Teaching evolution for sustainability in the era of climate change: the Socio-Scientific Issues (SSI) approach

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development has been at the centre of public debate since the 1980s, but the challenges to sustainability have become more urgent in recent years due to rapid environmental changes that threaten the planet's biological support systems (United Nations, 2015). These threats include, but are not limited to, global warming, with a growing number of extreme weather events causing natural disasters, rising sea levels and ocean acidification, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and international migration driven by these factors. Against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world, new approaches to sustainability education are needed. One such approach is based on the teaching of evolution using socio-scientific issues (SSI). In fact, understanding evolution is necessary to understand and predict ecosystem responses to rapid environmental change and their consequences for human societies, so that to devise possible solutions informed by evolutionary biology. SSIs are ill-structured problems and dilemmas, controversial in nature, without immediate and clear solutions, which require evidence-based considerations and can be informed by various ideas and perspectives, such as economic, political, and ethical ones (Zeidler, 2014). The SSI-based pedagogical approach uses controversial and personally relevant issues that require scientific reasoning but include social aspects that require "students to engage in dialogue, discussion, debate and argumentation; they integrate implicit and/or explicit ethical components that require some degree of moral reasoning" (Pessoa et al. in Sá-Pinto et al., 2023). In this session, we intend to present a teaching resource produced within the COST Action EuroScitizen project. This resource is an open access e-book entitled "Learning evolution through socio-scientific issues" http://www.euroscitizen.eu/2023/02/03/learning-evolution-through-socioscientific-issues/ It is the result of contributions from 34 authors and 29 reviewers from 15 different countries. The authors of this poster were involved as editors, authors and reviewers (Sá-Pinto  and Pessoa) or as reviewer and coordinator of the Italian translation (Realdon). The e-book comprises two parts: - chapters addressing theoretical and methodological issues related to science literacy, SSI education approach and evolution education; - chapters presenting good practice examples with the use of the SSI approach in formal and non-formal evolution education. The resource focuses on a number of examples (biodiversity conservation, health issues, e.g. pandemics, antibiotic resistance, agriculture and pesticide resistance, ...), but the SSI approach can be profitably exploited in other diverse and interdisciplinary contexts, such as natural resource use (water, minerals, fossil fuels), energy production, land management, waste disposal, climate change mitigation and many others, all of which are related within the framework of sustainability education.