January 1, 2025

Geography Teaching as a Tool for Enhancing Values Education in Malawi: Exploring the Promoting Sustainable Development Values in Secondary Schools

Key Points

Most secondary school geography syllabuses in Malawi fail to promote sustainable development values effectively,
Findings show that only a few schools integrate sustainable development values into their teaching practices, indicating a missed opportunity for holistic education.
Using a mixed-method approach, this research involved teachers and former students from various secondary schools in Malawi, focusing on their perceptions of geography education.
These findings suggest significant improvements are necessary in curriculum design and teacher training to fully integrate values education into the geography syllabus.

Abstract

This article explores how secondary school Geography education helps to instill values, particularly Sustainable Development Values (SDVs) in Malawian citizens. The study was guided by Mezirow’s (1900) Transformative Learning Theory (TLT), adopted a mixed-method approach and fell under the pragmatic research paradigm. It involved 78 secondary school Geography teachers and 38 former Geography students as participants. This project was conducted in 35 secondary schools in two districts (Mzimba north and Nkhata bay) of Northern Education Division. Semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and document analyses were used to collect qualitative and quantitative data. The study findings reveal that most success criteria in both junior and senior secondary school Geography syllabuses do not promote the SDVs. In addition, though most Geography teachers indicated that they are knowledgeable of the geographical values, they do not plan and consider addressing them when handling their Geography lessons.

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Cite This Study

C. et al. (Wed,) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68af59ddad7bf08b1eade7c2 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.47772/ijriss.2025.907000446

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