New Publications

  • WTF: weighted total futility

    An article in the Economist's Bartelby column this week served to inform and amuse.  But should it have done? It begins: "Few things are more depressing than estimates of how much time people spend on a specific activity over the course of...

  • Manifestos compared

    I wrote the other day about the 2021 manifesto from Education International.  This post comments on another manifesto: the more recent one from NAEE.  This was launched in early 2022 and you can read a number of comments here.  Before...

  • The manifesto with a hole at its centre

    Thanks to SOS-UK for alerting me to the Manifesto on Quality Climate Change Education for All! [subtitled: Teach for the Planet] from Educational International.  EI is the "Global Union Federation that brings together organisations of teachers and other education employees from across the...

  • SDG 4.7 and Our Shared World

    A report by Doug Bourn (UCL) and Jenny Hatley (Bath Spa) on behalf of the Our Shared World coalition of organisations, was launched the other day.  The report gathered evidence of the extent to which the themes of Sustainable Development Goal...

  • Biodiversity gain blues

    A recent article in The Conversation said that although the 2021 Environment Act made it mandatory (after a two-year transition) for most new developments in England to achieve a biodiversity net gain, there are concerns that the policy contains loopholes...

  • The aims of environmental science education revisited

    As I noted the other day, the ASE is reprinting a 2010 article of mine in the 2022 edition of ASE International.  A core part of that paper was a section on The aims of environmental science education.  Here it is:...

  • The DfE's new environmental education strategy

    The DfE has launched its new environmental education strategy for consultation.  Actually, they called it a (draft) Sustainability & Climate Change strategy (for the education & children’s services systems).  You can read it here. There are 5 mentions of curriculum, but...

  • Education: A Very Short Introduction

    A second edition of Gary Thomas's OUP publication, Education: A Very Short Introduction, has now been published.  When this book first appeared in 2013, with its stimulating, readable approach, I thought it was so good that the Department of Education ought...

  • Affirming the negative

    Michalinos Zembylas, from the Open University of Cyprus, has a chapter in a new book: Affect and the Rise of Rightwing Populism.  This is the summary: "This chapter seeks to explore how, why and under which conditions a move away from critique...

  • Educating for the Future we Want?

    I've been reading Stephen Sterling's opening essay in the new GTI Forum, The Pedagogy of Transition. It begins: "Formal education systems have—or should have—a critical role in the global social learning process underpinning the Great Transition.  On the face of it,...