6.3 Characteristics of STS and EE Programs

Problem and Issue Oriented

STS and environmental education teaching is problem and issue oriented. Students often choose the problem or issue they will investigate, which is contrary to most of the schooling process. Problem and issue oriented teaching involves two important dimensions of learning that characterize STS and EE teaching. These dimensions are:

1. Anticipation

2. Participation

Anticipation in STS and EE teaching implies that students will develop the capacity to face new situations. Anticipation is the ability to deal with the future, to predict coming events, and to understand the consequences of current and future actions. Anticipation also implies "inventing" future scenarios, and developing the philosophy that humans, especially ordinary citizens, can influence future events.

Participation, on the other hand, is the complementary side of anticipation. Students must participate directly in learning. As we pointed out in Chapter 2, cognitive psychologists have developed powerful ideas that suggest that knowledge is constructed by the learner, not transmitted from teacher to student. STS and EE programs underscore participation by designing activities and strategies that involve students process or a series of stages beginning with problem identification and ending with action on the problem or issue.

According to many educators, the decade of the 1990s will be the "environmental education" decade, and educators around the world will be focusing attention on STS and EE teaching, but from a global perspective. Students will learn that the problems and issues they tackle locally will not only be similar to problems and issues people encounter elsewhere, but the local problems have global consequences. James Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra and Mircea Malitza in their report No Limits to Learning, make the point very clearly when they say:

Participation in relation to global issues necessarily implies several simultaneous levels. On the one hand, the battleground of global issues is local. It is in the rice fields and irrigation ditches, in the shortages and over-abundances of food, in the school on the corner and the initiation rites to adulthood. It is in the totality of personal and social life-patterns. Thus participation is necessarily anchored in the local setting. Yet it cannot be confined to localities. Preservation of the ecological and cultural heritage of humanity, resolution of energy and food problems, and national and international decisions about other great world issues all necessitate an understanding of the behaviour of large systems whose complexity requires far greater competence than we now possess. The need to develop greater competence and to take new initiatives is pressing. For example, during times of danger or after a natural catastrophe, nearly everyone participates. Can we not learn to participate constructively when animated by a vision of the common good rather than a vision of common danger?

Interdisciplinary Thinking

As we will discuss later in this chapter, a number of individuals as well as groups have proposed a lists of topics upon which STS and EE programs should be based. Among others, these topics include health, food and agriculture, energy, land, water and mineral resources, industry and technology, the environment, information transfer, and ethics and social responsibility. These topics fall outside the traditional disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics and Earth science, and instead require an interdisciplinary view.

Students working on anyone of the above topic areas will be required to gather information from several disciplines, thereby bringing the student into interdisciplinary spaces. The content of biology will be seen as relevant to chemistry if students investigate health problems. Yet, as you look at the problems, students will not be confined to the disciplines of science. Philosophy and psychology (especially since most of the STS and EE problems and issues involve ethics, values and decision making) will be important to students, as well as psychology, geography, history and sociology.

Connecting Science to Society

Peter Fensham makes an important when he pointed out that "most of the great reforms in science curriculum looked inwards to science and scientific research for their inspiration." On the other hand STS and EE curricula "look outwards from science to society to see how science is, or could be, applied."

The STS and EE teacher or curriculum developer looks first to important social issues (where will all the garbage go, earthquake preparedness, human diseases, pesticides and home gardens, to name a few), and then helps students explore the "appropriate" science content that is relevant to the social issue or problem. In this sense, science content is not seen in isolation (as it is typically presented in textbooks and by teachers), but rather in a real context that is related to their community or personal lives.

Global Awareness and the Gaia Hypothesis

Global awareness was surely manifested when the first pictures were sent back to Earth by Apollo astronauts giving the single celled picture of Earth. Yet global awareness is more than a visual picture of the earth, it implies something more powerfully. Global awareness implies that all things are connected, that the nature of the atmosphere over Toledo can effect trees in Boston, that removing trees from the forests of Brazil could change the temperature of Moscow, and recycling newspapers could reduce the chances of oil spills. The environmental motto, act locally, think globally has relevance here.

And just as the space age has given us new visual images of Earth, it has led to new questions and theories. One of the scientists to work on the Martian project that looked for signs of life on the 'red planet' was James Lovelock. Lovelock and his colleagues on the Martian project devised a number of "life-detection" experiments. One of their suggestions was that a planet bearing life might have an unexpected mix of gases in its atmosphere if life's chemistry were at work. Dr. Norman Myers, editor of GAIA: An Atlas of Planetary Management described Lovelock's breakthrough this way:

When they looked at Earth in this light [having an unexpected mix of gases], their predictions were borne out with a vengeance. Earth's mix of gases, and temperature, were hugely different from what they predicted for a "non-living Earth, as well as from neighboring planets. The fact that these conditions appeared to have arisen and persisted alongside life led to the Gaia hypothesis---the proposal that the biosphere, like a living organism, operates its own "life-support" systems through natural mechanisms.

What Lovelock, and microbiologist Lynn Margolis, co-author of the Gaia hypothesis, suggested was that the Earth's atmosphere was not simply a product of the biosphere, but was "a biological construction---like a cat's fur, or a bird's feathers; an extension of a living system, designed to maintain a chosen environment."

The Gaia hypothesis is a useful tool to help students think about the interrelationship of Earth's basic resources---energy, water, air and climate (Figure 1). According to the Gaia hypothesis these elemental resources can be radically affected by changes in anyone of them. Many of the STS themes that are identified later in this chapter are evident in one of these elemental resources. Students will discover that management of these elemental resources is what many environmental action groups advocate.

Figure 1. Interacting/Interdependent Elements of GAIA

Global awareness and the philosophy of the Gaia Hypothesis lead to a new way of reasoning about the Earth, its environment and inhabitants, namely global thinking. Global thinking is systemic thinking in which whole systems are perceived, as well as the consequences of changes any aspect of the system. Global thinking is not a foreign concept to students. Here are remarks make by middle school students about global thinking. They responded to the question, "What, in your opinion is the meaning of global thinking?"

• Global thinking is thinking how our actions and reactions affect all the world.

• Thinking globally means the world must come together and solve the problems of today so that the world of tomorrow can be a better place.

• To me, global thinking means being in tune with the different cultures of the world, and everybody having its' enironmental problems and social issues strongly at heart.

• Thinking of the world as a whole with differences but not divided.

Relevance

A useful way to understand STS is to contrast STS programs with traditional or standard science education programs (Figure 2). STS programs tend to be problem oriented, whereas traditional science programs are based on concepts found in the textbook or curriculum guide. STS programs depend upon a facilitative teacher who organizes the learning environment so that students engage in identifying problems, seek resources and information to learn about the problem, and develop action plans to solve the problem. STS teaching deals squarely with the problem of relevance by involving the student in problems that relate to the students world.