ABSTRACT
Through glonacal agency heuristic, Abalahin and Chang examine in this chapter the impact of national curriculum reforms in ESD, particularly in Primary Geography, implemented across various countries during and immediately after the UN declaration on the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014. The emerging rhetoric among scholars is that sustainability is not a school subject on its own but a learning process of reframing how we see the world and imagine the future, embedded in existing or emerging disciplines such as Geography or Climate Change Education. Sustainability in Primary Geography needs to be explicitly stated in programmatic curriculum.
Understanding and empowering children and developing teacher agency is critical to harnessing the transformative power of ESD in Primary Geography, particularly in impacting change on the national as well as the global scale. Policies and system-wide curriculum reforms may have been put in place during the decade-long global commitment to ESD, the impact of which still trickles down to this day. However, integration at the programmatic level is still unclear. Sustainability as a ‘vehicle idea’ and learning process is still lacking in Primary Geography. A plethora of issues arises in teaching sustainability as well, presenting various challenges to effectively integrate ESD in an existing curriculum framework for Primary Geography Education. Teacher agency through institutional support is still lacking. Disengagement among geography teachers is a common issue that emerged across countries examined in this chapter. There is, therefore, a need to reconnect academic knowledge and everyday knowledge of ESD when bridging the theory-practice gap in teaching ESD in Primary Geography. This chapter concludes with a hopeful call to action to make changes in practice architecture to support the integration of ESD in Primary Geography at the programmatic curriculum level. The aim is for the local and national dimensions to be strong enough to create a ripple effect in the global dimensions.
