This paper brings together considerations voiced in the Journal of Curriculum Studies (2012) on how curriculum might be viewed as a rhetorical practice, and examples of teachers’ talk about the realities and fantasies of perspective and agency within an educational program deliberately positioned to respond to “the world being at stake” (ResourceSmart, 2014). In brief, Biesta (2012) has raised important questions about how various aspects of the rhetoric of education are understood, including whether particular social challenge-focused programs conceive and connect their curriculum to ideas of paideia and Bildung, and how the rhetoric of curriculum-makers and practitioners relates to the questions, aspirations and lived experience of empowerment or emancipation. We note too that Latour’s (1999) vocabulary on mediation and attachment helps illuminate teachers’ claims and dilemmas (e.g. in presenting a curriculum as something to embrace and/or contest in terms of current and possible artefacts and affiliations for knowing and what should be known). We show how both can be related to examples of shifts in teachers’ perspective and agency associated with their participation in a program deliberately designed to leave ‘positive traces on reality’ now and into the future, but which is also contested within the lives of these and other members of their schools. ResourceSmart explicitly positions education as having a key role in building a more sustainable world, through helping “schools benefit from embedding sustainability in everything they do”. We discuss ResourceSmart in terms of the wider sustainable schools movement (DCSF, 2010; Harris, 2010), a term and whose general mission are shown to be rhetorically loaded in a range of ways, as illustrated by DCSF in the UK (DCSF, 2008, p. 6). As our analysis shows, for these teachers to become ‘world-wise’ involves more than simply paying attention to the language and rhetoric of such social challenge-oriented programs: for educators to address ‘matters of fact, value and concern’, the democratic paradox of education must also be engaged (Van Poeck & Vandenabeele, 2012; Van Poeck, Goeminne & Vandenabeele, 2015).

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