Türkiye’de Ortaokul “Çevre Eğitimi ve İklim Değişikliği Dersi”nin Tarihsel Gelişim Süreci

Abstract

Environment problems and the effects of climate crisis give rise to different consequences and affect the lives of people. Therefore, educating students with awareness and sensitiveness about this subject at an early age has become obligatory. In other words, the environmental education instructed at schools is always supposed to be up to date in this context. In this research, the historical background of the content of the Environment Education and Climate Change Lesson's curriculum is investigated which is instructed to secondary school students as a selective course in Türkiye. The instruction durations at schools, content, learning fields, distribution of the subjects and the number of the outcomes of environmental education's curriculum are examined progressively. In this research, the weekly schedule of the lesson and document analysis of the curriculum are performed, and the results are presented. Consequently, it is understood that there was not any independent lesson named as environmental education in Türkiye until the 1990s; the instructional statute of the lesson from the beginning of primary schools differentiated as selective or compulsory in the meanwhile; the names of independent lessons about environmental education are changed in time; the instructional levels of the grades are increased in number with the latest updates; the climate crisis and disaster trainings are highlighted as independent subjects, and the content is developed mainly for practical applications rather than transfer of academic knowledge.