There is a conference [*] coming up in May in Berlin to explore the idea of a curriculum based around the sustainable development goals [SDGs].
One of the inputs [ Towards a new teaching and school culture ] will be by Margret Rasfeld, who will argue that new ways of teaching and cooperation are necessary in order to enable future leaders of society to act and to implement the sustainable development goals. Rasfeld is principal at the Evangelical School Berlin, and founder of the Schools on the Move initiative ("Schule im Aufbruch"); she is the initiator and host of the conference's Global Goals Curriculum. You can she her on YouTube, in German, and also see the school.
Question is: is this just another adjectival education, or something quite radical – a curriculum that really embodies the SDGs? It is, quite feasible to have such a curriculum (in the proper sense, and not just in terms of schemes of work, etc), and I can see the arguments for and against. In a way, it is evangelical in both spirit and nature, and a worry has to be whether too much of a focus on the goals will run counter to all those other (often prosaic) goals that schools have these days. I'm not putting any money on its catching on as an idea, but I shall be watching. It would certainly be good to hear from those immersed in global learning whether this is what they think they are doing anyway.
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[*] The conference has 13 keynotes over 3 days – that's an awful lot of listening.
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