This article addresses the effects of neoliberalism as it operates through global and local educational policy, and in particular in relation to the United Nations' Education for Sustainable Development initiatives. It examines how a politics of scale is necessary in enabling critique and in rearticulating forms of education policy-making and practice that prioritize interscaler local ‘good sense’ over neoliberal global ‘common sense’. The article closes with examples of interscaler data from a participatory research project on youth orientations to place and sustainability that aims to use practice to generatively examine sustainability education policy.
References
1.
AppaduraiA. (1996) Here and Now, in AppaduraiA., Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization, pp. 1–23. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
2.
BallS.J. (1997) Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research: A personal review of recent education policy and policy research, British Education Research Journal, 23(3), 257–274. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0141192970230302
3.
BattisteM.HendersonJ.Y. (2000) Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A global challenge. Saskatoon: Purich.
4.
BrayM. (1999) Control of Education: Issues and tensions in centralization and decentralization, in ArnoveR.F.TorresC.A. (Eds) Comparative Education: The dialectic of the global and the local, pp. 207–232. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
5.
BreidlidA. (2009) Culture, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Sustainable Development: A critical view of education in an African context, International Journal of Educational Development, 29, 140–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2008.09.009
ChirkovV.GeresK. (2007) The Integration of Immigrant and Refugee youth in Saskatoon, SK: Challenges and potential solutions. Paper presented at the 9th National Metropolis Conference, Toronto, Ontario.
9.
ConnellR. (2007) Southern Theory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
10.
CoulthardG. (2010) Place against Empire: Understanding indigenous anti-colonialism, Affinities, 4(2), 79–83.
DioufM. (2000) The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism, Public Culture, 12(3), 679–702. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-3-679
13.
DownL.NurseH. (2007) Education for Sustainable Development Networks, Potential and Challenge: A critical reflection on the formation of the Caribbean Regional Network, Journal of Education for Teaching, 33(2), 177–190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607470701259473
14.
EscobarA. (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NH: Duke University Press.
15.
EstevaG.PrakashM.S. (1998) Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. New York: Zed Books.
FranciscoV. (2008) Diaspora as Geography: The Filipino diaspora and political organization. Paper presented at the American Association of Geographers Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada. March.
18.
FriedmanT.L. (2005) The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st century. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
19.
González-GaudianoE. (2005) Education for Sustainable Development: Configuration and meaning, Policy Futures in Education, 3(3), 243–250. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2005.3.3.2
20.
GoughN. (2009) Becoming Transnational: Rhizosemiosis, complicated conversation, and curriculum inquiry, in McKenzieM.HartP.BaiH.JicklingB. (Eds) Fields of Green: Restorying culture, environment, and education, pp. 67–84. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
21.
GruenewaldD.A. (2004) A Foucauldian Analysis of Environmental Education: Towards the socioecological challenge of the Earth Charter, Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2004.00281.x
22.
HallA. J. (2010) Earth into Property: Colonization, decolonization, and capitalism. Montreal: McGill University Press.
23.
HarveyD. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
24.
HarveyD. (2010) Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.
KaiserR.NikiforovaE. (2008) The Performativity of Scale: The social construction of scale effects in Narva, Estonia, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 537–562. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d3307
27.
KapoorI. (2008) Capitalism, Culture and Agency: Dependency versus postcolonial theory, in KapoorI., The Postcolonial Politics of Development, pp. 3–18. London: Routledge.
28.
KatzC. (2004) Growing up Global: Economic restructuring and children's everyday lives. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
29.
KostogrizA.TsolidisG. (2008) Transcultural Literacy: Between the global and the local, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 16(2), 125–136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681360802142054
30.
LeggS. (2007) Reviewing Geographies of Memory/Forgetting, Environment and Planning A, 39(2), 456–466. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a38170
31.
LevinsonB.A.U.SuttonM. (2001) Introduction. Policy as/in Practice: A sociocultural approach to the study of educational policy, in SuttonM.LevinsonB.A.U. (Eds) Policy as Practice: Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy, vol. 1, pp. 1–22. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
32.
LinderK.E. (2011) Global Competition in a ‘Flat’ World: A Foucauldian analysis of the neoliberal mentalities of ‘2 Million Minutes’, Discourse, 32(3), 443–456. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.573260
33.
MacKayG. (2005) The City as Home: The sense of belonging among Aboriginal youth in Saskatoon. Prepared for the Bridges and Foundations Project on Urban Aboriginal Housing. Saskatoon: Author.
34.
MasseyD. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
35.
MasseyD. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.
36.
MawhinneyH.B. (2010) Shifting Scales of Education Politics in a Vernacular of Disruption and Dislocation, Educational Policy, 24, 245–263. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0895904809355446
37.
McKenzieM.KayiraJ.WalsA. (2009) ESD for All? The Paradox of Global Prescriptions for Local Development/Participation. Paper presented at the World Environmental Education Congress, Montreal, Quebec. May.
38.
McLeod, Julie (2009) Youth studies, Comparative Inquiry and the Local/Global Problematic, Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 31(4), 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714410903132840
39.
MillerP.RoseN. (2008) Governing the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press.
40.
Ministry of Education (MOE), Province of Saskatchewan (2005) The Learning Community in Aboriginal Education: Priorities report, 2005–2007. Regina: Author.
41.
Ministry of Education (MOE), Province of Saskatchewan (2009) Plan for 2009–10. Regina: Author.
42.
MirónL.DarderA.IndaJ.X.L. (2005) Transnationalism, Transcitizenship, and the Implications for the ‘New World Order’, in McCarthyC.CrichlowW.DimitriadisG.DolbyN. (Eds) Race, Identity, and Representation in Education, pp. 289–306. London: Routledge.
43.
MuellerM.P.BentleyM.L. (2009) Environmental and Science Education in Developing Nations: A Ghanaian approach to renewing and revitalizing the local community and ecosystems, Journal of Environmental Education, 40(4), 53–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JOEE.40.4.53-64
44.
NguyênT.S.T. (2010) Vietnamese Diasporic Placemaking: An ethnographic moment in uneven geographic development, Educational Policy, 24, 159–188. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0895904809354496
45.
OlssenM.PetersA. (2005) Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism, Journal of Educational Policy, 20(3), 313–345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930500108718
46.
PaquetteJ.FallonG. (2010) First-Nations Educational Policy in Canada: Progress or gridlock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
RasmussenD. (n.d.) Cease to Do Evil, Then Learn to Do Good … (A pedagogy for the oppressor). Unpublished manuscript, pp. 1–17.
49.
RasmussenD.AkulukjukT. (2009) My Father Was Told to Talk to the Environment First before Anything Else: Arctic environmental education in the language of the land, in McKenzieM.HartP.BaiH.JicklingB. (Eds) Fields of Green: Restorying culture, environment, and education, pp. 135–151. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
50.
ReganP. (2010) Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.
51.
RicoeurP. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SassenS. (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
55.
SassenS. (2007) A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W.W. Norton.
56.
SaundersK. (2002) Introduction: Towards a deconstuctive post-development criticism, in SaundersK. (Ed.) Feminist Post-development Thought, pp. 1–38. New York: Zed Books.
57.
SauvéL.BrunelleR.BerrymanT. (2005) Influence of the Globalized and Globalizing Sustainable Development Framework on National Policies Related to Environmental Education, Policy Futures in Education, 3(3), 271–283. http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2005.3.3.5
58.
ShavaS. (2008) Indigenous Knowledges: A genealogy of representations and applications in developing contexts of environmental education and development in southern Africa. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Rhodes University, South Africa.
59.
ShinkshantarA. (2008) What's the REAL Story? Generating a Dialogue around the MDGs. The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development. http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/rethinkMDGs.pdf (accessed December 5, 2010).
60.
SiodmakE. (2008) Geographic Imaginaries and the Politics of Community in Miaflor, Nicaragua. Paper Presented at the American Association of Geographers Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada. March.
61.
SlaterD. (2003) Beyond Euro-Americanism: Democracy and post-colonialism, in AndersonK.DomashM.PileS.ThriftN. (Eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography, pp. 420–432. London: Sage.
62.
SmithL.T. (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. New York: Zed Books.
63.
SmithN. (1984) Uneven Development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. New York: Blackwell.
64.
Steiner-KhamsiG. (Ed.) (2004) The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending. New York: Teachers College Press.
65.
StiglitzJ. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton.
66.
Sustainability and Education Training Academy (SEdA), York University (2010) Leadership for Sustainable Development in Education Brochure. Toronto: SEdA.
67.
TakanoT.HigginsP.McLaughlinP. (2009) Connecting with Place: Implications of integrating cultural values into the school curriculum in Alaska, Environmental Education Research, 15(3), 343–370. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504620902863298
UNESCO (2009) Bonn Declaration: UNESCO world conference on education for sustainable development. Bonn: UNESCO.
70.
WalsA.E.J. (2009) A Mid-decade Review of the Decade for Education for Sustainable Development: Key findings and ways forward, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 3(2), 195–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/097340820900300216
71.
WillinskyJ. (1998) Learning to Divide the World: Education at empire's end. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
72.
WilsonA. (2010) Interconnecting isms: Race, gender, and homophobia in education. Concluding Keynote Address, ‘Social Justice in Education: How far will you go?’, Saskatchewan Teacher's Federation SAFE Conference, Saskatoon, October.
73.
ZepkeN. (2011) Navigating between Maori Particularism and Economic Universalism in Adult Literacy Provision in Aotearoa New Zealand: The case for Wananga, Discourse, 32(3), 431–442. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2011.573259
