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The history of Australian mass schooling has seen contestations over school and curriculum purposes, zig-zagging across conservative and progressive directions. In this paper, we examine how possibilities for students to have 'voice', 'participation' and 'leadership' in their learning are currently limited in Australia. Policy framings, we argue, dampen potentials for connecting young people's democratic and activist impulses – manifest, in our example, in the Schools Strike for Climate movement – with curriculum activity that responds to local-global challenges such as the viral-ecological crisis. We propose an activist curriculum praxis wherein young people undertake action-research – in collaboration with diverse community actors, teachers and academics – on problems that matter for local-global future life with others. Since local-global emergencies are emergent, curriculum must build citizen-capacities to work together, apprenticing to problems that matter for social futures, creating emergently needed knowledge-in-action. This participatory-democratic curriculum approach challenges schools to become more socially just and proactive institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking England as our case study, this paper reviews secondary school environmental education from a policy perspective. By drawing on Stevenson's typologies for environmental improvement and Lucas' categorisation of environmental education, we analyse national policy documents, local authority and Multi-Academy Trust policies; and individual school planning documents. Our findings suggest in these areas a general absence of environment education policy, and where identified a rhetoric towards conservative reform framed as technology solutions, where learning is about the environment, rather than for the environment. We explain how the (lack of) environmental education rhetoric is a result of global economic changes and national austerity policies, and offer insights and signposting for policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an evidence-based model (the I3E model) for embedding education for sustainability (EfS) within a higher education institution. This model emerged from a doctoral research that examined organisational learning and change processes at the University of Southampton to build EfS into the university curriculum. The researcher aimed to learn from real practice through acting as a facilitator for curriculum development in EfS within an interdisciplinary group of academic staff members. A critical friend position was also acquired within a community of practice to implement a programme which attempted to embed sustainability within the student experience. The I3E model identifies four overarching components that can support universities in their aim to embed EfS within the undergraduate curriculum. These integrated components are: Inform the university community about sustainability; Engage the different university stakeholders in the change process towards sustainability; Empower individuals and groups to make change happen within their sphere of influence and action; and Embed sustainability within existing university structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance, the introduction of a national curriculum for Australian schools suggested a new era of revival for school geography. Since the late 1980s, the development and introduction of more integrated conceptions of curriculum design and implementation has seen the decline of Geography as a distinct subject in Australian schools, with statewide guidelines or frameworks that promoted the integration of Geography along with History into Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). The approval of the Australian Curriculum: Geography design in late 2013, therefore, offered some degree of optimism that Geography would be revived as a distinctive area of learning in the secondary environment. Utilising a qualitative comparative case study of three Victorian secondary schools, this paper argues that the hopes of renewal engendered by the institution of an agreed national Geography curriculum have been confronted by the reality of school curriculum and governance processes, in which existing local staff structures and priorities are more of an imperative in school-based Geography curriculum decision-making than policy-driven curriculum change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study was to better understand how Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) policy has been developed and mobilized across subnational contexts in a federated system. We undertook a comparative analysis of sustainability-specific policy and curricula documents from all Canadian provinces and territories. We identified three thematic clusters in the data; two aligned with major global ESE policy initiatives, and a third cluster centered on localized Indigenous education in a northern territory. Conclusions and implications include that the absence of globalized ESE uptake in the northern territory demonstrates localized, relevant, and appropriate policy development, which could inform future global sustainability education initiatives. In addition, with only 6 of 13 provinces and territories having specialized education policy or curricular documents focused on climate and sustainability, there is an urgent need for increased focus in these areas in responding to calls from students and communities for climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inclusion of the climate change topic in the curriculum of school subjects in Singapore was pivotal, such that it positioned the discourse squarely in the structure of Singapore's education system. In an examination of the intersections and disjoints between state policies on climate change against the programmatic curriculum, results showed that there is no strong policy curriculum that mandates how climate change should be learned in Singapore, even though it is present in several school subjects. The topic is included in school subjects through the initiative of subject disciplinary specialists and middle managers of the education ministry. This exemplar has implications on how climate change education policy and practice can be shaped elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]