Narratives as a Didactic Resource in the Social Sciences to Teach Sustainable Development: A Study with Primary Education Students

Abstract

The environment should be incorporated transversally into all human activities, especially the different areas of education. However, this is not always the case. In these pages we present a study carried out during the 2021/2022 academic year among students studying for a degree in Primary Education at the University of Cordoba, to analyze narratives as resources for teaching pupils about the environment and sustainable development, mainly through the dissemination and knowledge of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Data on the didactic experience was collected from a potential sample of 217 teachers to be via a questionnaire validated by experts, which was subjected to reliability analysis with Cronbach’s Alpha, using the SPSS program, version 25.0 for Windows. The trainee teachers reacted positively to the use of narratives as resources for teaching and learning about the environmental contents of the SDGs, considering them an ideal pedagogical resource to transmit concepts effectively, in addition to serving to develop other types of competences. Likewise, they concluded that this intervention provided significant coverage of both the theoretical and practical contents of sustainable development.

Samhällskunskapsnarrativ: En studie av samhällskunskaps-undervisning som en väv av berättelser

“…In the US, there is a strand of research concerning narratives and counternarratives about race, marginalisation and hardship in American social science teaching (see, e.g., Ender, 2021;Jimenez, 2020). Other examples are a study of how teacher candidates in the US deal with the dominant narrative of neoclassical economics in a social science methods course (Shanks, 2018) and a study of Spanish teacher candidates' views on narratives as a didactical resource in teaching sustainability (López Serrano & Guerrero Elecalde, 2022). In Germany, there is a strand of research on narratives in Politische Bildung, where some researchers focus on the use of political narratives from literary texts in subject teaching (see, e.g., Juchler, 2015b).…”