Challenges and Opportunities Influencing the Integration of Environmental Sustainability into Primary Education: Scoping Review

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, environmental sustainability has been part of the core curriculum in primary schools in Tanzania, although the integration of environmental sustainability content in the daily teaching-learning process is not uniform, and is influenced by some structural challenges remaining and the more limited opportunities for its use. This scoping review aimed to identify and outline the breadth of literature documenting challenges and opportunities for integrating environmental sustainability into primary education and the documented evidence for how these challenges and opportunities affect the level of integration in practice. The review was based on the methodology from Arksey and O'Malley (2005) adapted by Levac, Colquhoun and O'Brien (2010) and reported according to PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (Tricco et al., 2018). A structured search was used to locate 463 records and 39 of these were found to be eligible after Population-Concept-Context screening. The charted evidence suggests that there are common themes of curriculum rigidity, teacher preparedness, resource constraints and symbolic rather than substantive policy commitment as principal challenges, while community co-teaching, integrating media, integrating indigenous knowledge and cross-curricular flexibility are recurring opportunities in Tanzanian and similar East and Southern African settings. Very few provide direct measures of the extent to which the balance of challenge to opportunity determines integration in a particular school; most evidence is descriptive rather than explanatory. The review highlights a need for comparative studies that illustrate which opportunities are best able to address which challenges, and provides a set of synthesised evidence to guide curriculum developers and school leaders in considering practical strategies to strengthen integration.