0000000000684084
AUTHOR
Luís Marques
The current planetary crisis: a missing dimension in science education
The origin of our research has been the intuition that, in spite of some dramatic calls of United Nations experts, the attention paid by science education research to the study of citizens’ awareness of the state of the world and of the danger of an irreversible degradation of life in our Planet, has been very poor. Our work intends to clarify to what extent this essential issue in the education of future decision-making citizens is adequately dealt with in science education research. With this purpose, we have posed open questions to several hundreds of science teachers in training and in service about “problems and challenges that humanity has to face” and we have analysed the content of …
The need for contributions to the decade of education for a sustainable future: an ethical commitment
The United Nations General Assembly, given the serious and urgent problems humanity has to face nowadays, has adopted a resolution establishing a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). This constitutes a new urgent call to educators of all levels and areas to contribute to citizens’ awareness and understanding of the state of the world in order to enable them to participate in well-founded decision-making. Our aim in this paper is to analyse the obstacles that could explain the poor response to previous calls, in order to overcome them and make it possible to assume an ethical commitment on behalf of the community of educators and researchers in science education