Biology Education in the Future

Abstract

Biology today is a popular and influential discipline that dramatically shapes our lives and affects the development and operations of societies around the world. Biology educators thus play a crucial role in ensuring the global community is made aware of the biological bases of everything we do. However, as biology teachers and educationists, we face unprecedented challenges in making our discipline relevant, meaningful, attractive and respected. Some of the challenges include: (i) the explosion of knowledge and the feeling that we are being over-whelmed by new developments and applications, (ii) challenges to the scientific method from fundamentalist and other groups, (iii) urgency of challenges that confront society, so that long term solutions are less considered than immediate, short-term ones, (iv) shift to more applied studies that do not have the intellectual rigour that underpins disciplines like biology, and (v) specialization of the disciplinary components of biology and the challenge to integrate and generalize. On the other hand, I am optimistic about the future importance and potential success of biology education.