Geographical Education for Sustainable Development in Primary School: Discourse and Narratives

Several European National Curricula and international declarations present Geographical Education for Sustainable Development both as a way to produce scientific knowledge and a way to promote concrete changes in children’s local environment. This is a fundamental theoretical structure of Geographical Curricula, but it runs the risk of neglecting the role played, by a “third actor”: didactic materials realized by NGO, institutions, and other extracurricular agencies. Many observers have discussed how teachers’ beliefs are influenced both by textbooks and by other didactic supports. The aim of this contribute is, first of all, to show that these materials should be considered not only scientific support but, in the same way as media, also a part of a broader production of discourse on the “global environmental crisis”, and, secondly, to discuss the link between environmental discourse and ESD and Geography in Primary School as a relevant issue from political and, above all, pedagogical point of view