Researchers’ positions and construction of curricula of education for sustainable development in France

Abstract

The article sets the international context for the development of a curriculum of education for sustainable development and shows the directions being taken in the Francophone community. Building on a significant number of studies carried out in France, we constitute a typology of the positions of French-speaking researchers involved in those studies and contributing to the establishment of the national curriculum. This typology is constructed using a methodology based on the frequency of lexical occurrences in a bibliographic database, combined with a methodology of research on the social representations of the researchers of this community. We first present a broad comparison with the Anglo-Saxon sphere, we postulate that these positions influence the curriculum construction and raise the issue of the social responsibility of education science researchers in the face of international political demands.

Keywords:

• Education for sustainable development
• curriculum
• researchers’positions
• France

Notes

1. ANR-BLAN-08–135.

2. The SDGs show how far these concepts, once deemed radical and idealistic, are now firmly embedded in the mainstream of policymakers' agenda. This is something to celebrate. (G.H. Brundtland, 2015) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/gro-brundtland/only-a-just-and-strong-climate-deal-can-avert-disaster_b_8655130.html

3. The bibliographies cited in these categories serve as illustrations, and in no way exclude all those that characterize these positions.

4. https://www.tropes.fr/

5. https://products.office.com/fr-fr/excel

6. We ensure here that the criterion of equality of class width is respected. The width being the difference between the highest value and the lowest value. From the global minimum ‘a’ of the data and the overall maximum ‘b’ of the data, we calculate the class boundaries ‘hi’ using a simple arithmetic progression whose common difference is k = (b − a)/(n − 1). A variant of this method consist of using ‘k’, value of the standard deviation of the data, as the width. If ‘n’ is odd, the boundaries of the median class are ‘m − k/2, m + k/2’ where ‘m’ is the data average. If ‘n’ is even, ‘m’ is the upper boundary of the class number ‘n/2’.