[DRAFT]

Some notes towards the development of curriculum for the anthropocene (CfA) in higher education

Use the Anthropocene as provocation for curriculum development to test and link CfA features to Anthropocene features. That is, it needs to engage directly with the ecological, economic, and political challenges of the Anthropocene. It cannot repeat educational practices, models and patterns of thinking that have themselves contributed to the contemporary ecological crisis.

Appreciate the disruptive nature of the following processes and approaches. They present a radical critique of some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning the dominant ways of doing education research and curriculum development. Curriculum and pedagogy then are not stable categories but need to be interrogated and recreated as to their being fit-for-purpose in the Anthropocene.

The following Items can be seen as approaches and principles for CfA

Anti-Fatalism & Paralysis – Educators responsibility to generate hope and agency

More-than-human – Dismissing the conceit of anthropocentrism and engaging with a multispecies commons – a place where human–animal entanglements are explicit, where social, biological and historical processes are entwined with wider ecological processes.

Student-led pedagogy – integrating academic and societal knowledge from real-world experiences brought to the class by faculty, students and other knowledge holders. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and practice.

Contested Curriculum – Analyse critically via a domination / resistance frame. Deconstruct past injustice while disrupting ongoing cycles of inequality and exclusion.

Interrelated Teaching / Learning Strategies for CfA

• Place-based pedagogy but within its regional and global contexts.
• Using place-based socio-political and economic circumstances, but engaging with the previously excluded perspectives of women, Indigenous people, and so on.
• Emphasise regenerative, strength-based stances ecologically as well as socially.
• Use systemic participatory action research techniques that have the following characteristics:

1. Able to recognise ‘place’ as stakeholder
2. Transdisciplinary (ie demands the inclusion of non-academic actors (and knowledge holders) into the processes of knowledge generation)
3. Multi-literacy basis that includes inter-species involvement and the more-than-human world
4. Collaborative
5. Self-reflexive,
6. Respectful of fragility, and
7. Associated with values transformation