This book challenges the dominant expertise professionalism rationale for music education by responding to the call to develop ‘ecological awareness’ at a time when all professions have a moral obligation to place sustainable and interdependent life at the center. The book aims to expand music education’s professional horizons to acknowledge the responsibility of the music field to contribute to the demands of complex questions of sustainability and identify the ways in which sustainable music education may be strengthened through an activist relational ecological stance. It suggests a radical moral turn by asking: What if music education is recognised as part of the problem of sustaining unsustainability? and What if music teacher education was developed in and through dialogue with a futures perspective? These questions are interrogated through a critical analysis of the historical positioning of music in education and an interdisciplinary application of theories of ecology and professionalism.

Vols. for 1969- include a section of abstracts.

This is the academic Age of the Neoliberal Arts. Campuses—as places characterized by democratic debate and controversy, wide ranges of opinion typical of vibrant public spheres, and service to the larger society—are everywhere being creatively destroyed in order to accord with market and military models befitting the academic-industrial complex. While it has become increasingly clear that facilitating the sustainability movement is the great 21st century educational challenge at hand, this book asserts that it is both a dangerous and criminal development today that sustainability in higher education has come to be defined by the complex-friendly “green campus” initiatives of science, technology, engineering and management programs. By contrast, Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts takes the standpoints of those working for environmental and ecological justice in order to critique the unsustainable disciplinary limitations within the humanities and social sciences, as well as provide tactical reconstructive openings toward an empowered liberal arts for sustainability. Greening the Academy thus hopes to speak back with a collective demand that sustainability education be defined as a critical and moral vocation comprised of the diverse types of humanistic study that will benefit the well-being of our emerging planetary community and its numerous common locales.

Bringing expert knowledge to bear in an open and deliberative way to help solve pressing social problems is a major concern today, when technocratic and bureaucratic decision making often occurs with little or no input from the general public. Albert Dzur proposes an approach he calls “democratic professionalism” to build bridges between specialists in domains like law, medicine, and journalism and the lay public in such a way as to enable and enhance broader public engagement with and deliberation about major social issues. Sparking a critical and constructive dialogue among social theories of the professions, professional ethics, and political theories of deliberative democracy, Dzur reveals interests, motivations, strengths, and vulnerabilities in conventional professional roles that provide guideposts for this new approach. He then applies it in examining three practical arenas in which experiments in collaboration and power-sharing between professionals and citizens have been undertaken: public journalism, restorative justice, and the bioethics movement. Finally, he draws lessons from these cases to refine this innovative theory and identify the kinds of challenges practitioners face in being both democratic and professional.

Universities continue to expand, bringing considerable debate about their purposes and relationship to the world. In The Ecological University, Ronald Barnett argues that universities are short of their potential and responsibilities in an ever-changing and challenging environment. This book centres on the idea that the expansion of higher education has opened new spaces and possibilities. The university is interconnected with a number of ecosystems: knowledge, social institutions, persons, the economy, learning, culture and the natural environment. These seven ecosystems of the university are all fragile and in order to advance and develop them universities need to engage with each one. By looking at matters such as the challenges of learning, professional life and research and inquiry, this book outlines just what it could mean for higher education institutions to understand and realize themselves as exemplars of the ecological university. With bold and original insights and practical principles for development, this radical and transformative book is essential reading for university leaders and administrators, academics, students, and all interested in the future of the university.

This book provides a critique of over two decades of sustained effort to infuse educational systems with education for sustainable development. Taking to heart the idea that deconstruction is a prelude to reconstruction, this critique leads to discussions about how education can be remade, and respond to the educational imperatives of our time, particularly as they relate to ecological crises and human-nature relationships. It will be of great interest to students and researchers of sociology, education, philosophy and environmental issues.