The inclusion of Geoethical Values in the Design of Educational Policy for the Next Decade: The Case of the Greek Educational System

The inclusion of geoethics in the curricula contributes to young people's reflection on personal and social values and responsibilities, in order to raise awareness and develop appropriate behavior regarding the interaction of human activities with the Earth system (Georgousis et al., 2021; 2022). In modern societies, educational policy is implemented with the curricula being the mainspring. Recently, the new educational curricula that reflect the directions of educational policy in Greece for the next decade were prepared and announced. These curricula have received and are subject to various criticisms from scientific reviews of academic committees and educational institutions. In the midst of these, the question of whether they incorporate values of the natural world related to Geology and geoethical thought was developed, namely whether in an indirect and direct way they contribute to the sensitization and empowerment of students to the values of geoethics and consequently to the formation of environmentally and socially aware citizens. In order to answer this concern, research questions were posed regarding the presence of conceptual patterns, which refer to obvious or latent meanings for the promotion of geoethical values through the educational process. The methodology followed is the qualitative strategics with the technique of sensitizing content analysis, aimed to explore the thematic units and the expected learning outcomes of the new curricula of compulsory education of the Greek educational system. The texts were examined with the paragraph as the thematic unit. The characterization of the quantity was based on linguistic scales of related studies, according to which the results were characterized, identified and documented as they were estimated by the authors of the study. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) was used for the content analysis, specifically the quantification of the meaning patterns. Sixteen (16) new curricula were investigated. The investigation identifies a relatively small number of obvious conceptual patterns (codes) and a greater number of latent meanings in both social and natural sciences, revealing the limited potential for the development of geoethical thinking and geoethical values. Therefore, the lack of integration of geoethical values in the curricula of the next decade is noted, although recent researches document the lack of understanding of the geological heritage and the necessity for developing geoethical awareness of young people through the educational process.