Curriculum and environmental education

Education is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and essential for the success of all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In fact, education can accelerate progress towards the achievement of all of the SDGs and therefore should be part of the strategies to achieve each of them. A key debate in those early days continues to the present. It is whether environmental education is inevitably characterised by a ‘pedagogy of despair’ or something other. In fact, arguments and counter arguments have also shown how educators, including environmental educators, might respond to any heavy-handedness in how assumed normative dimensions to such education and curriculum are operationalised or critiqued. Key debates were often on what was required as interventions or changes to the goals, content and experience of curriculum, most often by arguing for their revision, reorientation, and possibly, transformation through a deliberate focus on the provision of environmental education.