Within past decade, we have all witnessed the public concern about the environmental issues and the need for ecological concepts to be accurately taught to students in primary and secondary schools, to undergraduates, and to adults. The Ecological literacy has been viewed as the morally and experientially engaged way of knowing, involving a sense of wonder and respect for life and the realization that all human activities have consequences for the larger ecosystem (Orr, 1992). On the other hand ideologies in the school teaching and particularly in school science textbooks are important for students’ scientific literacy and work on their analysis has shown that a rather individualistic image of science is offered to students (Knain, 2001). “At their best, the textbooks are a collection of missed opportunities,” according to Dr. J.E. Roseman, director of AAAS (2000) study. The results of this study have revealed that the textbooks are sources of a number of students’ difficulties and ignore or obscure the most important ideas by focusing instead on technical terms and trivial details. Considering the fact that science teaching and learning in Greece, is dominated by the school textbooks, the question arisen is the following: In what extend has primary curriculum, as expressed in textbooks, the potential to support students’ development of ecological literacy?

This study is based on the analysis of Greek school textbooks taught in the primary education. There are books related to science for every year of primary school. In all textbooks we identified those chapters that related to nature and to ecology. After preliminary analysis of both text and visual representations a scheme of categories emerged in the form of a systemic network (Bliss et al, 1983). Based on this category scheme, we independently analyzed and counted all paragraphs and visual representations of the selected chapters. The scheme is a mixture of categories emerged by employing the approach of inductive category development of qualitative content analysis Mayring (2000) and categories developed and used in other studies (Korfiatis et al, 2004).

Our first results show that, although basic principles concerning the environment and the ecology are included in the new subject matter, the content and the context of Greek primary science textbooks cannot support ecological literacy. Almost half of the text paragraphs concerns the scientific presentation of the content and aims in informing students generally about relevant to content issues. A very small proportion is relevant to safety and environmental issues. Visual representations are not also appropriate for a positive contribution to students’ ecological literacy. For example, representations of ecosystems, beyond inaccuracies, provide static and individualistic images of the nature. If, as Orr (1992) argues, an ecological education would immerse the learner in the natural world and the local community; it would engage the learner in conversation, in dialogue with the surrounding environment, then not a sense of ecological literacy is supported by the present textbooks. The main idea of wholeness, connection, and relationship is absent in the primary curriculum. It seems that the fragmented and compartmentalized curriculum on one hand and the kind of thinking developed from the function of the text and the visual representations involved, on the other, can result only in fragmenting knowledge into discrete specialties.