Integrating Environmental Education in Social Studies Textbooks for Primary Education in Tanzania

Environmental education has been integrated into social studies textbooks for primary education. The provision of environmental education to the young generation while they are in the school system enables them to understand the importance of the environment to human beings. However, the content related to the environment presented in the social studies textbook has not been aligned with the primary school education syllabus. This problem is more serious for textbooks published by private publishers. This paper explores how environmental education has been covered in social studies textbooks. The paper applies a qualitative approach to facilitate the achievement of this goal. The data were collected through the document analysis method as a data collection technique. Through this method, ten (10) social studies textbooks from standard three to seven were reviewed. In each class, two social studies textbooks were selected, one published by a private company and the other published by the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE). The findings revealed that the content related to the environment is not well aligned with the syllabus, especially in textbooks published by private publishers. Moreover, most social studies textbooks published by private publishers are inconsistent with the primary education syllabus. This caused some issues stipulated by the syllabus to be left uncovered. Therefore, there is a need for a full alignment of the environmental education content in social studies textbooks in primary school education. It is anticipated that this paper may inform the publishers of the need to align the content with the existing syllabus.