Exploring the Scope of Sustainable Development Goals in Textbook of Upper Primary Level: A Case Study

Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Social innovation is very essential for sustainable development. In the modern world, there are many social and environmental problems and the students should be provided with proper skills and knowledge to critically think and find out solutions to those problems. It can be done by re-organizing the textbooks and curriculum by including topics related with environmental problems and social issues in it. Therefore, this study has been focused to discuss the role of curriculum in education for sustainable development and to find out the scope of sustainable development approach in English textbook of upper primary level. It is a qualitative study of English textbooks of West Bengal Board in upper primary level and the content analysis of these textbooks has been done for the study. The Sustainable Development Goals Report (2022) has emphasized on 17 goals to overcome the global problems. In this study, these goals are taken as parameters to evaluate the English textbooks of upper primary level of West Bengal Board and to find out the extent to which the themes of the lessons in these textbooks relate to the objectives of sustainable development. The various curricular and co-curricular activities at school enable the learners to solve environmental and social problems in real life situations and provide them the idea how to make efforts for creating a sustainable future. After doing the content analysis, it was found that topics and themes related to 6 SDGs among the 17 SDGs were included in these textbooks. There is lack of activities related to real life experiences in them. These textbooks can be more enriched by adopting experiential teaching approaches for making the students learn proper skills and values for preserving and maintaining the society and environment.