This research project aims to reach a better understanding of science teachers' competencies and training needs necessary to teach sustainable development goals (SDG) through socio-scientific issues (SSI) in Dutch secondary science education efficiently. Implementing SSI into science lessons and developing citizenship skills such as argumentation, reasoning, and evidence-based decision making are suggested by several researchers as an effective way to achieve the SDG.
Although there is a relatively large literature on SSI and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) separately, there is limited research on ESD through implementing SSI in science lessons. Moreover, previous studies have mainly focused on teacher knowledge, although, for effective use of SSI for ESD, not only teacher knowledge but also skills, and attitudes are crucial. Physics, chemistry, and biology teachers will form a professional learning community to design SSI lessons for ESD in this project.
The qualitative data will be collected from teachers and teacher educators to capture teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of teaching SSI for SDG in science lessons, to characterise teachers’ skills and attitudes for teaching SSI for SDG science lessons, to describe teachers’ views on the use of SSI for teaching SDG, the challenges and tensions in teaching SDG through SSI, to explore the development of science teacher candidates’ competencies to teach SDG through implementing SSI in science lessons. The outputs of this research will contribute to the knowledge development about teacher competencies for teaching SDG in secondary school science lessons.