In this week you have begun to think about the way education might have a role in preparing the next generation of citizens for thinking about and dealing with the environmental challenges we are facing, both locally and globally. This has introduced the idea of education for sustainability as a possible purpose for education. In Week 4 you will turn to consider demographic issues and how these might affect possible purposes for education.
If you have found the issues discussed this week of particular interest, you may want to read further about Paul Warwick’s views of how Education for Sustainable Development should be developed in schools to enact what he terms a ‘pedagogy of compassion’ (2016). This peer reviewed academic paper, made available for open access, reviews the Future Leaders Programme in the UK which, at the time of writing the paper, had worked with over 200 children and young people aged between 7 and 19 years old in a range of locations.
Reference: Warwick, P. (2016) ‘Education for Sustainable Development: a movement towards pedagogies of civic compassion’, FORUM, vol. 58, no. 3, pp. 407–414 [Online]. Available at:(Accessed 3 October 2017).
If you would like further access to published research, and support in critically reading and reviewing such work to inform your own re-visioning of the purposes of education, why not consider the Open University’s new postgraduate module EE830 Learning and teaching: educating the next generation, which ran for the first time in October 2018. If you are interested in signing up for this masters module, you can find more information at http://www.open.ac.uk/ postgraduate/ qualifications/ f70. If you have general enquiries about registering on the programme please email https://www.open.ac.uk/ contact or phone 0300 303 5303. If you have specific queries and would like to speak to a member of the academic team please email email@example.com. Paul was interviewed by the module team and has provided some talking-head videos, so you can ‘meet’ him there.