Situaciones determinadas en la revisión de ingresos y efectivo del Proyecto en la Escuela Normal José Martí

In the Canadian context, a national body called the Council of Ministers for Education Canada (CMEC) was formed in 1967 to provide a forum for provincial/territorial education ministers to have a national voice on important issues. This was particularly important for Canada given that education policy is provincially/territorially mandated (Nazir et al. 2009). While CMEC has produced several documents relating to ESD recommendations for Canadian education (e.g., CMEC 2007, 2010), there are no formal educational frameworks that sanction provinces/territories to engage with these endorsements. Yet, Jickling (2006) claimed that although it was not a compulsory curriculum agenda, ESD was generally not received well by Canadian environmental educators. As Jickling suggested, teachers typically opposed notions of sustainability with preferences to maintaining association with environmental education. Further, Jickling commented that teachers were deterred by ESD, given its focus on learning, rather than more holistic ideas relating to education.

On a global scale, scholars in the environmental education field have illuminated inherent tensions within UNESCO’s vision of ESD for environmental education. While I acknowledge that there are many different critiques of ESD within any given context, I have included these specific interrelated and interconnected tensions, and associated comments from scholars in the

environmental education field, as I have identified these as the most pervasive issues implicated in challenging binary logics through a (re)storying of human/nonhuman relationships.

2.4.1 ESD Tension One: Over-reliance on Science, Technology, and Economic Growth

Drawing on ESD’s over- reliance on science and technology, Edgard Gonzalez-Gaudiano and Rosa Nidia Buenfil-Burgos (2009) argued that this has caused societies to become enmeshed within utilitarian values, driven by consumerism, and further divided from the environment. For Margarita Pavlova (2013), overarching ideas of sustainable development remain ‘linked to the contemporary faith in the power of science and technology to resolve environmental problems’ (p. 665). And according to Braidotti (2013), the prevailing idea that economic growth and rational and secular pursuits of techno-scientific innovations can provide the solution to global ecological problems is fraught with tension. As the spinning machine of the global economy impacts all living species, Braidotti suggests that this also leads to the radical disruption of human/nonhuman relationships.

While the discursive systems perpetuating the over-reliance on science, technology, and economic growth might not explicitly deny pervasive and ongoing socio-ecological crisis narratives, they are detrimental to the field of environmental education. In prioritising the development of science, technology, and economic growth, the political, economic, and social ideologies of these systems understand such crises through the lens of ecological modernisation. Through this lens, the structure of the ecological crisis is, indeed, derived from unsustainable commercialisation, consumption, and exploitation of planet Earth, yet this lens simultaneously assumes that existing political, economic, and social institutions can fix these issues through their internalising care for the environment. In its lack of genuine commitment to the

development means that it fails to actively account for social and environmental considerations in attending to socio-ecological crisis narratives.

2.4.2 ESD Tension Two: Globalising, Neoliberal, and Capitalist Spinning Wheels of a Commercialised Earth

Other critics of ESD have questioned whether such agenda has the traction to challenge or problematise globalisation, neoliberalism, and capitalist political and economic structures, suggesting rather, that it contributes to, and exacerbates, globalisation, neoliberalism, and

capitalism (Jickling 2016). For example, John Huckle alongside Wals (2015) claimed that, ‘there is too little attention to power, politics and citizenship; the ways in which neoliberalism has made the adoption of sustainable behaviours and lifestyles less likely’ (p. 492). Helen Kopnina (2012, 2015) examined power hegemonies in ESD/environmental education, as neoliberal ideologies purport that good citizenship equates to market participation, advancing global competitiveness of political and economic agendas. Moreover, as governments look for market solutions to educational expansion, efforts to understand human/nonhuman relationships in environmental education are implicated by the globalised ‘market economy’ (Rizvi & Lingard 2010). As David Greenwood (formerly Gruenewald) (2004) argued, ‘corporations, government, and the media constantly reinforce the connection between education and successful competition in the global, capitalist economy...directed at and adopted by educational institutions, sometimes with militant urgency’ (p. 77). These ideas were also taken up by McKenzie alongside Andrew Bieler and Rebecca McNeil (2015), as they questioned the integrity of sustainability when twinning with processes of neoliberalism in educational policy. For David Hursh, Joseph Henderson, and David Greenwood (2015), while the known effects of neoliberalism are certainly troubling for the field of environmental education, more troubling is the idea that neoliberalism has become so

naturalised, and internalised in these Anthropocene times, that its homogenising and institutionalising effects on environmental education can often go unnoticed.

2.4.3 ESD Tension Three: Homogenising and Institutionalising of Policy on Local Practices Referring to the unclear definitions of ESD, McKenzie (2012) highlighted issues

pertaining to the often vague and tacitly accepted clarifications of what sustainability, education, and development might mean at the local level. Given Canada’s vast and diverse geo-political landscapes, with varying historical, cultural, and linguistic affordances, and an education system of provincially/territorially-based curriculum, the gap between globalising policy mandates and policy, practices, and knowledges within any given situated local context, is particularly

problematic (Nazir et al. 2009). This is because ESD agendas are often filtered through governmental bodies causing different interpretations and political agendas, which means that there is a risk that ESD will not be fully realised at the local school level. In other words, as local policies, practices, and knowledges become co-opted by the (re)colonising and globalising trajectories of Western education, the uptake of sustainable development at local level becomes obscured and diffused (McKenzie 2012).

When environmental education is siloed within structures and forces of globalisation, neoliberalism, and capitalism, a policy-driven discourse of instrumentalist, technicist, and mechanistic teaching practices works to prioritise outcomes-focused ideals (Gough, A 2015; Ideland & Malmberg 2015; Kopnina & Meijers 2014). Pointing to the homogenisation and institutionalisation of global policy movements and the prescriptive construction of teaching, Jickling and Wals (2008) stated:

Many trends in education seem policy-driven, rather than innovation-driven. Trends such as lifelong learning and competence-based education are inspired by national and international policies (and corresponding economic incentives). Environmental education is no different. The conversion from environmental education to education for sustainable development may be seen as a policy-driven transition. (p. 5)

As these three interrelated and interconnected tensions in ESD co-opt environmental education, then as the field uses the same tools, principles and theoretical foundations of a system within a culture situated in competition with the nonhuman world, then environmental education is incompatible with its own aims and objectives (Blenkinsop & Egan 2009). In this way, environmental education is geared to:

• Depict humans at the centre (Pavlova 2013);

• Prioritise economic concerns to the detriment of socio-ecological priorities (Hart 2002; Sauve et al. 2005);

• Promote an individualistic and national competition of winners and losers (Greenwood 2004; Hursh et al. 2015; Kopnina 2015);

• Teach about ‘nature’ as a resource (Kopnina 2012);

• View the environment is something to be valued as an entity outside of humans (Bell & Russell 2000).

Ultimately, the narrative emulating the idea that the Earth is something humans can ‘save’, through affirmations of human exceptionalism and supremacism, means that environmental education is limited through its ability or capacity to actively address and (re)story the cultural roots of socio-ecological crisis narratives (Bowers 2004).

2.5 Welcome to the Anthropocene