Challenges and opportunities in mainstreaming environmental education into the curricula of teachers' colleges in Ethiopia

Abstract

Lack of environmental awareness is one of the underlying causes of severe environmental degradation in Ethiopia. As teachers' colleges are a seedbed of such awareness, assessment of college curricula should shed light on the possibilities they offer to develop capacities to address environmental degradation. This small‐scale study is based on the assessment of the curricula of the Kotebe and St Mary's teachers' colleges, Ethiopia, and the knowledge and opinions of a sample of teaching students on pertinent environmental issues facing the country. Comparative analysis of data generated through questionnaires and interviews was undertaken across college, curricula and gender categories. The results suggest: a ‘paradigm shift’ from a core‐focused to a pedagogical‐focused curriculum in the last three decades; a declining trend in the provision of outdoor environmental education; inadequate levels of factual knowledge amongst current college students; and variations in knowledge levels and attitudes among the respondents taking different curricula. If the work of teachers' colleges is to support wider efforts throughout Ethiopia to address the causes and effects of environmental degradation, the findings of the study underscore the necessity of revisiting the composition of course categories and maintaining the existence of outdoor environmental education in the current college curricula.

Keywords:

• environmental awareness
• outdoor education
• initial teacher education
• environmental education
• Ethiopia

Notes

1. Over the centuries, deforestation, overgrazing, and practices such as cultivation of slopes not suited to agriculture and land fragmentation due to the titling system have eroded the soil, a situation that worsened considerably during the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Eritrea, Tigray and parts of Gondar and Wollo.

2. Such as is the case with the short (belg) rains in the South Wollo area of Amhara Regional State, in the northeast highlands. Teff, indigenous to Ethiopia, furnishes the flour for enjera, an unleavened bread that is the principal form in which grain is consumed in the highlands and in urban centres throughout the country.

3. The former military government of Ethiopia, which ruled the country from 1974 to 1991. Under the twin guise of improved food security and reduced food aid dependency, this authoritarian regime undertook various land reform initiatives to improve levels of food production and supply, through the development of large‐scale state farms, cooperatives, resettlement and villagization, but, it is argued, without due consideration of their serious long‐term social, economic and ecological impacts (Lind and Teriessa 2005).

4. Wollo Province, it was once estimated, had 111 types of land tenure.