Enhancing Education for Sustainable Development Through Geographical Perspectives in Chemistry Teaching
- PDF / 500,775 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 89 Downloads / 213 Views
Enhancing Education for Sustainable Development Through Geographical Perspectives in Chemistry Teaching Christian Zowada 1 & Nadja Belova 1
& Ingo
Eilks 1
Received: 2 July 2019 / Accepted: 12 December 2019/ # Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan 2020
Abstract Chemistry, with its related technical applications, is of crucial importance for creating a sustainable future. Without chemistry, current challenges will be difficult to solve. Such problems include meeting most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the United Nations and adherence to planetary limits, for example, novel chemical substances being released to the environment, biochemical flows, and climate change. Such challenges can, however, only be solved via transdisciplinary approaches. They can never be fully explored by a single discipline only, either in reality or in the context of teaching and learning. In order to strengthen education for sustainable development (ESD), we suggest including geographical perspectives in science education. Geography commits itself to the analysis of human-environment systems and combines social perspectives with those found in the natural sciences. In our opinion, such an approach can increase the educational value of science learning, e.g. in the case of chemistry education. An exploratory interview study with twelve purposefully selected chemistry teachers was recently conducted in order to explore chemistry teachers’ views on implementing geographical perspectives. This study reveals that German chemistry teachers view such inclusion as generally positive, but also recognize limitations in the approach due to curricular and time constraints. Keywords Education for sustainable development . Geography . Secondary/
undergraduate chemistry education . Teacher education
* Christian Zowada [email protected] Nadja Belova [email protected] Ingo Eilks [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
C. Zowada et al.
Introduction About 50 years ago, the report “The Limits to Growth” questioned human behavior in the 20th century (Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972). A glimpse into today’s media reveals that challenges are still growing at all levels from local to global. These challenges include the increasing releases of novel chemicals, extensive biochemical flows of phosphorus or nitrogen compounds into the environment, plastic pollution in the oceans, and challenges associated with climate change. Especially, the topic of climate change has gained growing media attention recently in many countries when pupils started a youth movement, demonstrating banners showing “Fridays for Future.” However, not only climate controversy is changing mankind’s behavior. The growing influence of mankind on Earth’s systems has led some researchers to claim that the current age should be renamed the “man-made age”—the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). Since the 1950s, the human influence on the Earth has been clearly visible (Steffen et al
Data Loading...
