Our qualitative interviews with 16 early-career South African researchers investigated how they view public engagement and its role in their research careers, as well as the motivations, challenges and institutional factors that shape their engagement efforts. We situate our findings in the context of high societal diversity and inequality in…

Although participation in citizen science can improve cognitive and affective learning outcomes, many citizen science projects exhibit low retention rates. By gaining an understanding of forms of engagement, reasons for ongoing participation, and the impact of project design on participant motivation and engagement, we can help keep people…

Traditional biology curricula depict science as an objective field, overlooking the important influence that human values and biases have on what is studied and who can be a scientist. We can work to address this shortcoming by incorporating "ideological awareness" into the curriculum, which is an understanding of biases, stereotypes,…

This study was carried out in order to determine what postgraduate science teachers perceive when socio scientific issues are mentioned, how they teach these subjects, what difficulties they encounter during teaching the subjects and what they need during the teaching of socio scientific issues. For this purpose, three groups of interviews were…

Purpose: A faculty development program (FDP) introduced postsecondary instructors to a module focused on the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, a socio-hydrologic issue (SHI) and a sustainability challenge. This study aims to examine factors influencing faculty interest in adopting the instructional resources and faculty experience with the FDP,…

In Brazil, environmental topics in teacher education programmes have largely been addressed and explored by the field of research in Environmental Education and subsidized by legislative and normative instruments. Nevertheless, the difficulties in articulating environmental topics within some areas of knowledge compromise their integration in…

Citizen science education is a new approach in science education for promoting scientific inquiry related to localized problems and for engaging in social action based on inquiry results. Using agency as a lens for understanding teachers' practices when using this approach is important. In this ethnographic case study, a teacher implementing a…

In the socioscientific issues (SSI) classroom, students need to cross the border between the subcultures of science (i.e., school science vs. everyday science). Traditional school contexts tend to present science as positivistic knowledge and unshakable truth unaffected by sociocultural factors. In contrast, everyday science, including SSI, is…

This study focused on inquiring into undergraduate chemistry professors' efforts in North America to increase student motivation and interest in the subject and the feasibility of methods that connect students to real world applications and societal issues related to chemistry. A survey was distributed to chemistry instructors at post-secondary…

This study explores the views of Indonesian junior high school pre-service science teachers (PSTs) towards teaching based on socio-scientific issues (SSIs). Questionnaires were analyzed qualitatively and descriptively. The PSTs (N=62) acknowledged that student competencies ranging from personal to socially relevant skills as well as character…

Ocean Acidification (OA) is an emerging environmental issue that is still largely unknown to the public and in its infancy in terms of educational strategies. OA teaching material should address the specific challenges that educators face while building learners' understanding of OA. The objective of this study is two-fold. First, we identified…

This survey explored Indonesian science teachers' experience and perceptions toward science teaching that is based on socio-scientific issues (SSIs). The participants were asked whether or not they already used corresponding practices in their own teaching and whether they experienced any challenges in implementing SSI-based pedagogies. Further…

Our paper analyses the genetics and gene technology contents of German (Bavarian) and Portuguese biology textbooks, as fields common in science-technology-society-environment (STSE) issues. Our aim was to determine the extent to which textbooks from both countries contribute to students' understanding of the STSE issues and therefore to students'…

Citizen science is a relatively young research field. Having 'discovered' it in a conference workshop, I thought it might be the answer to solving a problem I had encountered during my PhD studies -- how to scale-up efforts to record valuable experiential knowledge. I planned to train citizen scientists to conduct qualitative semi-structured…

Teaching socioscientific issues (SSI) necessitates dialogic discourse activities. However, a majority of science teachers prefer monologic discourse in SSI contexts. In addition, some of these teachers are resistant to change (from monologic to dialogic discourse) despite certain professional development attempts. The purpose of the present…