Environmental Education in Science Curricula in Korea: Analysis of the 2015 National Science Curricula and Suggestions for the Future

The status of environmental education (EE) in the existing curricula should be analyzed before setting up strategies for enhancing it in the future national science curricula. This chapter introduces available EE analysis frameworks to check how well EE is integrated into national curricula. Based thereon, the 2015 revised science curricula are analyzed to present suggestions for the revision thereof. To this end, this chapter introduces the OECD’s Learning Framework, the Australian Sustainability Curriculum Framework, NAAEE’s Environmental Literacy Analysis Framework, and Lee et al.’s analysis framework for EE. Among them, Lee et al.’s Framework includes the following four categories: environmental knowledge, environmental values and attitudes, environmental competencies, and environmental action and participation, especially highlighting the fourth category. Analyzing EE in curricula and textbooks by using such frameworks is expected to give meaningful insights into types of EE offered in the school environment and into ways to improve EE. This study is designed to identify the level of EE in science curricula by analyzing EE in the 2015 science curricula in Korea in the context of content. Specifically, the following items are analyzed: achievement standards by curriculum, learning elements, comments on achievement standards, teaching/learning methods and notes, and evaluation methods and notes. According to analysis results, it is hard to say that EE is sufficiently integrated into science curricula for elementary, middle, and high schools in terms of content and methods. In particular, environmental values and attitudes, environmental competencies, and environmental action and participation are much less reflected in the curricula than environmental knowledge. EE is also found to be differently integrated in curricula by school level (elementary, middle, and high schools). In particular, EE is found to be more highly integrated in the high school science curriculum than in elementary and middle school science curricula. Based thereon, this chapter presents implications and considerations for enhancing EE in the next science curricula.