1st Edition

Neoliberalism and Environmental Education

Edited By Joseph Henderson, David Hursh, David Greenwood Copyright 2017
    228 Pages
    by Routledge

    226 Pages
    by Routledge

    This timely book situates environmental education within and against neoliberalism, the dominant economic, political, and cultural ideology impacting both education and the environment. Proponents of neoliberalism imagine and enact a world where the primary role of the state is to promote capital markets, and where citizens are defined as autonomous entrepreneurs who are to fulfill their needs via competition with, and surveillance of, others.

    These ideas interact with environmental issues in a number of ways and Neoliberalism and Environmental Education engages this interplay with chapters on how neoliberal ideas and actions shape environmental education in formal, informal and community contexts. International contributors consider these interactions in agriculture and gardening, state policy enactments, environmental science classrooms, ecoprisons, and in professional management and educational accountability programs. The collection invites readers to reexamine how economic policy and politics shape the cultural enactment of environmental education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Environmental Education Research.

    Preface Michael Peters

    Introduction: Environmental education in a neoliberal climate David Hursh, Joseph Henderson and David Greenwood

    1. Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times Marcia McKenzie, Andrew Bieler and Rebecca McNeil

    2. Nature is a nice place to save but I wouldn’t want to live there: environmental education and the ecotourist gaze Robert Fletcher

    3. Entrepreneurial endeavors: (re)producing neoliberalization through urban agriculture youth programming in Brooklyn, New York Evan Weissman

    4. Sustainability science and education in the neoliberal ecoprison Peter C. Little

    5. Refusing to settle for pigeons and parks: urban environmental education in the age of neoliberalism Michael W. Derby, Laura Piersol and Sean Blenkinsop

    6. Supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context Alexandra Schindel Dimick

    7. Negotiating managerialism: professional recognition and teachers of sustainable development education Hamish Ross

    8. Neoliberalism, new public management and the sustainable development agenda of higher education: history, contradictions and synergies Sophie E.F. Bessant, Zoe P. Robinson and R. Mark Ormerod

    9. The promise and peril of the state in neoliberal times: implications for the critical environmental education movement in Brazil Nicolas Stahelin, Inny Accioly and Celso Sánchez

    10. Towards a political ecology of education: the educational politics of scale in southern Pará, Brazil David Meek

    11. Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens Clayton Pierce

    12. Community organizing, schools, and the right to the city Gregory A. Smith

    13. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development: business as usual in the end John Huckle and Arjen E.J. Wals

    Biography

    Joseph Henderson is a Research Scientist at the University of Delaware, USA. Trained as an anthropologist of environmental and science education, his research investigates how sociocultural, political, and economic factors influence teaching and learning in emerging energy and climate systems.

    David Hursh is a Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, NY, USA. His research situates education policy and reform in the United States and globally within the context of a neoliberal social imaginary.

    David Greenwood is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Environmental Education at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. His scholarship, teaching, and activism revolve around place-based, environmental, holistic, and sustainability education.