Annette Gough

Sustainable Schools: Renovating Educational Processes

This article discusses findings from a recent evaluation of the experiences of six Sustainable Schools engaged in Stormwater Action Project in terms of their achievement of educational, environmental, economic, and social indicators of quality education. It also discusses the change strategies of the Sustainable Schools initiative within the broader context of quality education for a sustainable future, and the relationship between visions of environmental education/education for sustainable development and visions of quality education. The article concludes that Sustainable Schools is a most appropriate strategy for renovating educational processes and achieving quality education.

Outdoor and Environmental Studies: more challenges to its place in the curriculum

In Victoria, Australia, outdoor education has been a legitimate subject in the school curriculum for over 25 years. However its place has been debated and challenged over this period. This paper traces the history of the subject, its current status in the Victorian Certificate of Education, future challenges to its place in the curriculum — particularly from the Education for Sustainable Development agenda — and strategies for using challenges towards defining the subject with its own identity.

Body/mine: A chaos narrative of cyborg subjectivities and liminal experiences

This is a story about how I came to construct my postoperatively scarred body as a mine site, my liminal experiences of reconstructively normalizing its appearance as a cyborg, and what that means to me, conceptually and physically, as a feminist poststructuralist researcher interested in how the body of a theorist performs and is (re)presented within theoretical spaces. My story takes the form of a mitigated “chaos narrative” that questions linear modernist medical discourses of rehabilitation and restitution by discussing the chaotic dynamics of my cancer experiences, and relates concepts of cyborg subjectivities and other feminist poststructuralist work to my corporeal body and the body of my research in environmental education.

Moving gender from margin to center in environmental education

For the past 30 years or so, a small group of environmental education scholars have attended to gender and promoted feminist theories and methodologies (e.g., Barrett,2005; Barron,1995; Davies,2013; DiChiro,1987; Fawcett,2000; Fontes,2002; Gough,1999a,1999b,2004; Gough & Whitehouse,2003;Gray,2016; Hallen,2000; Harvester & Blenkinsop, 2010; Li,2007; Lloro-Bidart,2016; Martusewicz,2013; McKenzie,2004,2005; Newbery,2003; Russell & Bell,1996; Russell & Semenko,2016; Sakellari & Skanavis,2013; Storey, DaCruz & Camargo,1998; Stovall, Baker-Sperry, & Dallinger,2015; Wane & Chandler,2002; Warren,1996; Whitehouse,2012; Whitehouse & Taylor,1996).1Historically, this scholarship has remained somewhat on the margins of the field (A.Gough,2013,in press; Russell &Fawcett,2013), however, it is time for renewal. This special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education is devoted to the topic of gender and environmental education. The issue brings together an international group of scholars who share a common dedication to promoting social equity and gender equality in environmental education and beyond. Including research reports, theoretical inquiry, autobiographical explorations, and creative assemblages, collectively the articles demonstrate the exciting possibilities that come with bringing gender from margin to center (see hooks,1984).

Beyond cyborg subjectivities: Becoming-posthumanist educational researchers

Abstract This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research.

Teacher Education for Sustainable Development: Past, Present and Future

Since the earliest formulations of the UN goals for environmental education (EE) at the Belgrade conference (1975), through the reconceptualization of education for sustainable development (ESD) at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), to The Future We Want (2012), teacher education—at pre-service and in-service levels and across primary and secondary education—has been regarded as being essential for achieving sustainable development. In response, the UNESCO-UNEP International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) published prototypes for teacher education at elementary and middle school levels in the 1980s, and UNESCO published Guidelines and Recommendations for Reorienting Teacher Education to Address Sustainability (Hopkins and McKeown 2005) and continues to support related programmes. However, despite these many attempts, there is recurring testimony to the almost universal lack of success in introducing coherent or consistent programmes of EE/ESD into teacher education courses. This essay discusses these and other strategies for re-orienting teacher education through pedagogy and whole school system approaches while acknowledging that the teacher education institutions themselves are often the biggest obstacles.

The Politics and Practices of Equity, (E)Quality and Globalisation in Science Education: Experiences from Both Sides of the Indian Ocean

Gender, equity, equality, quality and globalisation are political issues which are interwoven into the discourses and practices of science education and education writ large. In this chapter I firstly review the status of the gender agenda in education, particularly science education, within a global context, and then explore the complicated curriculum conversation that constitutes gender in South African (science) education and the ways in which gender is/is not an educational issue. I then discuss the tensions between equality and quality in educational discourses in South Africa and Australia, and how the resolution of social justice issues such as gender equality are so tightly interwoven into issues of democratic education

New vintages and new bottles: the "nature" of environmental education from new material feminist and ecofeminist viewpoints

ABSTRACT Fifteen years ago we explored the implications of adopting a poststructuralist feminist research methodology in environmental education research and practice. We argued that speaking the world into existence provides multiple ways of thinking about and comprehending environmental knowledge and the way we experience ourselves in space, time, and place. In the intervening years, feminist new materialism has emerged, ecofeminism has had an enlivening resurgence, feminist scholarship in environmental education has expanded, and “nature” seems to have declined within dominant discourses, supplanted by a more anthropocentric agenda. The positioning of body/nature in this scholarship has become a point of contention, difference, and convergence. Here, we explore the “nature” of environmental education as informed by new material feminist, ecofeminist, and other viewpoints, interrogating their similarities and differences, their relationship to feminist poststructuralism, and their implications for environmental education research and practice.

Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship Education: Challenging Imperatives

This chapter is essential reading for understanding the origins and evolution of the much debated and misunderstood concept ‘sustainable development’. It argues that achieving sustainable development requires balancing of economic, environmental and social goals, highlights the lack of international consensus and commitment on these issues, and asserts that global citizenship education is critical for achieving sustainable development, noting that both areas struggle to find a place in the school curriculum. It concludes by arguing that the increasing global inequalities require governments to take a stronger role in promoting education for sustainable development and global citizenship, and achieving Sustainable Development Goals.