Chapter 8: Changing Science Teacher Education in a Changing Global Climate: Telling a New Story

We are science teacher educators committed to transforming education for a more sustainable world. We believe that classroom teachers have a uniquely challenging role for which they must be thoughtfully prepared. In sharing our story, our hope is that teachers, teacher educators, and everyone else associated with education will benefit from learning about our approach to including eco-education within science education. Our goal is that we might start a new conversation about preparing teachers to educate learners as environmentally conscious global citizens for the 21st century.

In this chapter, we describe our approach to infusing environmental education into science teacher preparation. We created an interactive curricular module on global climate change (lead designer Hestness) that we implemented within our elementary teacher education program.¹ Since we were interested in encouraging teachers to approach science in new ways, we used an innovative curricular approach, centered on storytelling, to guide the creation of our global climate change module. Powerful stories create other worlds where individuals may safely make contact with issues of great energy—topics that may at first seem overwhelming or too challenging to fully comprehend (Tatar, 2009). Our take on curriculum-as-storytelling emphasized the need to incorporate a diversity of perspectives and voices in thinking about climate change as a personally and globally important issue. We believed that this could help guide teachers in reenvisioning their responsibilities in preparing students to make informed decisions that impact their environment and their lives. As Tatar states, both witnessing and exploring are key components of prompting learners through storytelling. By presenting climate change education in an engaging way, we believed it was possible to reduce new teachers’ hesitation around addressing this important issue in the classroom.