“Environmental sustainabity” in portuguese textbooks

Abstract

The sustainable development is the principal issue of the society contemporary, in order to have a future. We have to care about the resources to avoid their over exploration and to protect the nature, not only for the human but also for the other living beings. The aim of this study is to analyse in Portuguese textbooks the item Sustainability which is associated to the conception – “Relation of humans in respect to nature” and its relation to the topic “Human-Nature”. Our results show that not much emphasis is given to ecological, social, and economic sustainability in science and geography textbooks. These results from text analysis are in accordance with the ones from images related to human and nature. In this context we observed that the higher number of images concerns human activities in the context of the human management of the environment. These findings show that if we want an education for sustainability, which is stated in international official documents, textbooks should be changed in order to introduce more information about sustainability and promote students’ citizenship.