Re-Thinking Curricula and “Evil” in Teacher Education During the Sustainability Crisis
摘要
The current sustainability crisis entails the moral transformation of the global community including teacher education. Amidst this need for change, curricula are mainly studied to illustrate “good” and “ideal” in education. However, in teacher education, curricula should also be understood and criticized from the perspective of “evil” to reach more holistic and sustainable moral transformation through higher education. In this study, we explore the under-researched aspects of sustainability, namely the construction of evil in the curricula. By applying critical discourse analysis and by analyzing three separate Finnish national core curricula, we detect how the curricula communicate understandings of evil. Our results show that, in all the curricula, “evil” was constructed implicitly through four similar discourses. However, between the curricula, there were also differences on how “evil” was constructed and by this, different educational trajectories for sustainability and “evil” were created. Our findings illuminate that the implicit construction of “evil” should be more profoundly understood in teacher education to promote more critical, systemic and structural understandings of “evil” in education during current sustainability crises.