Development of Curriculum for Dept. of Environmental Education toward a Sustainable Green Society

지속가능한 녹색 사회를 향한 환경교육과 교육과정 개발

This study was aimed at developing a common curriculum for the department of environmental education from 5 colleges of education. The need and background of curriculum reform can be summarized as follow; first, it has been recognized that new national curriculum of 2009 and 2011 created need for training teachers equipped with more integrated competency. Second, global environmental problems such as climate change and energy crisis asked for more responsible choice and action from all citizens. Third, the extremely low hiring rate resulted in the consideration of new working fields for teacher students majoring in environmental education. Fourth, the expansion of new environmental education paradigms including education for sustainable development called for practicing reconstruction of both contends and methods. From a series of research processes including analysis of current curriculum, DACUM, opinion survey and interest groups review, several new approaches for developing new curriculum had been identified as follow; first, content areas of environmental education should be extended beyond environmental natural science. Second, new learning approaches such as project-based learning need to be emphasized for strengthening the identity of environment as a separate subject. Third, more selective majoring system need to be applied in connection with environment government officials, researchers, and social environmental educators. It was recommended that the application of new curriculum developed by the study would be evaluated and managed by teaching conditions surrounding each of the five university members joined this developing processes. However, it needs to be noted that there is not much time because we had experienced zero hiring rate for the last 4 years and environmental policy and education programs are moving rapidly toward sustainable development.