Critical discourse analysis of sustainability curriculum

Critical discourse analysis is a powerful linguistic tool that can be applied to environmental policy and curriculum documents (discourse/text) to unveil the underlying social goods and power relationships embedded in text. It provides teachers, curriculum coordinators, principals and others (readers) with the means to investigate the agenda of the curriculum writers and, in so doing, to understand the landscape of factors influencing the text. The politics of a national curriculum can be rendered transparent by analysing the discourse for power and ideology, enabling greater freedom of interpretation of the curriculum material. In this paper we analyse the Sustainability cross-curriculum priority of the Australian Curriculum 7.5 using a critical discourse analysis approach and then examine the resulting socio-cultural interpretations arising from the process (in terms of status, power, ideology and biographical trajectories). From this we derive the invocations of the text such as promises, suggestions, demands and less overt agendas, in a process that ultimately gives a clearer meaning and interpretation of the curriculum texts. We use a worldview of deep ecology to investigate the curriculum and critical theory as our strategy of inquiry for analysing the Australian Curriculum.