Abstract:

Sustainability is a broad discipline that provides opportunities to teach several aspects of our planet, business, various cultures and communities, and technology to learners of all ages. Students gain the knowledge, skills, and abilities in the areas of hard and soft sciences while contributing to the process of attaining a sustainable future through collective efforts of humanity. The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) followed by Global Action Programme (GAP), mainly led by United Nations and member states, seeks to accelerate progress toward sustainable development (SD) by extending good examples of ESD. Reorienting existing educational programmes to address sustainability sets ground for pioneer examples of instruction to get a foothold for further implementation. During DESD (2004-2014) many countries and stakeholders took part in reorienting education at all levels of their education system and carried out curriculum development activities.

During DESD and first years of GAP, secondary school chemistry curriculum of Turkey had been updated twice by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), and there was not any clear information about the changes being related to ESD. Türkmen, Teksöz and Boz (2017) had studied the secondary school chemistry curriculum of Turkey updated in 2013 and pointed out the imbalance of inclusion between the three dimensions of SD. In 2018, whole K-12 curricula have been updated by the commission of MoNE. An analysis of the current version of the curriculum would provide insight about the inclusion of ESD in the updated curricula. Hence this study is aimed to extend the study of Türkmen, Boz and Teksöz (2017) to analyze the learning objectives of the secondary science chemistry curriculum of Turkey employed in 2018 in terms of the three dimensions of sustainable development. This is a qualitative research of a case study that evolves around secondary science chemistry curriculum of Turkey updated in 2018 and it employs content analysis of chemistry curriculum. The categories for coding are determined to be the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainable development.

The curriculum is still under the investigation of the researchers, yet the expectations from the results can be stated in light of the analysis of secondary science chemistry curriculum of Turkey employed between 2013 and 2018. It is expected that there would be an imbalance in including ESD related objectives in 9th to 12th grade levels of the curriculum. Furthermore, it is expected that the environmental dimension of the curriculum would overweigh the economic and social dimensions of sustainable development. Finally, it should be noted that these expectations do not provide a direction for the research and actual results of the study may show differences.

Keywords:

Education for Sustainable Development, Chemistry Curriculum, Content Analysis, Secondary Education.