Rethinking the Curriculum in the Context of Education for Sustainability: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

In considering the current COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of reflection on a wide variety of issues, this paper discusses the need to rethink the curriculum, in regard to its priorities and in the context of education for sustainability. It does so by revisiting some ideas that have received, or have begun to receive, attention in the field of education. More specifically, the paper focuses on the development of global awareness as an educational goal, the notion of hope and the future dimension of the curriculum, the value of systems and ecological thinking, as well as the value of decision making and the role that knowledge of the nature of science can play in decision making. Given that the world will most likely face in the future complex global issues and problems, just like the COVID-19 pandemic, all the aforementioned ideas deserve particular attention, especially if the curriculum is to promote and foster the idea of sustainability.

Seeking Nietzsche’s Great Tree of Humanity: The Overhuman and Powers’s The Overstory

This essay reconstructs Nietzsche’s ecological and environmental thought by focusing on his idea of the human-earth (Menschen-Erde) and his deep concern for the natural world. It then articulates these thoughts in a coordinate reading of Richard Powers’s environmentally focused novel The Overstory (2019). Nietzsche understands that the human position on the Earth is precarious and that we are in danger of injuring our fragile environmental surround. I attempt to clarify the contemporary relevance of this thought by showing how his diagnosis chimes with current ecological thinking. Nietzsche saw not only dangers but opportunities in the relation of humans to their environment. His writings as well as his daily life exhibit intense interest in trees and forests. He foresaw that too much forest clearing could endanger the climate, leading to excessive warming. Nietzsche also imagined that the humans might foster a “great tree of humanity” (WS 188-89), a green expansion of their environment, and Zarathustra anticipates living in the world as a garden (Z “The Convalescent”). Richard Powers’s The Overstory speaks to a time that is much more deeply informed about our precarious ecological situation. The novelist dramatizes this in a narrative that brings together a number of disparate individuals, drawn to defend an old-growth US West Coast forest from the state-supported depradations of industrial logging. These figures learn about “the secret life of trees,” their mutual dependence and communication, as they experiment with a new life high among the branches. Their different fates pose a variety of questions relevant to Nietzsche’s ideas for a transvalued Earth.

Energy-efficient technologies and architectural education

The article deals with the methodology of forming the ecological thinking of bachelor-architects, at the level of interdisciplinary relations, by introducing topics and sections on energy efficiency in the disciplines of general humanitarian, technical and artistic-compositional training. The program of step-by-step implementation of energy-efficient technologies in course design is proposed. It is aimed at bringing it closer to the current design requirements by consistently disclosing the principles of energy – efficient architecture-starting from simpler, «basic» concepts to more «specialized» ones.

Hardy’s Trees

Maxwell Sater, “Hardy's Trees: Ecology and the Question of Knowledge in The Woodlanders” (pp. 92–115) This essay attends to one of the stranger episodes in Thomas Hardy’s fiction: the inexplicably linked deaths of John South and the elm tree outside his house. I argue that this subplot is of central importance to The Woodlanders (1887) and to Hardy’s ecological thinking more generally. Hardy posits an episode that resists narrative accommodation: simply, it does not make sense. Its senselessness, I contend, indexes a broader discomfort with, and rejection of, what Stanley Cavell would call relations of knowing as the foundation of ecology. By reading The Woodlanders alongside Cavell, I suggest that Hardy develops an ecological mode of relation dependent neither on knowledge of nor on continuity with nonhuman worlds but, rather, on a negotiation of the epistemological and ontological limits inhering between, in this instance, humans and trees. For Hardy, humane ecological relations are possible in spite of those limits; in fact, seeking to transcend them, as the elm tree plot parodically demonstrates, can be counterproductive.

The role of ecological education in the spiritual develompment of pupils

Caring for nature, the emergence of ecological thinking depends on the level of ecological education and culture in the younger generation. The concept of national education also pays special attention to environmental education and upbringing. The article discusses the importance of forming environmental education in the teaching process, extracurricular activities and in the out school trainings. Key words: Environmental upbringing, environmental education, environmental literature, ecological games, ecological days

Ecopedagogical Activity - As An Innovative Process In Geography Education

This article states that "Eco-pedagogical activity as an innovative process in geography education", Eco-pedagogical activity - as a prerequisite and basis for innovative development of modern society, ie the evolution of man and the environment, society and nature. This activity is aimed at creating the most favorable conditions for the development of geo-ecological thinking and consciousness in the student, the subject of which is the "geo-ecological culture of the student", as well as its content and main directions.

HAYAO MIYAZAKI IN SEARCH OF THE WORLD

Рецензируется перевод монографии американского теоретика культуры Сюзан Нейпир «Волшебные миры Хаяо Миядзаки». Книга Сюзан Нейпир представляет собой наиболее фундаментальное исследование визуальных форм в творчестве японского анимационного режиссёра Хаяо Миядзаки. Сквозь призму анимационной визуальности автор раскрывает те философские смыслы, которые режиссёр закладывал в свои фильмы. С позиций культурной теории и философии культуры монография представляет особенный интерес, поскольку позволяет погрузиться в интерпретации ключевых для культуры XX века сюжетов в японской анимации. Помимо прочего работа Нейпир может представлять академический интерес для всех, кто интересуется теорией культурного фронтира и такими философскими сюжетами, как экологическое мышление, феминизм, новый материализм или апокалиптическое видение. Настоящая рецензия построена на исследовательских инициативах визуальной семиотики. Анализ интеллектуальных способов работы Сюзан Нейпир с визуальностью аниме Хаяо Миядзаки может быть полезен не только тем, кто интересуется непосредственными смыслами работ японского аниматора, но и претендует на раскрытие внутренних механизмов визуальных репрезентаций культурных феноменов. Иными словами, книга Нейпир, помимо раскрытия скрытых и неочевидных смыслов художественных произведений, вносит вклад в общую теорию работы с визуальным. Рецензия также акцентирует внимание на ряде непоследовательных ходов в мышлении Нейпир и предлагает свою интерпретацию спорных аспектов в книге. The Russian translation of Susan Napier’s monograph Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art is being reviewed. The book should be considered as the most fundamental research on the visual semiotics in the works of the Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki. Through the prism of visuality, the author analyses philosophical meanings that the director put in his films. From the perspectives of cultural theory and philosophy of culture, the monograph is particularly interesting because it allows going deeper into the interpretations of topics, key in the 20th-century culture, in Japanese animation. Among other things, Napiers’s book could be of interest for all academics interested in frontier studies and such philosophical topics as ecological thinking, feminism, new materialism, and apocalyptic thinking. This review is based on the research initiatives of visual semiotics. The analysis of Susan Napier’s intellectual ways of working with the visual nature of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime can be useful not only for those interested in the understanding of the direct meanings of the Japanese animator’s works, it also claims to reveal the internal mechanisms of visual representations of cultural phenomena. In other words, Napier’s book, in addition to revealing the hidden and non-obvious meanings of works of art, contributes to the general theory of working with the visual reality. The review also focuses on a number of inconsistent moves in Napier’s thinking and offers its own interpretation of the controversial aspects in the book.