Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study examined Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), an educational philosophy promoted by the United Nations through the Sustainable Development Goals, as the philosophical underpinning of the 2021 contextualized curriculum innovation for the Galapagos Islands. Land Education, an educational philosophy developed by Indigenous scholars, was used as the non-Western lens to carry out a Critical Discourse Analysis using Directed Content Analysis. The analyzed texts were official, published documentation of the 2021 contextualized curriculum innovation, which contains the 2016 Ecuadorian national curriculum, and transcripts of interviews of education and conservation leaders in Galapagos who represented organizations that participated in developing the 2021 curriculum. Codes for the qualitative data analysis were gleaned from the Land Education literature that critique Education for Sustainable Development, which were then organized into natural categories: epistemology, ontology, axiology, and historicity.

Data from this study suggest that education and conservation leaders in Galapagos are divided between those who bolster the ESD-promoted discourse and therefore the 2021 curriculum, and those who question the role of sustainability and development in educational innovation in Galapagos. In addition, both the published documentation of the 2021 curriculum and the interview transcripts suggest validity of the critiques leveled against ESD in the Land Education literature.

Results of the study are significant for the field of education, especially related to the United Nations-led global efforts to implement sustainable development through education. This study dispels misperceptions held in the ESD literature and among conservation and education leaders in Galapagos by providing evidence that suggests that ESD and the many ESD-adjacent educational philosophies, are fundamentally incompatible with Indigenous education as articulated in the Land Education literature. Being embedded within a settler colonialist worldview, ESD principles are recruited to serve ends consistent with the colonialist project. Further, this study reveals that ESD affirms current power structures by assuming colonial settler stability, thus dispelling the pro-change narrative promoted in the ESD literature and in the 2021 curriculum innovation for Galapagos.

Further implications regarding curriculum content and its implementation can also be gleaned from efforts to make education relevant to the lives of students on small islands. Educational initiatives would benefit from selecting an educational philosophy that has been scrutinized to reveal its epistemological, ontological, axiological perspectives, as well as its view of history, its correspondence to long-term goals of the island’s inhabitants, as well as its capacity to engage colonial legacies in education. Results from this study also indicate the value of achieving coherence among all of the system components - textbooks, teacher administrative responsibilities, content, pedagogy, professional development, and assessment.