Abstract
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development sets up education as a fundamental tool to educate and raise awareness of the importance of sustainable development; thus, education in schools must fulfill this purpose. Regarding to Primary Education in Spain, legislation establishes that sustainability must be addressed in a transversal manner, although it is explicitly mentioned in the curriculum as content to be addressed by the social sciences subject. Given that, in practice, textbooks are one of the most used tools by teachers, in this paper, we analyse the treatment given to sustainability by the activities of the textbooks of social sciences in Primary Education of the main Spanish publishers, from two perspectives: analysis of cognitive complexity and study of the subtopic regarding sustainability addressed in each activity. For the analysis of cognitive complexity of activities, Bloom’s taxonomy (six cognitive categories) and Costa’s questioning levels (three levels of questioning) were used. The results reveal an abundance of cognitively simple activities, along with a shortage of cognitively complex activities. The most addressed subtopics are environmental problems and recycling.
Highlights
Since the Industrial Revolution, technological development has led to an obvious improvement in the quality of life, mainly in developed countries
The activities that were collected in the different textbooks were categorised according to the complexity of cognitive processes: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, and 3B
The three levels of questioning of Arthur Costa were taken into consideration, so that activities 1A and 1B belong to the activities of introduction to knowledge; 2A and 2B are of the application type of knowledge; and, 3A and 3B are the domain and mastery of the treated knowledge
Summary
Since the Industrial Revolution, technological development has led to an obvious improvement in the quality of life, mainly in developed countries This development has caused multiple environmental problems; so evident is this global impact due to human actions that the scientific community has proposed a new geological epoch, known as Anthropocene [1]. As a result of the growing concern for environmental issues, various summits have been held since the middle of the last century, including the first Climate Summit in Stockholm (1972) [3], the Río de Janeiro Summit (1992) [4], and the Summit of the United Nations, held in New York in 2015 [5] In this latest event, the 2030 Agenda was adopted, which led to a global action plan for the period 2015–2030 that aims to guide decisions of governments and society towards sustainable development. Education for sustainability (EDS), from a formal [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], teaching training [14,15,16], and non-formal [17,18,19] perspective, is essential for instilling in students content and concepts, and the fundamental values that make them sensitive in matters of sustainability
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