Confucianism provides a specific view on the world held by many people living in several Asian societies. It offers views on humans and nature that generally differ from other traditional or Western modern views. The paper presents a systematic analysis of the literature in education with a focus on science education about the connection of…

Background: The ongoing transformation of the interplay between human beings and nature calls for new ways of learning. Although established educational practices merging sciences and arts have been studied before, the focus has been mainly on science or technology-discipline-orientated aspects. More research is needed on the characteristics of…

The content of organic chemistry is closely related to our everyday life, to nature, and to the human body. Illustrations play a big role in the acquisition of the course material, especially if those help to make the interpretation of the textual content easier. Hybrid illustrations are made up of combinations of realistic images (photographs,…

As a result of human beings' activities to dominate nature and transform it for their own benefit as they continue to advance in science and technology, environmental problems such as climate change have become the biggest threat faced by the biosphere in the current century. One of the biggest problems of humanity today is the scarcity of water…

Ecosystem services (ES) are the benefits people obtain from nature contributing to our well-being. Although this concept has high didactic potential, its presence in education literature is scarce. This article presents the ES framework as a new teaching principle that, taught together with the biodiversity concept, may help students develop…

This lesson used the correspondence of Charles Darwin as an exploration of nature of science (NOS) in a historical context. Specifically, we used his original correspondence about his "provisional hypothesis" of pangenesis as a novel way to explore a scientist's social community. Darwin's community of friends and colleagues in the…

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the appropriation of the sociocultural perspective by the physics education research community has represented a linguistic turn in the field, pointing out a promising path to overcome the dominance of the "individual paradigm," both in terms of student learning and initial and continuing teacher…

This dissertation is aimed at articulating and empirically characterizing an expansive orientation to field-based socio-ecological systems learning that elevates participatory and ethically-engaged approaches to teaching and learning. Grounded in relational ways of knowing, this dissertation works to expand and transform normative educational…

This article describes how preservice elementary teachers learn about the nature of science and develop scientific literacy through a collaborative project that prepares them to design meaningful learning experiences for students. The Life's Replica Project was an effort between a college professor and an elementary school teacher to facilitate…

Promoting a functional scientific literacy entails preparing people to effectively engage and make decisions regarding real-world socioscientfic issues (SSI) through consideration of the relevant products and processes of science, as well as social, cultural, environmental, and ethical factors. Students can develop a functional scientific literacy…

In considering goals for science education, it is conventional to make arguments for the utility of scientific knowledge for a variety of purposes. Less prominent are rationales based on the beauty or truth of science. In this paper, we examine how an approach to science education might be different if we shift the goals of communication to an…

Western science largely controls what is learned, funded, studied, and published, yet few scientists are aware of the particular ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions that form the foundation of the Western scientific worldview. Western science is not universal, acultural, or objective, and only the privilege and power of…

Teaching science involves designing learning experiences that attend to a complex set of relationships between students, the discipline of science, and the places where science experiences are carried out. Unfortunately, with traditional approaches to K-12 science instruction, contributions to learning from students and places are often overlooked…

This dissertation aims to address frequent calls for partnerships between informal science learning spaces and formal K-12 science education (e.g. Bevan & Dillon, 2010; Hofstein & Rosenfeld, 1996; NRC, 2009; Stocklmayer et al., 2010) as well as how informal educators and organizations are or are not addressing issues of equity within these…