Collaborating in an international learning community to develop a sustainability lesson that features both science and stewardship perspectives.
A series of exciting and interactive online workshops have been taking place over the last few months, facilitated by LASAR. Teachers from Pakistan and England have come together to collaborate and share their experiences of teaching about issues related to sustainability.
In our global society of limited resources, sustainability and environmental issues often raise big questions, for example, ‘How can we create a better world?’ Hence, education has an important role to play to help students explore and think critically about sustainability opportunities and challenges. Sustainability has often been conceived as three interrelated ‘spheres’ or ‘pillars’: economic, environmental, and social. Further specified a global call to action through 17 sustainability development goals (UN, 2015), and as such calls for expertise and perspectives from a range of disciplines. Often, the teaching of sustainability issues initially focuses on science for example, by observing the behaviours or habitats of different fish species to learn about and document marine decline. However, science may have limitations, and other reasons for marine decline, may point to human behaviour through historical perspectives or geographical factors i.e., is overpopulation to blame for overfishing? Therefore, presenting a more in-depth understanding of a sustainability problem or issue.
The learning community first considered the relationship between science and religion (worldviews), and how questions regarding sustainability can naturally link to theology and religious education (?), particularly stewardship and looking after our planet. It brought into question who is responsible, who those responsible are responsible to and why are they/we responsible. Therefore, the workshops drew attention to the science-religion (worldviews) discourse, establishing interaction and synergy between stewardship and STEM disciplines, to enable a multidisciplinary response to those big sustainability questions.
The learning community engaged with the big question ‘How ‘Green’ are electric cars?’, sharing experiences and coming together to create a lesson plan that responded to this question through the lenses of science and stewardship before expanding to consider other ways of knowing. The plan focused on three key goals:
- To build on current practice by establishing learning objectives for science and for stewardship that responded to the big question ‘How ‘Green’ are electric cars?’ Hence, students’ existing knowledge is established, and any misperceptions are challenged. Science and stewardship objectives are then mapped to the school curriculum.
- To develop Epistemic Insight – students are supported to think about how each disciplinary perspective i.e., Science and Stewardship would interpret the question, what methods are employed by each discipline to investigate the question, and how (someone) in each discipline would know they have a good answer.
- To build a permeable classroom where links are formed across the curriculum to avoid misperceptions, breaking down disciplinary boundaries through teacher collaboration, co-planning, and co-delivery, responding to a big question from various disciplinary perspectives.
I have included the example lesson plan below which is available to download at https://zenodo.org/record/7966827#.ZIGfkXbMKUk.
If you are interested in joining our learning community, to collaborate with colleagues and share your experiences of teaching sustainability that includes both science and stewardship perspectives, we would love to hear from you. Contact Lasar@canterbury.ac.uk
References
UN (2015) THE 17 GOALS. Available at https://sdgs.un.org/goals (Accessed: 07/06/23).