Sustainable Development in Primary Education – A Perspective from Official Portuguese Guiding Documents

Abstract

This study aimed to identify and characterize the perspectives of the concept sustainable development present in official Portuguese primary education guiding documents. Methodologically, this is a qualitative study framed by the interpretive paradigm and implemented through an exploratory and interpretative-descriptive strategy. In order to fulfil the defined objective, a documentary analysis was carried out, enabling the constitution and analysis of the corpus through content analysis. The content analysis instrument used resulted from the adaptation and revalidation of a previous published instrument. The webQDA software was used to categorize and analyse the data. The results show that the environmental dimension is privileged over the economic and socio-cultural dimensions. However, the three dimensions of analysis considered are present in the vast majority of analysed documents.