In revisiting whether curriculum should be characterized as largely knowledge- or aims-led, Young (2015) raises two challenges for notions of depth. First, whether curriculum can overcome pragmatically- and ideologically-driven challenges associated with specialization; and second, addressing the imperative of fostering ‘powerful knowledge’ in schools. The former increasingly requires acknowledgement of unintended consequences (fragmentation of disciplinary knowledge, the instrumentalisation of school subjects, and the prioritizing of extrinsic over intrinsic value of knowledge and ways of knowing). Meanwhile, the latter (even if ironically) is increasingly articulated against a policy backdrop that champions schools as occupying a unique role in social reproduction and change: ‘providing the conditions which enable them to innovate and change’ (Young, 2009, p.10). For Young and his interlocutors, a key debate is what we can realistically expect of ‘powerful knowledge’. Primarily seen in terms of that which enables individuals to move beyond their experience, develop new ideas, envisage alternatives and think the ‘not yet thought’, important questions concern the orientation and frameworks for such claims, e.g. from social realist, critical realist and post-realist assumptions. However, a persistent blind spot in such arguments is while powerful knowledge about the social and natural is generally sought in relation to the world we live in and what it means to be human, an ecocentric—or more accurately, more-than-anthropocentric—perspective is largely missing from debate, including in relation to curriculum-making, evaluation and critique (Reid, 2015). Equally, while others have questioned the singular focus on a knowledge-transmission function of and a focus on disciplinary knowledge structures (Baker, 2015), leading alternatives, such as re-conceptualist perspectives, also receive pointed criticism, such as their ‘exclusive focus on issues of subjectivity, personal experience, identity, gender, race and so forth’ (Deng, 2015, p.727; see also Reid, 2006). A key challenge then, is the likelihood of refocusing the debate from normative and theoretically driven concerns to those that take account of renewed interest in Schwabian ‘practical’ undertakings, including their relation to political, professional and expert judgement about education (Biesta, 2013) and its reform (Connelly, 2013). Through elaborating such considerations, the paper illuminates various ‘distortions’ to the spaces of curriculum that might arise when engaging matters of environmental concern and sustainability. To pursue this, the paper revisits recent scholarship on the ‘learning virtues’ and how these are being repositioned in these debates, alongside how forms of adjectival education and processes of ‘extensionism’ are reconciled with priorities for reworking curriculum (Reid, 2015).

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