1 Technological Education and Environmental Sustainability, a Critical Examination of Twenty years of Canadian Practices and Policies

This paper will look at the last twenty years of technological education in Canada through a ‘sustainability ’ lens. Technological education has a central role to play in helping young people develop the skills, knowledge and attitudes required to transform the term ‘sustainable development ’ beyond mere policy rhetoric to one of embodied reality. The transformation of our built environment, our patterns and modes of consumption, transportation and energy use are all necessary in order to slow down and halt the degradation of the biosphere. This paper questions whether technological education programs in Canada have made substantive progress in addressing the problem of environmental sustainability. It will also offer a number of recommendations for transforming technological education to meet the global sustainability challenge. Selected secondary school technological education curricula from Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Maritime Canada were reviewed for this paper. We live in what has been called the “Anthropocene”, a geologic epoch in which humankind has emerged as the “potentially intelligent ” globally dominant species, capable of virtually reshaping the face of the planet and its ecosystems through both intentio