Beyond business as usual (but greener) politics

The types of global citizenship education that children and young people are exposed to within and beyond schools has important consequences for how they understand themselves and the world, including their role in society, their relationships with others and their environment, and their capacity to affect change.

This webinar offers a critique of dominant ways of thinking about the Anthropocene generation in terms of their innocence/vulnerability, their exceptionalism/heroism, their mental health/eco-anxiety, and their agency/activism. The speakers will argue that mainstream educational thinking that draws on these dominant frames has a range of problematic effects, ranging from: obscuring more uncomfortable realities about some children and youths’ implication in the ecological crisis; occluding more nuanced and expansive encounters with responsibility and vulnerability; and bolstering pedagogical preoccupations which serve to reinscribe “business as usual (but greener)” (BAU-G) politics rather than the system change that is so desperately required.

The speakers will outline a range of alternative approaches to global citizenship informed by “de-growth” and post-materialist perspectives as well as non-Western and decolonial scholarship which offer children and young people a concrete vision of what an alternative to BAU-G looks like.

This event will be particularly useful for teacher educators, student teachers, curriculum developers and education policymakers.

Related links

• Academic Network on Global Education & Learning (ANGEL) Network
• Development Education Research Centre (DERC)
• Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment

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Stacey Gabrielle Koenitz Rozells via Pexels.