Education, Eco-Progressivism and the Nature of School Reform

Abstract

This article is an attempt to critique some of the limitations of dominant school reform discourses in education, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, and Dennis Carlson, in addition to writers in the emerging field of what might be called “eco-progressivism.” The intersections between ecology and education can help construct a distinct counternarrative of progressive educational reform that is informed by ecological discourses, movements, and zeitgeists. Through the field of conservation biology, I hope to connect both ecology and education as crisis disciplines and suggest that the reform discourse in the field of biology utilizes a much different framework than that of current school reform orthodoxy. These differences have powerful and real consequences for the ways in which children and teachers experience school. Utilizing the well documented case of the failure of the Biosphere 2 research project as a grounding metaphor and cautionary tale, I plan to show not only the severe limitations of the current school reform orthodoxy but the ways in which the normalization of what I call the “biospheric number” functions as a technology of power. Finally, I hope to position the emerging worldview of eco-progressivism as a useful framework for reconsidering school reform specifically and the progressive education movement more broadly.