Abstract
Research on climate sustainability investigates (1) global climate change, and (2) the natural and anthropogenic factors that affect it. In an ongoing, NSF-funded, environmental literacy project, we use a learning progression approach to study the teaching and learning of climate sustainability at the secondary school level. More specifically, we focused on promoting an environmental literacy goal in relation to climate sustainability: to use discipline-based reasoning to analyze and explain how human energy usage activities (e.g., farming, electricity usage, transportation) and natural processes (e.g., plant growth, human food consumption, dead organisms decaying) affect the carbon cycle. We conducted empirical research over a span of 6 years, engaging middle and high school science teachers from five states representing all four time zones of the country. We developed Learning Progression Frameworks (LPFs), curriculum, teacher professional development materials, and student and teacher assessments based on the LPFs. In this chapter, we provide suggestions for incorporating climate sustainability into teacher education programs. In particular, we discuss what pre-service teachers need to know in order to effectively facilitate their students’ achievement of this goal. We also provide two specific suggestions for teacher education programs: using visualization tools to promote discipline-based reasoning and using scenarios to support pre-service teachers’ understanding of students’ intuitive reasoning patterns.
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Jin, H., Johnson, M., Yestness, N.R. (2015). A Learning Progression Approach to Incorporate Climate Sustainability into Teacher Education. In: Stratton, S., Hagevik, R., Feldman, A., Bloom, M. (eds) Educating Science Teachers for Sustainability. ASTE Series in Science Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16411-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16411-3_8
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