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Developing the sustainable school: thinking the issues through
Author(s) -
Scott William
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the curriculum journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.843
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1469-3704
pISSN - 0958-5176
DOI - 10.1080/09585176.2013.781375
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , sustainable development , sustainability , work (physics) , process (computing) , plan (archaeology) , set (abstract data type) , political science , education for sustainable development , public relations , sociology , engineering , computer science , geography , mechanical engineering , ecology , philosophy , linguistics , archaeology , law , biology , programming language , operating system
This paper reports on a study that was a response to a call from the UK government%s Department of Children, Schools and Families for research into the link between the work of schools that address sustainability and the UK%s national sustainable development indicators. This was part of the government%s sustainable schools initiative, developed as a contribution to the UN%s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. The paper uses the four capitals model of Herman Daly and Donella Meadows to critically examine, firstly, how a school might make such a contribution to sustainable development, and, then, how we might come to know how effectively this is progressing. In doing this, the paper builds on Webster%s work about the stages that a sustainable school might go through in its development, and the result is three sets of process descriptors to guide a school%s thinking about what it might do. These are presented in the sense of an embryonic and sketchy map to the terrain, rather than as a set of instructions or a detailed plan to follow.