Acting on Sustainability

Abstract

Changing scienceThis special issue of RISE makes a timely contribution to the growing literature on researchon teaching and learning about socio-scientific issues (SSI), particularly focusing on thetopic of sustainability. The SSI agenda when applied to school science represents asignificant attempt to reconceptualize this subject’s fundamental rationale, goals, andmethods. The traditional curriculum where students confirm canonical theories, conceptsand processes through predictable classroom-based inquiry, is replaced by study of complexscience-based real-world problems, where science is understood as a powerful resource,knowledge base, and repertoire of methods and strategies, for contributing to possiblesolutions. The traditional certainties around what science content should be studied, howand why, and what should count as optimal student learning are all problematized by thisshift to an emphatically applied focus. While researchers in this field now broadly agree onthe rationale for a SSI orientation, and concur about broad principles for its enactment,many areas remain under-researched and emergent. The seven papers in this special issuecollectively contribute to this agenda, but also indicate the diversity of theoretical andpractical matters at stake. In this short response I highlight new insights provided by thesearticles, as well as future challenges arising from this work.SSI approaches so farThere is now a substantial literature characterizing SSI approaches to science education as anecessary reform to science curricula that focuses on controversial, socially relevant issueswithin this curricula (Cross & Price, 1996; Davies, 2004; Hodson, 2003; Kolsto, 2001; Lee& Witz, 2009; Levinson, 2006; Ratcliffe & Grace, 2003; Sadler et al. 2007; Zeidler, 2003).The SSI movement insists that ethical aspects of social issues need to be linked withconceptual and methodological approaches in science to address real-world problems. As