Innovative Approaches To Socioscientific Issues And Sustainability Education

This book explores innovative approaches to teacher professional learning, examples of teaching enacted in classrooms, and factors affecting the promotion of quality teaching in socio-scientific issues and sustainability contexts. Since educational settings and cultures influence teaching, the different approaches and perspectives in various cross-national contexts enable us to appreciate the diversity of different countries’ practices and provide insight into seminal approaches to socio-scientific issues-based teaching internationally. The book consists of three parts: innovative professional development programs, innovative teaching approaches, and issues relating to student engagement with socio-scientific issues and sustainability education. The book targets those who can be expected to develop curriculum, enact teaching practices, and facilitate teachers’ professional development in socio-scientific issues and sustainability education.

In advocating an action-oriented and issues-based curriculum, this book takes the position that a major, but shamefully neglected, goal of science and technology education is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to confront the complex and often ill-defined socioscientific issues they encounter in daily life as citizens in an increasingly technology-dominated world carefully, critically, confidently and responsibly. In outlining proposals for addressing socioscientific issues through a curriculum organized in terms of four increasingly sophisticated levels of consideration, the author adopts a highly critical and politicized stance towards the norms and values that underpin both scientific and technological development and contemporary scientific, engineering and medical practice, criticizes mainstream STS and STSE education for adopting a superficial, politically naïve and, hence, educationally ineffective approach to consideration of socioscientific issues, takes the view that environmental problems are social problems occasioned by the values that underpin the ways in which we choose to live, and urges teachers to encourage students to reach their own views through debate and argument about where they stand on major socioscientific issues, including the moral-ethical issues they often raise. More controversially, the author argues that if students are to become responsible and politically active citizens, the curriculum needs to provide opportunities for them to experience and learn from sociopolitical action. The relative merits of direct and indirect action are addressed, notions of learning about action, learning through action and learning from action are developed, and a case is made for compiling a user-friendly database reflecting on both successful and less successful action-oriented curriculum initiatives. Finally, the book considers some of the important teacher education issues raised by this radically new approach to teaching and learning science and technology. The book is intended primarily for teachers and student teachers of science, technology and environmental education, graduate students and researchers in education, teacher educators, curriculum developers and those responsible for educational policy. The author is Emeritus Professor of Science Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), Adjunct Professor of Science Education at the University of Auckland and Visiting Professor of Science Education at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include considerations in the history, philosophy and sociology of science and their implications for science and technology education, STSE education and the politicization of both students and teachers, science curriculum history, multicultural and antiracist education, and teacher education via action research.

This edited volume, the second of a two-volume set, presents science curriculum exemplars based on existing and future curriculum models. Drawing upon complexity and systems theories, this book will provide a framework for science curriculum that tackles and transforms the interrelated and socio-ecological causes of our ecological crises. The result is a refreshing and hopeful look at K-12 science curriculum in light of our current global trajectory in the twenty-first century. Chapter Future-oriented Science Education Building Sustainability Competences: An Approach to the European GreenComp Framework is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

We live in challenging and uncertain times, with profound implications for the purpose and nature of education. The crises of the Anthropocene, with the related climate-related challenges, biodiversity loss, a global pandemic, and changes to the world of work driven by science and technology innovation and the ascendency of data and knowledge, pressure us to rethink how we prepare people for such futures. This, in turn, has changed the landscape of educational research, perhaps particularly in the areas of mathematics, health and environmental education research that are so central to responding to these global pressures and potential solutions. We need to think critically about education research design and practice as part of a considered and robust discussion of education research theory and practice that will inform and help shape education systems into the future. This volume responds to these challenges, casting fresh light on contemporary methodologies fit for reconsidering education into the future. Chapters explore post-qualitative inquiry, with overviews and practices, arts-based and interdisciplinary methodologies, self-study and auto-ethnography for the Anthropocene, co-design with teachers, researching for system change, the ethics of ‘netnography’, and principles and practices of literature review.

In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis placed on the role of creativity and innovation in critical areas such as thinking and problem-solving, self-management, stress tolerance and flexibility, education, sustainability, and the new normal caused by COVID-19. Though creativity is a crucial cognitive skill and innovation is a requirement to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, these concepts must be thoroughly examined and considered as they are often misunderstood and underestimated. Achieving Sustainability Using Creativity, Innovation, and Education: A Multidisciplinary Approach discusses important issues surrounding human creativity and innovation as well as how education can develop cognitive abilities and skills and be improved to meet future challenges and demands using creativity and innovation. Covering topics such as creative leadership and problem-solving skills, it is ideal for practitioners, academicians, managers, policymakers, consultants, development specialists, researchers, instructors, and students.

Including considerations of sustainability in universities’ activities has long since become mainstream. However, there is still much to be done with regard to the full integration of sustainability thinking into science and engineering curricula. Among the problems that hinder progress in this field, the lack of sound information on how to actually implement it is prominent. Created in order to address this need, this book presents a wealth of information on innovative approaches, methods and tools that may be helpful in translating sustainability principles into practice.

Innovative Approaches to Education for Sustainable Development (Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability)

This book consists of stories of struggles in science education presented by a network of science educators working in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Britain, and the United States. The common goal of these educators is to produce more socially/ecologically just models and practices of science education. The book considers and reworks the key-terms of current social justice: agency, realism, justice, and power. Its first section explores re-inhabiting science in the quest for more just worlds including reterritorializing science within emergent theories of critical realism, engaging citizens activists with corporate science, and challenging neoliberalism and the forces that organize (structure) knowledge. The second section redefines praxis of science education itself through nuanced explorations of agency, decolonialism, and justice in ways that emphasize complexity, hybridity, ambivalence, and contradiction. The stories of this international group capture individual and collective efforts, motivated by a persistent sense that science and science education matter for questions of justice.