Hamish Ross

The global dimension in education and education for global citizenship: genealogy and critique

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.

Inside Research, inside Ourselves: Teacher Educators Take Stock of Their Research Practice.

This paper tells the story of how a group of teacher educators in a university education department used action research to examine their research situation, and what conclusions they reached. Some recent historical background puts the study in context, identifying tensions between university expectations and time‐heavy teaching demands that operated as obstacles to research activity. This context is shared by many academics who provide training for practitioners in UK universities that seek substantial funding through their performance in national research quality assessments. The project was initially organised in Spring 2007 by new research staff who had investigated staff perceptions of and interests in research through semi‐formal interviews, observations and documentation. An invited group turned to action research as a possible way forward. They asked the question ‘What kind of research culture do we want, and how can we get it?’ Over a year, all participants gathered at semi‐formal meetings for collaborative reflection and discussion, engaged in a diversity of micro‐researches that experimented with ways of researching around the barriers, and wrote a collaborative paper about what they had learned. This gave rise to a series of national and international conference presentations that drew several of the group members into the wider research community. The group members grew to realise that the kind of research that they perceived the institution to value was not necessarily a kind that was readily built into their identities as teacher educators. But this realisation itself was empowering, exposing previously opaque assumptions that had left a felt irreconcilability that had been difficult to articulate.

Environment in the curriculum: representation and development in the Scottish physical and social sciences

Scottish official curricular texts, including guidelines and examination papers, are analysed for representations of ‘self and the environment’. The environment is represented as fragmented when it is the curricular focus and is only ‘whole’ when it is background context; ‘human–environment relations’ are dualized; and the value of ‘environment’ lies dominantly in its use by humans (although there is a much less clear possibility that it might have inherent value). These representations lend themselves to the kinds of dominant and abusive relationships with environment that the same official curricular text hopes to counter. The assumed need for publicly shared understandings may drive this representation, through processes in which students understand environment by its ‘parts’, by generalized models of relationship, as being shallowly causal and progressively ‘other’, and not as contingent, local, or privately experienced. The desire for such a public world‐view may in turn be driven by historical efforts to use education to tackle social inequality. The purpose of undertaking such a detailed analysis is to create space for progressive and incremental curricular development rather than for revolutionary revision.

Representing self-in-society: education for citizenship and the social-subjects curriculum in Scotland

The documented social‐subjects curricula for Scottish 5–16 year olds are analysed for representations of ‘self‐in‐society’. Such representations are important in Scotland because it is expected that the new Education‐for‐Citizenship framework will in part be delivered through the social subjects. However, citizenship education is also relevant throughout the UK and beyond and our analysis of the social subjects has wider relevance. An ideal‐type analysis was used on documents including national guidelines, examination syllabuses, examination papers, and assessor instructions. Our analysis suggests that in these documents: the self is seen as an abstract; people are understood by category; society is the sum of discrete institutions; self‐in‐society is fully defined; and this representation of society is not contested. This representation becomes increasingly exclusive with age/ability and may be linked to assumed modes of curricular division, teaching and assessment. We discuss how this overall picture might affect students’ sense of ‘agency’ in the light of citizenship education. We conclude that the social‐subjects’ curricular representation of self‐in‐society may not fully support the Scottish Education‐for‐Citizenship framework.

Space, place and sustainability and the role of outdoor education

The call for this special issue asked whether outdoor education had any specific or special role to play in fostering environmental sustainability. The question was predicated on a small but steady stream of peer-reviewed articles in the outdoor education research literature claiming that there were such roles that were under-realised as yet or in need of deeper investigation (see, e.g., Higgins, 1996; Higgins & Kirk, 2006; Hill, 2012; Irwin, 2008; Lugg, 2007; Nicol, 2002). Indeed, the title of the special issue—‘Space, Place and Sustainability and the Role of Outdoor Education’—attempted to recognise that outdoor education is at the very least a choice about the places and spaces of education (no matter how diverse are those choices), and that this was also a contemporary feature of the sustainability and environmental education research literature (see, e.g., Jones, Selby, & Sterling, 2010; Mannion, Fenwick, & Lynch, 2013). Four papers constitute this issue. Clarke and Mcphie offer a full ontological reexamination of ‘the crisis of perception’ to which sustainability is said to respond, and argue that an animistic sensibility might usefully inform outdoor (and indoor) educational endeavour. Hill and Brown provide an illustrated analysis of how intentionally deployed place-responsive pedagogies might be transformative of learners’ conceptions of sustainability. Gurholt examines her reading of 200 Norwegian youths’ views of friluftsliv (literally: free-air life) education and considers their relationships with the outdoors. Finally, Cook and Cutting present an evaluation of students’ experiences following visits to low-impact communities as a pedagogical strategy. These four papers are suggestive of outdoor education beginning to work positively with the pressing needs of sustainability, in both research and practice. Whilst it is an error to regard a special issue as a snapshot of the state of play, the process of producing the form presents the editors with a potentially revealing story about a field, at least to the extent that it is represented by the authors and audience of the journal in question. In so doing, we read into these four papers a sense that the outdoor education community was pushing at several boundaries for research and practice, two of which we thought seemed generative for future reflection and examination. This editorial therefore considers the extent to which outdoor education evokes sustainability largely in terms of the material world and also in political terms. In the first of these it seemed to us that several of the papers were ‘playing to’ but explicitly moving beyond the relationship between outdoor education for sustainability (OEfS) and natural or semi-natural environments (or the attention given to the learner–nature or learner–environment relationships). The significance of this effort lies in whether the resulting conception of sustainability is primarily material (e.g. the sustainability of finite resources or ecosystem services) rather than, say, social, economic, justice oriented or political. The second, and related, issue that the papers at least imply to be worthy of greater attention concerns what kind of transformation is intended by OEfS. Such transformative purposes might anticipate changes for the learner, or places, or social conditions, including educational conditions, or all of these; thus prompting us to ask: What is the politics of outdoor education when it attends to sustainability? Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 3, 191–197, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2014.960684

Negotiating managerialism: professional recognition and teachers of sustainable development education

Policy strategies to reward teachers for field-specific expertise have become internationally widespread and have been criticized for being manifestations of neoliberal globalization. In Scotland, there is political commitment to such strategies, including one to award recognition to teachers for expertise in sustainable development education (SDE). This study examined 22 application forms for that award, conducted face-to-face discussions with 8 successful teacher applicants, and with two policy-making actors and analyzed the websites of relevant policy institutions. The study asked how the concept of ‘the professional teacher of SDE’ was negotiated through the policy. In both policy and teacher discourse, there was a struggle to reconcile the constructions of the teacher as an individualized generic manager and as committed to SDE as a networked, disciplinary field of endeavor. Managerialism is a neoliberal technology, so these tensions are interpreted as traces of neoliberal ideology. Moreover, their negotiation is interpreted as de- and re-bordering engagements with globalization. The critical potential of these interpretations is in the revealed incompleteness of the engagements, leaving teachers and policy-makers with scope to manage responses to neoliberal globalization in SDE.

Citizenship & Democracy in Further and Adult Education

chapter on the University of Southern Maine; and Watson, Benson, Daly, and Pelton’s chapter on the Child Development Project), it would be informative to see these programs’ results in the field. Nonetheless, the collection serves as a practical reference for teacher educators, and the editors’ and contributors’ acknowledgement of the need for more such research might suggest this as a topic for a follow-up edition. Ultimately, Sanger and Osguthorpe’s collection is built on the premise that, whether educators know it or not, ‘anyone teaching in a classroom, to varying degrees and with different levels of success, engages in teaching morally and teaching morality’ (p. 3). If this premise, which lies at the heart of the book’s mission, is true, the critical question is how to teach morally and morality both intentionally and effectively. To this end, the essays become valuable templates from real-life ventures. Committed teacher educators would do well to take a look.