Although numerous approaches to cultivating an ecocritical awareness in students exist, much scholarly dialog has revolved around ecojustice education and ecopedagogy. Whereas the former seeks to cultivate a local ecocritical awareness in students, the latter advocates for a globalized "planetary citizenship." While both cultivate an…

The Education drives the Future of Humanity. The Wishes and Visions of Humankind have to drive the Education. What is the final goal of Education? To bring up a healthy, emotionally mature, wise, knowledgable nourisher of life, who understands and feels the reality, based on ethics, humanism and compassion, as essential characteristics of a human…

The discovery of frog abnormalities by students on a school field trip in 1995 sparked hundreds of scientific studies in search of the cause of abnormality. This Socio-Scientific Issue has been used as an inquiry-based learning exercise for training in the practice of science, but it is also well-suited to teaching the nature of science. Our goal…

The climate crisis is a growing concern for many people, especially those who are of college age, making it an important and pressing issue to explore in honors courses. Eco-Art: Using Art to Reconcile with the Climate Crisis, a University of New Mexico (UNM) Honors College course, integrates the disciplines of art and environmental justice to…

The article investigates sustainable development from the holistic perspective, taking into account the complex nature of the world and the dynamism of the socio-economic systems. The study is interdisciplinary, as it addresses the issues of economics, mathematics and physics with the main focus on the modern perspective of sustainable development…

This pilot implementation study examines the experiences of ten teachers who have employed a place-based learning resource called "A Walking Curriculum" for one to three years. "A Walking Curriculum" is an example of Imaginative Ecological Education--a pedagogical approach that centralizes imaginative engagement, emotional…

Using socio-scientific issues (SSI) in the science learning environment can promote student motivation to learn and make learning experiences more meaningful. Embedding model-based reasoning opportunities in science lessons can promote substantial science learning. However, how these both work together to promote science learning is a little…

We outline an instructional strategy for supporting students' science literacy skills using a structured decision-making tool in an interdisciplinary undergraduate course. Instructional tools support basing complex socioscientific issues decisions on a reasoned analysis of tradeoffs among multiple conflicting values rather than heuristics, such as…

This study investigates the effect of group collaborative argumentation on the quality of decision-making on waste incineration of socioscientific issues (SSI). To achieve this, fifty-nine high school students engaged with a lecture-style class that did not use any argumentation activities. They then completed an individual survey aimed at…

Only about half of Americans are convinced that human activity is the major cause of climate change. This statistic highlights the increased need for high-quality climate science education but also highlights the fact that lessons on this subject are often complicated as denial argumentation abounds in classrooms. In order to achieve greater…

This commentary discusses SSIs in relation to environmental ethics. In their article, Augusto Macalalag Jr., Joseph Johnson and Michelle Lai note tensions between SSIs and environmental education and investigate educational experiences that address some of these tensions. The discourse associated with SSIs generally does not consider…

Conceptual change in undergraduate capstone courses provides unique opportunities to examine how students draw from multiple courses and experiences to resolve conceptual confusion. We examined how senior-level natural resource management students revised their conceptions of 'ecosystem' throughout their capstone course. The concept of ecosystem…

The paper analyses modern information society in terms of an information ecology approach. Its aim is to determine the place of the human being in the human-society-ecosystem relations system and to study the prospects of a humanistic approach to the understanding of the essence of subject-object relationships in the communication space of…

The purpose of the current study is to reveal students' environmental attitudes, their informal reasoning, and how their informal reasoning on a socioscientific issue changes depending on their environmental attitudes. The study participants were 104 eighth-grade students. A form consisting of a scenario and open-ended questions was used as data…

Mankind could not exist without the earth to which it owes its life and could not have continued to exist to this day. This earth we call our world is an ecosystem. Mankind could not survive alone in this ecosystem. Mankind was able to continue its existence to the present day forming a whole with the other elements of this ecosystem. Aware of…