PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT Series Editors: Alan Reid and Marcia McKenzie CCitizzeenshhiipp aand Educcaattion ffoorr SSusttaaiinnabbiilliittyy and Environmmeennt MMaallin Iddeellaandd Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment Series Editors Alan Reid Faculty of Education Monash University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Marcia McKenzie College of Education University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, Canada This series focuses on new developments in the study of education and environment. Promoting theoretically-rich works, contributions include empirical and conceptual studies that advance critical analysis in envi- ronmental education and related fields. Concerned with the underlying assumptions and limitations of current educational theories in conceptu- alizing environmental and sustainability education, the series highlights works of theoretical depth and sophistication, accessibility and applicabil- ity, and with critical orientations to matters of public concern. It engages interdisciplinary and diverse perspectives as these relate to domains of pol- icy, practice, and research. Studies in the series may span a range of scales from the more micro level of empirical thick description to macro con- ceptual analyses, highlighting current and upcoming turns in theoretical thought. Tapping into a growing body of theoretical scholarship in this domain, the series provides a venue for examining and expanding theoriza- tions and approaches to the interdisciplinary intersections of environment and education. Its timeliness is clear as education becomes a key mode of response to environmental and sustainability issues internationally. The series will offer fresh perspectives on a range of topics such as: • curricular responses to contemporary accounts of human-environ- ment relations (e.g., the Anthropocene, nature-culture, animal stud- ies, transdisciplinary studies) • the power and limits of new materialist perspectives for philosophies of education • denial and other responses to climate change in education practice and theory • place-based and land-based orientations to education and scholarship • postcolonial and intersectional critiques of environmental education and its research • policy research, horizons, and contexts in environmental and sustain- ability education More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15084 Malin Ideland The Eco-Certified Child Citizenship and Education for Sustainability and Environment Malin Ideland Faculty of Education and Society Malmö University Malmö, Sweden Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment ISBN 978-3-030-00198-8 ISBN 978-3-030-00199-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00199-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018955456 An earlier version of the text in this book was published in Swedish with the title Den KRAV-märkta människan (Celanders förlag 2016). Translated by Alan Crozier. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my girls, Tova and Malva Ideland, whom I hope to be willing and able to hear and tell more than the single story. Foreword The Eco-Certified Child. Citizenship and Education for Sustainability and Environment brings into view paradoxes of the good intentions of schooling to provide for a more enlightened and progressive society. The paradoxes are embodied in the very efforts to provide a more inclu- sive, thoughtful and progressive society that simultaneously produces exclusions and abjections. The book provocatively engages today’s doxa or commonsense about enacting the moral and social commitments of education through examining the principles that order what is said, thought about and done in the name of those good intentions. The substance of the analysis focuses on Swedish environmen- tal and sustainable development education. But the case is not about national programs and their particularities. The case is the very condi- tions of enactments that order and classify the desires of modern edu- cation. And in this case of paradox is how the fondness of science as the privileged knowledge for rectifying social wrongs is enacted in the school. Ideland’s study illuminates how what is named as science is a translation and transmogrification in the curriculum as cultural theses about modes of living. I use the plural—cultural theses about modes of vii viii Foreword living—to refer to a continuum of values that differentiates the sustain- able child from the child cast as different and excluded as “unstainable”! Sustainable development integrates the science and science education with economics and social education. This brings clearly into focus the curriculum as a cultural practice and the political of schooling. Educating about the appropriation/misappropriation natural recourses is about kinds of people that exclude and abject particular populations from equal participation in the name of rectifying social wrongs. Let me start then with a general proposition about schooling that this book artfully and systematically brings into focus. The good inten- tions of the modern school continually connect with the hope of the European Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism, and with the faith in reason and science in producing a better and more rational and open- minded world.1 Of course, the French Philosophés, Republic of Letters and Encyclopédie, did not talk about sustainable development. But they sought to applied reason as a critical eye to the society and its weakness in order to think about human betterment. These searches for progress were (re)visioned in the political theories of new republicanism and the formation of the modern, mass schooling of the nineteenth century. What is important in this ‘history’ for understanding the significant contribution of Ideland’s book is twofold. First, the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitanism that emphasized a particular kind of person whose reason and rationality (science) was cast as models in the new republican forms of government. The new American and French republican governments of the 1 Of course, the book and my discussion relate particularly to schools in Western Europe and North America. Yet my reference to the Enlightenment is not to colonialize the emergence of the modern school through universalizing and essentializing the Enlightenment. Rather, it is to rec- ognize it as a space within particular historical formations that circulated internationally in differ- ent time/spaces. Marx was influenced by the Enlightenment, and the various forms of Marxism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are exemplars of this notion of travel as a relation and historical concept. For example, the marvel of John Dewey’s pragmatism in the United States was to provide a way to bring Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan values into the everyday organiza- tion of schooling; but the traveling of Dewey’s ideas as they moved into China and Turkey, for example, were not merely copies of the cultural principles enunciated in the pragmaticism. What is assembled and connected (and disconnected) are not merely copies or borrowing to make the new schools, which requires unthinking and rethinking historical differentiations without insert- ing binaries such as the West and “Other”. (See, e.g., Popkewitz, 2005; Popkewitz, Khursid, & Zhao, 2014) Foreword ix nineteenth century as well as in Sweden by the end of that century, were depended on particular historically derived rationalities about the wisdom of the citizen, as evident in today’s European and American debates about multicultural and intercultural education. The notions of the rational indi- vidual historically connected collective norms of belonging with those of civic responsibilities to participate in the society made possible governing and contributing in the social progress. If we think about the American Declaration of Independence (1776) calling for the purpose of govern- ment as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and the French “Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen” (1789), these are radical phrases not only about the natural right of people to freedom but also the governing of the kind of person who inhabits the spaces of participation. Schooling became a central site for the making of this kind of person necessary for the intricacies of social life and government. The citizen is one that continually needs to be made, as it is not born as such. It entails a different subjectivity that the person is the subject of a sover- eign. The person is spoken about in social and educational theories as one whose modes of life enable freedom, empowerment, participation, and collaboration to make possible the equitable and just societies, in which “eco-certified” child as a kind of person is central to this argu- ment about environmental education and sustainable development. What counts as the education for sustainable development, if I pursue this in Ideland’s study is the inscription ofdiscoursesof sciences that are assembled and connected with cultural discourses of the wisdom of the citizen through the school curriculum. This brings me to the second element that provides an important contribution of this book for understanding the paradoxes of mod- ern schooling. By the end of the nineteenth century, the distinction between reason (wisdom) and rationality mostly disappeared as the two notions are subsumed under the singular term of science. Science, then, became a social and cultural term that was not merely about particular kinds of expertise and what people do as scientists. Science becomes sets of historical principles for ordering, classifying and giving truth claims to what is seen, talked about and done in daily life. It is these different meanings of science that become ensconced in the school curriculum x Foreword that is not merely the provenance of science education. The epistemic principles that connect the knowledge-content of “science” with ped- agogical practices found in mathematics, music, and art education as well. The enactments of environmental and sustainable development give symbolic privilege to science but in fact whose name connects vari- ous sets of principles for ordering, classifying and governing in the mak- ing of kinds of people. The focus on education for sustainable development and ecology becomes the cultural artifact investigated and the paradoxes of good intentions explored in this book. When I speak of science, it is to think about it as a cultural artifact that circulates in the school curriculum rather than as what people do in disciplinary fields and their production of knowledge. First, science “acts” as the sacred knowledge of modernity. Science, since the nineteenth century, assumed cultural significance as the apoth- eosis of wisdom (Nye, 1999). Its knowledge had utopic qualities. It was to provide salvation and redemption through identifying the pathways to progress and human happiness. The inscription of science as a social knowledge captures, in one sense, the good intentions of sustainable development in the curriculum. In its contemporary terms, the faith in science turns to the particular trust given to positivism and empir- icism to identify the ecological knowledge necessary to understand how nature works in relation to human interferences; that is, to find sustainable development. And science is the panacea to social improve- ment identifying the correct pathways for modernizing what schools do. For example, how social life can be changed to have a more progres- sive society (the long-range tasks for making the effective teacher and instructional improvement), and to create social justice and equality. The mantra of science gives legitimacy to the purpose of benchmarks, using “scientific evidence” to prove what reforms work, and identifying the authentic teacher who enacts the good intentions of society in the practices of school. Second, education in ecology and sustainable development are never purely about nature, the physical world in the interaction with social practices and people. The formation of the curriculum is pro- duced through different intersecting historical events. At one layer is