الملخص الإنجليزي
This study aimed at specifying the fundamental concepts of education for sustainable development and investigating the actual administrational practices in achieving education for sustainable development; thus by exploring some programs and projects that were created in the Ministry of education which seeks to fulfill fundamentals of education for sustainable development. It also investigates whether there were statistically significant differences among respondents that could be attributed to gender, job title, educational region, number of courses taken in professional development, the extent of knowledge in : computer usage, computer qualification, the extent of knowledge in the English language, experience, and lastly bringing about suggestions to emphasize and promote practices concerning existing projects and programs and suggest others to reinforce the role of education in sustainable development.
Towards that end, the relevant literature was traversed. Drawing on relevant literature, research studies and a pilot study the researcher developed a 49-item questionnaire that was subject to face validity and reliability tests that reached (0.92). The questionnaire was divided into four domains, namely: administrational practices in empowerment (14items), education for all (14-items), social justice (11-items), and environmental awareness (10-items). A sample of (191) of administrators, supervisors, and technicians, which represent 10% of the study population, in four educational regions was selected, namely : Muscat , Dakhilya, Sharqia Shamal, and Dohfar.
The data was statistically treated using means, ranking, T-test and ANOVA. Prominent among the results are :
1- The highest arithmetic mean scored for the Empowerment domain (2.28), while the lowest scored for Environmental Awareness (2.21).
2- Only nine items scored " high" and the highest was related to " Maintaining health and cleanliness in school environment contest " (3.14); while the lowest score was related to " The net of schools affiliated to UNESCO project" (1.77).
3- The rest of the items gained" medium" scores which ranged between (2.40) and (1.77).
4- There are statistically significant differences related to gender to the advantage of females in education for all and environmental awareness domains; also related to region in the empowerment and social justice domains for the advantage of Sharqia Shamal region; while in number of courses variable the differences appeared in education for all, social justice and environmental awareness for the advantage of the group that didn't have courses; differences related to the knowledge of computer also appeared in education for all, social justice and environmental awareness domains to the advantage of the group that had higher computer knowledge; while differences related to computer qualification appeared in empowerment, education for all, and environmental awareness domains to the advantage of the computer qualified; for the knowledge of English variable the differences were in all domains; while for the experience variable the
differences appeared only in the empowerment domain.
5- There were no statistically significant differences related to job title. The study concluded with a number of suggestions, the most important are highlighted as follows: promoting awareness of the Millennium goals, education for all, and education for sustainable development goals; discussing challenges stated in the five-year human resources plans of the Sultanate of Oman, and recommendations related to educational strategy (2020) of the Sultanate of Oman; expanding the chance of inclusion and contribution of individuals in the educational directorates of the regions and in schools in Oman while setting up future educational plans; studying obstacles related to existing projects and create other programs and projects to comply with goals of education for sustainable development.
