Environmental and sustainability education in the mandatory Ontario secondary curriculum: analyzing for content and impacts on student engagement

There is widespread agreement amongst the academic community and governmental institutions that high school environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is critical to the development of young sustainability leaders. Despite this, ESE is often taught in isolation or from a purely scientific lens, limiting both its accessibility and scope. The Ontario Ministry of Education responded to these limitations in 2009 with the publishing of Acting Today, Shaping Tomorrow: A Policy Framework for Environmental Education in Ontario. This framework, and the curriculum updates that followed it, was intended to bring environmental education into every classroom in Ontario. However, little research has been conducted on the quality and outcome of these updates. This study reviews the ESE content currently found in five mandatory grade 9 courses in Ontario and examines the impacts that this content has on students’ engagement with sustainability. While substantial ESE content was found within the Science 9 and Issues in Canadian Geography 9 curricula, themes were largely limited to the physical sciences and human development. Very little mandatory ESE material was seen in the other mandatory grade 9 courses. Further, first-hand reports from students indicated significant gaps between content within the curricula and material covered in the classroom, as well as a lack of action-oriented ESE learning opportunities. To increase engagement amongst students and ensure that youth are well-prepared to navigate the complex sustainability challenges that the future holds, the Ontario grade 9 curriculum should be updated to include a more holistic and application-based focus on sustainability.