Sustainable development and secondary school chilean curriculum: What do school programs propose?

Abstract

Introduction. School education has a key role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Aim: To examine which sustainability areas are prioritized by the Chilean school curriculum and the pedagogical approach proposed by school subjects to address this type of content. Methodology: A two-stage sampling was developed for this research. In the first phase, the 7th to 10th-grade language curriculum was selected, where the sources and analysis units were identified and explicitly included the Spanish term sostenible (sustainable) and its related words sustentable (sustainable) and sustentabilidad (sustainability) in the subjects. This allowed identifying the presence of this concept in four subjects of the national curriculum: Art, Science, Technology and History, Geography, and Social Sciences. In the second phase, content units were classified into four categories. These categories allow analyzing the pedagogical and conceptual treatment carried out by each subject. Results: Of the four analyzed subjects, History, Geography, and Social Sciences holistically address this matter. However, the analysis reveals that addressing sustainability issues limits the development of citizen skills in education, as it does not address the controversies that this model generates at the national level. Conclusions: In conclusion, some suggestions are proposed to redesign the curriculum to generate different views to reconsider sustainable development from a critical and local perspective.