Sustainability as a core concept of an integrated science curriculum: Can the Czech curriculum follow the western countries?
Abstrakt
Curriculum revisions have been recently approved in many European countries. In the Czech Republic, ISCED1 and ISCED2 curricula are currently undergoing revision, which is a timely opportunity to learn from the experience of other countries by gaining insight into their educational standards through comparative analysis.
For this purpose, we selected curricula of European countries and regions with mandatory integrated science curricula, namely the UK (more specifically, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Spain (Catalonia) and Norway (both the current version and the version valid from September 2021). After retrieving curricula currently valid in these countries, particularly their sections on science education, we compared ten curricula with Czech curriculum to identify similarities and differences.
This inductive comparative analysis revealed several individual scientific themes in biology, chemistry, physics and geology. We also addressed more complex concepts, such as developing scientific thinking and reasoning among students and their ability to apply scientific knowledge in everyday life, focusing on the strong integrative role of sustainable development in education.
Most of these curricula show a shift from subject-based to competency-based curriculum. In contrast, the Czech curriculum still in force remains subject-based despite providing schools with the possibility to integrate educational subjects, e.g., the area of Man and Nature (physics, chemistry, biology and geography) since 2007.
Yet, most schools and teachers continue to follow the long-established, traditional system of teaching individual subjects. Therefore, in line with the curricula analysed in this study, we argue that the concept of sustainable development in education can be used as a primer for overcoming barriers to a competency-based approach in setting national curricula based on policy learning.