Reorienting curriculum for ESD: Integrating reading and literacy practices to address sustainability issues

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is built upon the premise that education is the key to promote Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). To achieve the 17 ideas of SDG, the school needs to collaborate with the community and other related entities to ensure basic skills such as literacy, numeracy, and relevant knowledge in the 21st century are integrated with the curriculum. In reorientating the curriculum toward ESD, certain skills, values, knowledge, and perspectives in the environment, community, and economy-related to sustainability issues need to be addressed. By reviewing curriculum 2013 documents and FGD (Focus Group Discussion) session with a group of literacy experts and practitioners, we learned that the curriculum 2013 already put literacy as targeted competence but has not considered texts as the center of interactions. It does not include literacy skills for other content areas than Indonesian, which would actually contribute to the SDG attainment. Moreover, it has not involved communities and families as integral partners in literacy program development. The experts and practitioners who took part in the FGD signified the importance of text-based interactions between adults and children in three settings: school, communities, and families, to promote lifelong readers and learners.