A School for the Anthropocene: Questions About Hospitality in a Curriculum of Existential Threat

Abstract

In an effort to define and act on my responsibility to prepare for climate crisis as an education professor, I taught a graduate course designed as a collaborative inquiry around a question: If we were to create a “School for the Anthropocene,” what philosophies, purposes, and structures of education would better serve youth in facing and preparing for the environmental challenges that are upon us? First, when inviting students to envision new forms of crisis-responsive schooling, I did not shy away from putting individual and collective mortality at the center of our discussions. Second, I insisted we should dispense with any and all schooling frameworks or constraints within which we usually work, for the sake of the exercise (e.g., jurisdictional curriculum mandates, subject areas, assessment norms, etc.). By perhaps hasty design, these moves opened the door to existential threat for my students. I narrate these choices and my view of the outcomes to provoke consideration of the uncomfortable responsibility of the teacher who is guiding their guest through facing climate crisis, who welcomes students to their own mortality as well as our collective mortality, and the kinds of responses that such teaching work may evoke.