Curricular response to education for sustainable development in Turkish basic education: a comparative analysis of national versus global learning objectives

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defined and promoted a set of learning objectives through a global framework that all education systems across the world could respond to. The framework aims to develop competencies empowering learners looking from both local and global perspectives, reflecting on their own actions, and managing the current and future impacts of their environmental, social, economic, and cultural behaviors. Assessing the level of national responsiveness in Türkiye to this global framework, this paper, through a comparative curriculum analysis, portrays how well the Turkish curriculum of basic education prepares generations for a sustainable future as suggested by UNESCO. The analysis was executed on a dataset consisting of 12 subject-specific and 57 grade-specific curriculum documents (484 pages) including a total of 2039 national learning outcomes through a coding scheme with 323 keywords. The questions addressed in the study include the following: How aligned is the national curriculum with the global framework; What school subject(s) give more prominence to sustainable development goals; and What domains of learning are predominant in the outcomes? The study is comparative in three aspects: comparison of national versus global objectives; cross-subject comparison within the curriculum itself; and comparison of learning domains prioritized in the curriculum.