Mapping tensions in environmental and sustainability education: considerations for the sustainability cross-curriculum priority and educators at the Australian coal face

Ecological sustainability is one of the most pertinent challenges of our time. Through environmental and sustainability education (ESE), educators seek to support their students to develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions that may support them in responding to and living in a climate changed world. However, these initiatives are often marginalised in curriculum and challenged by conceptual tensions such as how to navigate competing anthropocentric and ecocentric values, and environmental and economic interests, as well as how to make space for localised and cultural knowledge in often universal and Eurocentric policy framings. Sustainability is named as one of three Cross-Curriculum Priority (SCCP) areas of the Australian Curriculum to be taught through subject learning areas. However, this priority is framed as an optional add-on to the curriculum and sits against a backdrop of neoliberal education policies that narrow the scope of education and restrict the potential for Sustainability to be meaningfully integrated in practice. These tensions are made more complex when interacting with context. This thesis examines curricular, conceptual, epistemic, and ethical tensions associated with the teaching of the SCCP, and considers how these may relate to the experiences of Australian fossil fuel communities. It provides an analysis of the educational purposes of the SCCP, identifies conceptual challenges that restrict its environmental and social justice aims, and indicates opportunities within the SCCP to support more transformative visions. Two conceptual tensions are examined in more detail: competing anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews, and environmental and neoliberal aims. The tension between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric worldviews is examined and implications for ESE are discussed. Consideration is given to how the relationship between humans and the broader ecology, and attachments to place are framed in fossil fuel communities. The cruel optimism of pursuing transformative environmental and social justice in an age of neoliberalism is discussed with reference to neoliberalised educational policy that devalues the SCCP and requires public schools to rely on private funding – including from fossil fuel companies implicated in the climate crisis – in order to meet educational needs. These conceptual discussions are extended through an autoethnography of the researcher’s experience living in fossil fuel communities, and a fictional normative case study that examines ethical dilemmas emerging from a school’s funding partnership with a mining company. This thesis argues there is need to support educators in navigating the ethical, normative, epistemic, and conceptual challenges of ESE so educators can pursue its ideals and aims within the complex contexts in which they teach. It offers a normative case study and philosophical analysis of the SCCP to support educators in naming these tensions and working towards aims of sustainability, environmental and social justice from within these contexts.