Ecologically and Culturally Informed Educational Reforms in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

As people across the country are now experiencing the extreme weather conditions predicted in scientific reports, it is now time for teacher education and curriculum studies faculty to begin introducing reforms that enable classroom teachers to recognize when students are being socialized to take for granted ecologically unsustainable patterns of thinking. In addition to the toxic chemicals introduced by our consumer-dependent lifestyle, there is another major change that is altering the life prospects of students that also needs to be addressed in reforming teacher education and curriculum studies. That is, the long-standing tradition of replacing workers and their craft knowledge with machines has now reached a new stage of development where computer-driven production processes, as well as the outsourcing of work to the low-wage regions of the world, are now eliminating the need for workers who perform routine tasks in offices and on factory floors. Life-time employment and traditional careers, according to recent studies in the United States and Europe, will only be available for the small class of highly educated individuals. Work for the rest of the population will be low paying and characterized by continual uncertainty. This book, from which this excerpt is drawn, suggests how teacher education and curriculum studies programs can begin to address both of these life-altering changes.