Building key competencies into an environmental education curriculum using a modified Delphi approach in South Korea

Abstract

This study adopted the modified Delphi method to build key competence indicators for the course subject ‘Environment’ in the secondary school curriculum in South Korea. 15 Delphi panelists participated, and were provided a three-stage questionnaire survey. The findings classified eight secondary school ‘environment’ curriculum key competencies into three domains: intellect-oriented, personality-oriented, and relationship-oriented. The intellect-oriented domain includes ‘critical-thinking ability,’ ‘creativity,’ and ‘problem-solving ability’; the personality-oriented domain includes ‘autonomy,’ ‘ability to reflect,’ and ‘environmental sensitivity’; and the relationship-oriented domain includes ‘communication ability’ and ‘ability to manage conflicts.’ These environmental competencies were utilized to revise the current environmental education curriculum as part of the 2015 revision of the National Curriculum and set the key competencies for environment classes. The paper concludes with the significance of developments in theorizing and implementing environmental education curriculums in Korea and abroad.

Keywords:

• Environmental education curriculum
• secondary school
• key competencies
• modified Delphi
• national curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article draws on the first author’s Ph.D. research, which built key competencies into South Korea’s EE curriculum (Seo. 2014).

2 In South Korea, the school curriculum is nationalized; curriculum revision influences every school in the nation. In the 6th National Curriculum revision (1992–1997), EE in the secondary-school curriculum (7^th–12^th grades) was organized as one subject in an elective course.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eunjung Seo

EunJung Seo is Teacher of Environmental Education at Chowol High School in South Korea. Her research focuses primarily on environmental education and national curriculum. Most recently she has begun to pursue a research how environmental education is being done in National Curriculum in other countries.

Jaemyong Ryu

Jaemyong Ryu is Professor of Geography Education at Seoul National University in South Korea. He is interested in experiments to make a little difference in texts for students to understand how little things can change student's attitude toward environment.

Seyoung Hwang

Seyoung Hwang is Research Fellow at National Youth Policy Institute in South Korea. Her research focuses on environmental education, science education and teacher education. Recently her research has expanded into global citizenship education and youth policy studies related to Sustainable Development Goals.