Chapter 10: Human–Environmental Relationships as Curriculum Context: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Educators today are being challenged by the inequities inherent in a standards-based, high-stakes accountability driven system. Driven by federal (“No Child Left Behind”) and state legislation and policy mandates, reform efforts have resulted in a narrowing of curricula and assessment practices, often in direct conflict with evidence-based research on teaching and learning. Interdisciplinary ways of knowing, which are the heart of understanding and which help us respond to a global ecological disaster in progress, are devalued, while an ever-restrictive curriculum climate dominates the standardized structure of school reform. Emphasis on reading and mathematics, currently at the forefront of the standardized curriculum and accountability movement, limits the time available for teachers and students to engage in other subject matter content areas, including the arts, ecology, and the social sciences. At the same time, teachers’ voices are drowned out in a cacophony of corporate, legislative, and media-driven claims that teachers and students are failing, and in fact, that public schools are directly contributing to the current economic recession. Therefore, educational policies, primarily directed by non-educators, and almost always far from the classroom, are requiring ever more rigorous attention to educational practices associated with student memorization and test-taking skills. The assumption is that educational achievement can be appropriately measured by the use of multiple-choice items on standardized tests. The pattern of blaming schools, teachers, and students for national security and economic decline was previously witnessed during the Cold War and the race for space, with renewed calls for emphasis on science and engineering. But it was not until 1983 when the national education debate came front and center, thrust forward with the Reagan Administration’s highly influential publication, A Nation at Risk. The overriding message implied that public schools were culpable and primarily responsible for a decline in American business growth, and for undermining dominant neoliberal economic free-market values and practices. Subsequent legislative efforts have served as a force to rein in liberal education ideals and foster greater social control and a further perpetuation of a class-based society, in which the poor become poorer and rich richer. Discussion of the function and purposes of democratic ideals as fundamental principles and purposes of education, for example, faded into a rhetoric praising the virtues of privatization and standardization of all public schools, essentially silencing the narratives of those most directly involved in the day-to-day education of young people.