Restructuring Middle School Science Education Around Grand Challenges: online lecture on Friday, February 3, 3:00 p.m.

Prof. Dr. Jeff Nordine, Associate Professor at IOWA College of Education and Visiting Professor at IPN, will give a public lecture titled "Restructuring Middle School Science Education Around Grand Challenges."

February 3, 2023, 3:00 p.m.

Dial-in dates: Available upon request from the office of the Department of Physics Education, IPN: weyerke@leibniz-ipn.de

Students across the globe are rapidly awakening to the urgency of global challenges that will shape their future. Such challenges include climate change, biodiversity loss, global pandemics, fresh water shortages, plastic and air pollution, antibiotic resistance, and more. Each of these problems requires solutions that blend scientific, technical, economic, political, and educational perspectives; these complex and multifaceted issues are often referred to as Grand Challenges (GCs). In a recent international survey of 11,000 students, nearly all students expressed a desire to learn about such global issues in school, yet less than half reported regular opportunities to do so (Cambridge International, 2020). The difference between student interest and school science reflects two major shortcomings of science education throughout the globe: (1) students often fail to see the relevance of science in their lives, and (2) they typically leave school underprepared to use scientific ideas to participate in solutions to Grand Challenges either through participation in science as a vocation or engagement in public debate.

In May 2022, IPN hosted an invited international mini-conference addressing theoretical and practical perspectives on radically restructuring science education around the GCs and students’ desire to be well-informed and agentic with respect to these issues. The goal of this presentation is to share the ideas that were raised at this mini-conference.