Situated Histories and the Somatic Heart of Language: An Examination of Environmental Education Curricula

Conceptions of nature are not immune to the parameters of the social world. Situating pedagogical texts historically and assessing their current implications is to attempt taking their proper measure. The lenses of purity, pollution, touch, taste, space, and boundaries have to be renegotiated, resisted and re-formed to conceptualize an alternative ecological world. Alternative visions of stories, histories, skills, technologies, and priorities can then be mapped and archived as a possibility, first of all, of the existence of different ways of living and, second of all, as tools ready to challenge the existing dominant conception. Language plays a crucial role in this enterprise. It is a point of departure in the journey of reimagination. This paper, through critical discourse analysis of two sets of texts—an alternative curriculum called the ‘Climate Change Curriculum’ and an interactive curriculum called ‘The Circular Classroom’—seeks to map the contours of discourse that manifest in the texts and the possible outlook it furthers. The discourse around the environment works with the categories of possession, physicality, resources, and boundaries. Even the discourse of environmental justice operates within these frames. No systems of dominant discourse function in a vacuum, but construct and prop each other, making mapping out of heterogeneous, dynamic and plural histories of environmental education curriculum a crucial first step.