Education for Sustainable Development through Socioscientific Issues: Pre-service Teachers’ Pedagogical Design Capacity

Even though the importance of sustainability has been recognized in education, teachers struggle with identifying an appropriate method to implement education for sustainable development (ESD) in STEM subjects. There is a relatively large literature on ESD, and the implementation of socioscientific issues (SSI) separately. However, there is limited research on using SSI for ESD. For this reason, this empirical study aims at characterizing STEM teacher candidates’ pedagogical design capacity (PDC) to address what resources they use, and how they interact with these resources to design SSI-based instruction to facilitate ESD. The qualitative data is collected through field notes, reflection reports and semi-structured interviews. The results reveal that during their design, pre-service teachers referred to teacher resourcesthe most, followed by collaborative resources, and instructional resources. Even though their use of resources shows strong connections between SSI and their pedagogical content knowledge, pre-service teachers’ consideration regarding assessment remains inadequate. Furthermore, this study shows that professional development sessions have the potential to foster pre-service teachers’ use of PDC resources to address ESD.