Designing SSI Lessons For Sustainability Education: pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge

The urge to transform educational practices towards teaching sustainability has been widely recognized in education. However, teachers experience difficulty in implementing education for sustainable development in their lessons. Even though the research in socioscientific issues-based instruction grows, the literature is limited regarding the use of socioscientific issues for teaching sustainability, and teachers’ professional learning of socioscientific issues-based instruction as a means towards education for sustainable development. In this study, we aim to characterize STEM pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of designing a socioscientific issues-based lesson to teach about sustainable development goals. The qualitative data were collected from five pre-service teachers. Our findings show that we can capture all components of pedagogical content knowledge during the pre-service teachers’ lesson design. The most emphasis is given to Instructional Strategies while very little emphasis was given on Assessment.