering curricular relevance, we show that a historical emphasis on disciplinary subject content is one significant barrier to such outdoor learning. Curriculum for Excellence challenges this emphasis and could legitimise the kinds of outdoor learning we describe.
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