engleski

ESD-Relevant Content in Transitional Countries’ Compulsory Education: a Comparative Perspective

The proposed symposium will present conceptually and methodologically diverse findings resulting from the research on 9 national framework curricula, and a selection of subject curricula and textbooks. The aim of the research was to identify, collect and systematically present the existing content most directly relevant to sustainable development in the national curricula in 9 Eurasian countries, based on a uniform coding matrix and research process. One of the premises behind this was that the compulsory education curricula and its instructional methods play a formative role for the future global stakeholders. The proposed symposium will outline the methodology and the basic comparative findings and address the following questions: How to recognise and address the limitations of cross-country and cross-sector research? What the specific commonalities and differences are in the ESD-relevant curricular content of 3 South East European countries (Slovenia, Croatia and B&H) at different stages of development? There are extensive calls in literature to address global problems through education by altering the business-as-usual socio-productive processes and contemporary Western lifestyle (Milbrath, 1996 ; Doppelt, 2003). Alternative, sustainable socio-economic patterns fostered through education will require a broad civic learning about the ecosystem services on which human survival and material prosperity depend, so as to enable the conceptualisation of 'a more sustainable' future. However, based on this, sustainability education also has to equip the learners (Dietz et al. , 2003) with skills for reaching difficult decisions amidst conditions of uncertainty, complexity and significant bio-physical constraints and conflicting human values and interests. Tillbury (2007) argues that a more comprehensive approach to reorienting education will include the questioning of current mental models, those which led the current societies to the path of unsustainable development. New forms of curricular content may be called for, but more importantly the content has to be framed in a different way. Framing of an issue is a way to situate the existing knowledge and to interpret and question the processes of formation of new knowledge to be fed back into the loop (O’Brien, St. Clair and Kristoffersen, 2010). The research presented here, together with the educational policy initiative it is a part of, will provide a perspective on the shared problem from diverse Eurasian educational systems. But even more importantly, by being grounded in real-life national curricula in transition (outline of mapping of the positioning of the ESD- relevant curricular content), through presentation of qualitative framing of the relevant content within curricular documents and inclusion of both 'cognitive' and 'skills and values' content, the comparative research methodology and analysis pave the way for a series of realistic blueprints of globally applicable compulsory education curricula oriented on sustainable development. Comparative curricular content analyses described here will go some way towards uncovering the continuum of social and power relations behind current official knowledge construction. Mapping of both cognitive (factual) content and the skills and values associated with sustainability provides the first step in reframing the compulsory education curricula towards Tillbury’s (2007) arduous task.

education for sustainbility; comparative; content analysis; curriculum; development

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