What learning opportunities does the Chilean primary education curriculum offer to train in sustainability?

Abstract

Education is a fundamental tool to make a country's society equitable, just, and respectful of the environment. As primary education is compulsory for a country's population, it allows building knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development, in this sense, it is necessary to examine whether the primary education curricular bases offer learning opportunities and contexts for students at this stage to develop their awareness, knowledge and skills in a sustainable way. The qualitative methodology was used, specifically, the content analysis to analyze the 24 Chilean primary programs of Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences under the cognitive domain of Education for sustainable development (ESD) and in terms of their learning objectives with the sustainability development goals (SDGs). The results show that an interdisciplinary stochastic education in the context of the curricular learning of Social Sciences and Natural Sciences provides learning opportunities to develop ESD at the different levels that make up primary education. It is observed that the Natural Sciences and Social Sciences curricula at all levels of primary education lead to ESD are being developed in an interdisciplinary manner (with these two subjects and stochastic themes).