The University of Bath's Centre for Research in Education and the Environment [CREE] has now completed its external evaluation report of the GOSW-funded sustainable schools training programme which had been carried out by a consortium of local authorities and third sector organisations. Internal programme evaluations indicated broad, positive participant satisfaction. However, the external evaluation concluded that there could have been greater challenge provided to participants’ existing views and practice, and more critique offered to assumptions about the idea of a ‘sustainable school’. For example, the external evaluation felt that a pervading emphasis on the doorway metaphor encouraged a fragmented approach to the issues, and militated against schools’ looking at sustainability in the round. The evaluation report will be circulated in a few weeks, and will feature here.
I wonder if the evaluation also suggests (de)constructing a league table of root metaphors on developing the sustainable school?
My hunch would be that near the top, the doorway might be equally well understood by some by the notion of wardrobes. Spinning this a little further, perhaps they too can be seen as a means of transit - whether it be to or from the government's equivalent of Narnia: where, for example, only the chosen/pure in heart can see and use these portals, the rules of time and space can quite literally be suspended, and the point of departure and destinations each compete for a version of reality that is variously fantastical and mundane to its sojourners and voyeurs. There's also themes of sacrifice and redemption, moralism and the middle classes, the human and more-than-human, and so forth to consider.
You've also mentioned in another post Fish being a Milton scholar, so perhaps Paradise Lost is too obvious an analogy. But then a deeper connection may well be, as with Milton, to see whether waxing lyrical on sustainability's versions of predestination and free will sheds much light rather than heat here - the logic of the climate change debate clearly has implications for discourses on liberty, intellectual, moral and political integrity, the programmatic to the prophetic, and the poverty, or otherwise, of our imaginations, convictions and humanity. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, are some of the keys to unlocking the debates about the business and agenda of schools and schooling, for now and into [a sustainable?] future?
Looking forward to the report.