Susan Laird

This essay responds to recent philosophical interest in the Anthropocene by asking : Can and should educators adopt, form, transmit, teach ways of living to maintain, if not enhance Earth’s habitability, especially its habitability for diverse children? This inquiry therefore calls for conceptual study of learning to live through the Anthropocene—with, despite, after, before, amid, among, away from, and against its myriad harms, possible and actual, especially its harms to children. Examining cases of environmental racism in Checker’s Polluted Promises, and other cases of environmental threats to children’s health, in Steingraber’s Raising Elijah, this study begins by proposing the ecological gap in philosophy of education consequential for children resides within another epistemological gap, variously designated gender gap, love gap, care gap. Ruddick’s maternal thinking provides a conceptual frame for theorizing three moral aims of learning to live in the Anthropocene that might inform public schooling.

Reflecting upon Simone Weil’s conception of beauty as food, this essay proposes musical hunger as a metaphoric way of understanding a particular species of “cultural miseducation” as conceived by Jane Roland Martin, that disadvantages children musically and perhaps therefore also spiritually. It examines such musical miseducation with regard to an ethical conception of educational achievement as children’s growing capacities and responsibility for learning to love, survive, and thrive despite their troubles, especially their mothers’ absence, before narrating at length an educational autobiography of musical hunger and posing questions about formal and informal secular educative possibilities for musical nourishment.

This paper reviews the location of Responsible Research and Innovation approaches within the access and benefit sharing policy spaces of the Convention on Biological Diversity and Nagoya Protocol. We describe how a range of dialogues on ethical research practices found a home, almost inadvertently, within the ABS policy process. However, more recent RRI dialogues around emerging technologies have not been similarly absorbed into ABS policy, due in part to the original framing of ABS and associated definitional and scope issues. Consideration is given to the challenges posed to these policy processes by the transformative and rapid nature of scientific and technological change today, including the emerging field of synthetic biology. Drawing on experiences from regulating ABS, we emphasize that the integration of RRI into policies for new, emerging, or poorly understood activities such as synthetic biology faces deficiencies such as limits to government capacity, jurisdictional confusion, shortages in funds, and an absence of strategic approaches. We conclude that a coordinated combination of diverse policy processes within the CBD might provide an invaluable space for RRI dialogues on social justice, sustainability, biosafety, and other issues raised by emerging technologies.

Education is on the cusp of a configurational shift, or, as some may argue, in the midst of it. In the last twenty years the direct influence of corporations and their interest in leading educational agencies has substantially increased with no signs of stopping.1 The corporation has become a leader for systemic change in educational practice.2 This systematic change's emphasis on the mighty dollar brings about many different obstacles for educators and educational theorists to consider, one of these being the way education's monetization affects both learners' and educators' motivation. Where does this shift to the focus of funds find such motivations? Looking through the lenses of both John Dewey and...

In this chapter I reframe Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California, as an innovative work not simply of commercial/school partnership, but of educational thought. Explicitly inspired by Waters’ work as a Montessori teacher and as a restaurant owner prominent in the international Slow Food Movement, ESY is constructing a new paradigm for school lunch in the present climate change era. This new paradigm renovates school lunch’s conceptual continuity with once-canonical thought about children’s schooling, in which deeply gendered foodways have been figured significantly. This theoretical inquiry on ESY concludes with a caution to those who would simply claim school gardening as a new best practice without also providing a social-ethical critique of current school lunch practices.