2016 SPECIAL EDITION OF THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN JOURNAL OF
ENVIRONEMENTAL EDUCATION: Re-visioning environmental knowledge and
pedagogies in 21st century southern Africa curricula (schooling and teacher
education)
The recently debated UNESCO ‘Education 2030: A Framework for Action’ closely links the
concept of quality of education with Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), arguing
that ESD is needed to enrich acquisition of other foundational competences such as
literacy and numeracy. Educational challenges of the 21st century involve engaging
with the connection between quality of education and equality in education. The
Education 2030 Framework for Action sets targets for achieving Sustainable Development
Goal 4 (including a target on ESD), which forms part of a suite of seventeen new
development goals1 that seek to set the world on a more sustainable path. A
central tenet of these new policy developments is a call for all learners across the
world to “… acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development”.
We are particularly interested in the positionality and content associated with
environmental knowledge in this context, and its relationship to other forms of
knowledge relevant to sustainable development, such as knowledge of green and
more benign economic models and approaches and social justice. In this special
edition of the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education we seek to
explore the challenges of this new and important agenda for education from a
curriculum, knowledge and pedagogical perspective, focusing mainly on schooling and
teacher education in southern Africa.
This special edition of the SAJEE invites responses from authors to the statement by
UNESCO (2012: 5) that “… it appears that as the sustainability content of the curriculum
evolves, pedagogy is evolving simultaneously”. We invite authors to especially explore this
curriculum dynamic from a southern African perspective in the context of schooling and/or
teacher professional development. We invite authors to explicate the theoretical framings that
are being used to integrate ESD knowledge and pedagogical concerns into their school and
teacher education curriculum policy and praxis contexts. We also invite critical papers
discussing the internationalisation of environmental knowledge via global policy developments
such as the Education 2030: Framework for Action, UNESCO’s Global Action Plan for ESD, and
the SDGs. Authors are invited to address questions that include (but are not limited to):
• How do different country’s curriculum policies and practices present principles, value
orientations, learning outcomes and core competencies that respond to calls for educational
access, sustainability, educational quality and societal transformation?
• How are different countries approaching ESD in curriculum policy? Strategies may range from
strong inter--‐ disciplinarity which has the capacity to develop a wide--‐range of skills and
perspectives to address complex problems, to more tightly subject--‐bounded strategies where
ESD practices strengthen subject knowledge, knowledge of these concepts in practice in
specialised fields, and learner access to a growing professional field of environmentally skilled
citizens?
• What are the mechanisms that support the inclusion of new environment and sustainability
knowledge in curriculum policy and other educational resources?
• How are curricula presenting local and global perspectives on (amongst others) four key areas
of sustainable development as presented in the UNESCO Global Action Plan: Climate change,
biodiversity, disaster risk reduction and sustainable production and consumption? What is
included and/or excluded by these knowledge focus areas? How are the ‘newness’, dynamic,
complex and open--‐ended nature of these key knowledge areas presented in curriculum
documentation (including policy, textbooks and other supportive texts) and in teacher education
programmes, and how are potential challenges of atomisation, reduction and fragmentation in
curriculum policy documents addressed?
• Given the commitment in ESD policy to action oriented and transformative learning, how is
teacher education framed to interpret and implement curriculum in terms of the relationship
between teacher knowledge, teaching strategies and assessment strategies?
REVISED DATE FOR ABSTRACTS: 20 NOVEMBER 2015
FINAL PAPERS Due: 30 April 2016
Email abstracts to Dr Ingrid Schudel: i.schudel@ru.ac.za
1
These seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will replace the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs).