It is not by accident that the title of Susan Santone’s Reframing the Curriculum: Design for Social Justice and Sustainability refers to the Earth Charter.
Reframing the Curriculum is a guide on how to integrate concepts of healthy communities, democratic societies, and social justice into education. This is precisely why Earth Charter International partner Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society in Education, decided to publish this book. It gives educators across grades and disciplines the tools to bring sustainability and social justice into experiential, project-based instructional approaches.
Readers familiar with the pedagogy of the Earth Charter Education Center for Sustainable Development will recognize methods so clearly explained by Santone. In this practical, hands-on guide, she works toward answering the question of how to engage and motivate students for the global challenges we are facing. The opening line tells why she uses narratives as a base: “The future is a story yet to be written, and today’s students will write tomorrow’s chapters.”
Santone emphasizes the importance of putting the Earth Charter into action: “The vision and values… are articulated at the global level through the Earth Charter… Let’s be clear that we can’t rest on a vision, bring it in for a hug, and call it a day.”
She articulates the notion of interdependence by acknowledging that “our wellbeing depends on healthy relationships between ecological and social systems.”
Reframing the Curriculum is a must-read for educators in the formal and informal field of education who embrace the principles of the Earth Charter and want to put them into action by incorporating the values in their curriculum.