The Goals of Science Education Should Be Linked to the Central Tenets of Sustainable Development, Equity, and Social Justice

Abstract

In this chapter, we offer a rationale for why science educators ought to become active agents in facilitating the engagement of youth as they acquire the knowledge and skills to address global challenges facing humanity. The youth of today are demanding action. Science educators have a responsibility to facilitate learners - and their communities - as they transform and reinvent the world they are inheriting. Science education is a primary means of investing in human resources. The youth of today must be able to address complex everyday issues that are yet unforeseen. This is not a modest goal, but it must be accomplished. All learners must have access to an equitable education. We must bridge the divide and facilitate dialog between formal and informal/free-choice educators, as well as disciplinary and interdisciplinary science educators. Today’s youth recognize the consequence of failing to transform towards a more sustainable, equitable, and socially just future is profound.

1. Introduction

Herein we will highlight the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [1] in the context of current and emerging global challenges [2] and the need to transform education. It is important to note that nearly a quarter of the global population is composed of youth ages 10–24. This amounts to 1.8 billion people [3, 4]. Additionally, many underserved people in the global population are youth [4], with 90% of the global youth population living in less developed countries (LDCs).

By 2050, action is needed on environmental issues, biodiversity, and climate change (this is particularly true since July 2023 was the hottest month on record; see, [5]) and, significant investment is needed in education/literacy, health care and nutrition, addressing poverty alleviation and hunger, decreasing under- and unemployment, and enhancing food production/productivity. The World Youth Report on Youth and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development examines the mutually supportive roles of the new agenda and current youth development efforts [6]. Youth are not mere beneficiaries of the 2030 Agenda, rather they have a critical role in the implementation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The active engagement of youth in sustainable development efforts will be imperative to achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda.

We wish to further develop the notions presented by Kyle [7] when he asserted:

Science educators ought to be at the forefront of ensuring the education discourse is oriented towards the goals, aspirations, desires, and needs of all 1.8 billion youth versus adhering to a bureaucratic characterization of science in which universal standards, goals, objectives, and accountability measures are imposed upon learners, teachers, and administrators by policymakers and politicians. All too often, as a result of universalism and standardization, learners experience an education in science disassociated from the contextual realities of life (p. 2).

Moreover, we must ensure the goals of science education address sustainable development, empowerment, equity, social justice, and social transformation, thereby ensuring an informed, ecologically/environmentally literate, thoughtful, and empathetic citizenry. Empowerment – particularly in LDCs - is correlated with poverty alleviation and economic growth. An education in science must be contextualized and connected to the lives and world experiences of learners while taking into consideration issues of place-based locality, as well as social, civic, and cultural values [7].

2. The origin of the environmental education movement

The practices of sustainability education and legislation have traceable roots as ancient as the Western Han Dynasty (145–86 BCE) when regulations surrounding sustainable management of trees, swamps, and mountains were recorded [8]. Works attributed to Plato and Aristotle in the fifth century BCE show scholarly debate over foundational environmental issues, such as the impact of the introduction of invasive species (rats), the existence of ecological niches and keystone species, and the interdependence of species. “The environmental movement had no clear beginning. The movement did not begin in one country and then spread to another; it emerged in different places at different times, and usually for different reasons” ([9], p. 1). Following the advent of colonialism, the prevailing thought of colonial settlers was the relative abundance of natural resources, which gave them the right to use and kill without limit and regard for any notion of conservation. Key moments of environmentalism include South Africa, 1658: proclamations to curb reckless forest clearing and hunting practices; Australia,1803: warnings about deforestation leading to soil erosion; South Africa, 1846: environmental legislation, and several international efforts to protect and preserve nature began in the 1900s [9]. This period marked the beginning of international collaboration to curb ecological devastation with environmental efforts in Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. In 1909, the World’s first international environmental agreement saw Britain, France, Germany, Belgian Congo, Italy, and Portugal sign the Convention for the Preservation of Animals [9]. During the eighteenth century, western philosophers of the industrial period, such as Pinchot, Thoreau, and Muir, were credited with developing sustainability and conservation concepts mirroring those in ancient Confucian writings [8]. Such endeavors typically had little success [9]. The formation of the International Congress for the Protection of Nature in 1948 (now the IUCN) was interrupted by the outbreak of world war. It was unable to do much other than collect data on human impacts, save for some work in ornithological conservation. By 1943–1948, alarm was raised regarding the perils of self-indulgence, ignorance of natural laws, and the need to bring human demands upon nature into conformity with natural limitations [10]. In 1947, The International Office for Protection of Nature (now IUCN) hosted a conference with 70 delegates from 24 countries - the largest environmental conference yet, which was still ultimately fruitless.

The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the beginning of environmental consciousness in the US as issues of public health and environmental concerns increasingly captured the public’s attention. For example, in 1952, a report by the President’s International Materials Policy Commission (see Ref. [11]) urged the US to look to renewable energy resources (solar and wind power) and urged ecological prudence to protect natural resources into the twenty-first century (see, Ref. [10, 12]). Increased environmental literacy meant legislative efforts to curb air pollution also began to take shape [13]. A flurry of books offered urgency to environmental issues of the times (see, for example Ref. [10, 14, 15, 16]), yet approaching 75 years later youth of today must confront similar catastrophic issues. In the fall of 1953, courses on the science of ecology were starting to be offered in US colleges and universities. Advanced degrees in the emerging field were growing in number. The catalyst was a groundbreaking textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology, by Eugene Odum [17], who noted:

The roots of the science of ecology are old; they go deeply into the substrate of modern science and support a large and important superstructure of applied sciences. Partly because of its wide scope, few attempts have been made to present ecology as a whole and to place it in a logical perspective in relation to other divisions of biology and to other fields of learning ([17], p. v).

The origin of environmental science, and subsequently environmental education, can be traced to the 1960s. At this time, a growing awareness of the need for interdisciplinary studies analyzing environmental issues and concerns was taking shape. Simultaneously, primarily in Western developed nations, the passage of environmental laws and protections fed an increasing public awareness of such issues. These laws focused on a wide range of issues encompassing air and water quality, waste management and cleanup, natural resource management, and protection of biodiversity [7]. Today, environmental laws are part of the fabric of most nations, as well as the basis of international law and treaties. The environmental movement and environmental education (EE) arose as a result of increased public awareness. In the US, and many developed nations, Rachel Carson’s [18] Silent Spring inspired the public’s interest and engagement with environmental issues.

3. Preparing for the future

Even with all this attention being drawn to environmental issues, today’s youth are poised to inherit a world on the precipice of dramatic ecological upheaval. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [19] paints a dire picture of an intensifying climate crisis with complex impacts on human well-being. It underscores the urgency of the situation, highlighting how greenhouse gas emissions must be capped by 2030, and nearly halved by 2050. The report sets a goal of averting a global average temperature increase above the 1.5-degree tipping point that could result in irreversible damage to natural systems and catastrophic loss of human life [19]. Achieving such a dramatic change in greenhouse gas production will require rapid, substantial, and sustained changes in societies across the globe. The development of requisite technology, policies, knowledge, and systems will require tremendous investment and cooperation from all fields, including education [19]. Science educators thereby have crucial roles to play in equipping youth for participation in this rapid evolution of society.

On a global scale, the geographic regions and sociopolitical groups of the world most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and ecological devastation are also the ones with the largest per-capita population growth [20, 21]. These regions and populations are disproportionately facing the losses and damages associated with climate change while bearing the least of the responsibility for causing the calamity, an issue exposed front and center at the COP27 conference in Egypt [22]. The International Energy Association’s data reveal the handful of nations responsible for generating the most carbon emissions outpace the ones with the least production of CO2 by over 1000 percent [23]. Further, the Global North is responsible for 92% of carbon emissions [23, 24]. Taken together, this means most of the Earth’s population is about to inherit a planet reeling from the consequences of the choices of a handful of wealthy nations. It also means wealthy nations are going to need to enact dramatic changes to address climate change. Another consequence of this pattern is the LDNs will be pressured to catapult into a high-tech future while leap-frogging the scaffolds of fossil fuels if they are to obtain equitable access to economic prosperity [20]. Educators, both formal and informal, have a powerful role to play in preparing youth for changing this reality. They have the power to foster creativity and encourage curiosity in students. Educators must choose to confront the realities of our changing world head-on while helping students understand its relevance to their communities [25, 26]. If they do not, then students will simply replicate existing conditions or be forced to develop these skills and acquire this knowledge without their support: a daunting and potentially insurmountable hurdle.

The educational community has a responsibility to prepare youth to fully understand issues of sustainability. In fact, in a recent UNESCO study, 90% of youth agreed schools should be sites where people get prepared for issues of climate change [27], with 70% reporting they cannot explain climate change and can only explain its broad principles, or possess limited knowledge about climate change. This discrepancy highlights the need for educators to fulfill the moral imperative of preparing young people for the future. Moreover, youth activism reveals a distinct interest of youth in protecting the future of our planet. The school strike for climate change, a youth-led movement to draw attention to climate change by walking out of class in protest of the inaction of leaders towards addressing such issues, drew over a million students from hundreds of nations [28]. Subsequent movements such as ‘#Fridays for the future’ continue to branch off the success of these endeavors in mobilizing continued youth resistance. Despite the urgency of the situation and the fervor of young people’s resistance, educators, politicians, and administrators expressed concern over whether the protests were an infringement upon one’s education (see Ref. [29]). In response to this concern, Kyle [29] expressed:

I wonder why raising consciousness regarding the global crisis facing humanity is an infringement upon one’s education. I hope educators will have the wisdom and courage to respond to the demands of youth, transform educational practice, and engage with a research agenda focused on the global challenges facing humanity (p. 150).

Concerns around sustainability and social justice are a high priority for this generation of youth. By focusing on the interests of youth, educators can strengthen their engagement with sustainability, conservation, equity, and social justice, and facilitate a deeper understanding of the topics they are exploring in their academic pursuit.

Yet, in many nations, the moral imperative of adequately preparing youth to address climate change is regarded as secondary compared to the immediacy of school rankings and educator evaluations as measured by standardized test scores. This view of schooling does not need to be the case. The integration of sustainable development goals into science education standards and curricula can be a mutually beneficial enterprise, supporting the attainment of standards, while engaging students in meaningful learning focused upon real-world challenges, thereby preparing students for the world they will inherit. For the youth of today, the future is now [7].

4. Emphasizing standardized testing and standardizing inequality

Standardized test scores remain the penultimate measure by which politicians and administrators evaluate the relative successes of instructors and institutions [30]. The misuse, overuse, and overemphasis of standardized testing had multiple deleterious consequences for science and sustainability education. It functionally reinforces an outdated model of learning, emphasizing performance on singular, summative exams as indicators of educational attainment. These assessments typically fail to capture a glimpse of the true breadth of skills and knowledge students must acquire to participate fully in scientific discourse and affect substantive change [30, 31, 32]. For example, even though well-designed summative and end-of-course exams may be used to measure students ability to apply labels to elements of ecosystems and explain the ways in which they interact with one another [33], they may not measure whether students can apply this knowledge to make decisions about their own consumption of resources and engagement in practices that can help or harm the ecosystems they have influence over. This structure is designed to assess and incentivize students’ ability to function within the existing systems, which has led humanity to the very brink of disaster. It is not intended to assess their ability to improve on these systems, a skill vital to the future of our planet and humanity. Additionally, many schools and educators opt to reduce the quality and quantity of science, history, and arts instruction to boost scores for the higher stakes math and reading exams [31, 32, 33, 34]. This is especially true in the post-pandemic era, as schools scramble to make up for education gaps due to disrupted learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students deserve better than this.

An overemphasis on standardized tests also contributes to a reduction in diversity in the STEM workforce as white, male students are more likely to score well on such tests and thus self-select into STEM fields, even though the exams have been demonstrated to be a poor predictor of success in STEM majors [30]. Such a trend operates in contrast to the goals of equity in education presented in the SDGs. Unequal STEM field participation and education are evident in research from around the world along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and class [35, 36, 37, 38]. The trend of disproportionate underrepresentation leaves humanity at the disservice of missing the valuable contributions in diversity of thought, skills, and perspectives offered by the disenfranchised populations. Diverse teams regularly outperform heterogeneous teams in problem solving [39]. It also leaves these vulnerable groups at the disadvantage of having less of a voice at the table, and therefore fewer opportunities for crucial self-advocacy [24, 40]. Interestingly, researchers examining the practices of 1,951 companies across 24 industrialized economies linked increased gender diversity to a 5% decrease in a firm’s carbon emissions [41]. This suggests organizations can mitigate their climate change impacts as a side effect of focusing on boosting equity in the composition of their workforce, demonstrating another way in which sustainability goals are linked. Still, women and other oppressed populations across the world continue to face exclusion and under-investment in science education. Educators have a responsibility to be aware of and take effective steps to disrupt this harmful trend. Indeed, research has identified various modalities by which educators can achieve more equitable outcomes for their students [24, 42]. Culturally responsive, authentic learning experiences emerge as a trend in much of this research.

We raise the issues of emphasizing standardized testing and standardizing inequality herein as we wish to focus upon the contradictory roles schools play in society. Schools generally reproduce the inequities and inequalities we see in society and the economy [43]. And, while schools play a key role in reproducing social inequality, they simultaneously play a contradictory role with respect to society and social equality by allowing resistance to this reproduction. Students - and educators - do and must resist the social programming of schooling; and schools and individual classrooms must exist as contested sites of production of justice seeking to care for students, school staff, and the community in ways that build critical consciousness and critical social action [44].

The COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly disrupted education for students worldwide, has deepened many educational disparities [45, 46], exacerbating the disadvantages faced by vulnerable students. Furthermore, the pandemic has laid bare the perils of misinformation and mistrust in science [47, 48]. Intensifying climate change and ecological disruptions erode the natural safeguards to mitigate spillover events at the same time humanity is increasing travel and urbanization, amidst warnings of pandemics becoming a more frequent feature of the human experience [49]. Yet, in the scramble to make up for education gaps, many schools around the world have decreased investment in science education, opting to align content towards exams and backwards planning around standardized assessments [50]. We must choose to reimagine education to better cultivate the skill sets and content knowledge that can be harnessed to create a more sustainable future, instead of falling into the trap of replicating extant systems. COVID-19 has provided the silver lining of forcing rapid and sometimes revolutionary evolution of educational practices. Educators around the world have radically adapted their pedagogy [46, 48, 51]. While in-person field trips were canceled in many countries, educators explored alternative ways of connecting students to outside resources through video chats with local museums or using students’ own backyards and homes as learning tools. Now is the time to harness the innovative spirit and move towards decolonized, equitable, and experiential learning practices to usher in a new era of sustainability [50, 52].

5. Transforming the world toward a more sustainable future

Students need to develop a variety of complex skills and values predicated on critical thinking and the synthesis of interdisciplinary content to be successful in transforming the world towards a more sustainable future [24, 52, 53]. They need to be able to evaluate the veracity of claims presented to them by candidates for elected office, weighing their personal values against those of the candidates. They need to be able to analyze the complex interrelationships of factors involved in the production and consumption of goods against their values so they may make responsible decisions around their participation in commerce, unphased by greenwashing practices. They also need the skills to problem solve, design, and evaluate solutions, work as members of a team, and communicate their ideas so they may shape the future of science and technology [54]. These skills can either be nurtured by or suppressed by educators.

Paulo Freire’s emancipatory, citizenship-focused framework for education emphasized the power of dialogics, as both a means of acquiring knowledge and an epistemological relationship, a way of knowing in and of itself [55]. When education is exercised as a mere conveyance or passage of information from educators to students, rather than an exercise towards preparation for the social functions of citizenship, he argued, it is being wielded as a tool of oppression. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks emphasize the liberatory power of education. She describes the contrast between how the anti-hegemonic politics of her early all-black education contrasted with the stifling white-centric atmospheres of the classrooms she encountered throughout her collegiate and graduate education experience [56]. Many modern well-meaning science educators and institutions engage in practices resembling the latter, often through the lens of positive intent, believing preparing students to score high on standardized exams will launch them into positions of power and thereby liberate them. This oversimplified misunderstanding of the dynamics of oppression fails to nurture the critical thinking, self-study skills, intrinsic motivation to continue learning, and contextual understanding needed to foster active participation in shaping the world. What use will the possession of large sums of ‘banking knowledge’ (see Ref. [55]) afford students when they are demoralized and dehumanized by the learning experience? Students deserve the power to confront sustainability, equity, and social justice issues from an interdisciplinary framework. They need educational opportunities to empower them to be socially responsible agents of change through critical, action-oriented, and reflective pedagogy [57]. The pedagogical practices of Socio Scientific Issues education (SSI) and Science, Technology, Society and Environment (STSE) are approaches seeking to provide these opportunities by exploring explicitly the interconnectedness of science and society while helping students develop their own morals and ethical frameworks for decision making [58]. Students harness the engaging power of controversy to stimulate curiosity and rich educational discussions in the classroom. Moreover, students marvel at the novel opportunity to develop and share their own informed opinions.

6. The crossroads of science, politics, and culture

Debate exists regarding whether incorporating the sustainable development goals in science education - regarded by some as representing an imposition of Western neoliberalism and by others as anti-imperialist and decolonializing [59] - needlessly politicizes the discipline. After all, science is inherently political [60]. From Copernicus to the Manhattan Project, to Wangaari Mathi, and Anthony Fauci, scientists have always contributed to and engaged in political discourse. As Backhaus [60] notes “Science produces knowledge, knowledge provides options for politics, and politics then enables and finances (or impedes and starves) science” (p. 310). Tiptoeing around the eggshells of public opinion is antithetical to scientific praxis and effective liberatory teaching. Science Education cannot be apolitical, and when it pretends to be, it is most likely acting to reinforce hegemonies [56, 60]. The avoidance of politically sensitive topics in science education is futile and hinders advances in the field, tacitly reinforcing harmful power structures.

Science is inseparable from culture, whose influences shape the types of questions researchers ask, the framework for thinking about and investigating them, the lenses through which data are collected and interpreted, the perspective through which it is disseminated and understood [25, 61]. Educators must enable students to navigate the boundaries and borders between science and their lived experiences [62, 63]. The epistemology, beliefs, and practices underpinning Western science constitute a culture unto itself. Teachers can act as guides - helping students explore, comparing this to a border crossing, or an admission ticket, which demands socialization into unfamiliar ways of knowing, doing, and being. For much of its history, mainstream western science education was heavily influenced by didactic teaching methods and strict logical positivism, divorcing it from the dynamics of socio-political context, and meaningful relevance to the realities of students [64, 65, 66]. It also artificially separated the various science disciplines from one another [61]. This approach created a homogenized and sanitized representation of science as a field, ignored the diversity of learners in schools, removed the contextual factors that ground and incentivize learning [61, 66, 67] and operated counter to student’s effective meaning-making and development of critical thinking skills [25]. Critics of this approach, such as Dewey, argued science as a practice is an interdisciplinary, iterative, inquiry-based experience intertwined with culture and values, thus science education ought to emphasize preparing students to engage in this process [61]. For example, students who are taught how to dissect the impacts of excess fertilizer runoff on invertebrate health from this perspective will likely emerge capable of successfully filling out a diagram connecting the cause and effects of this problem. However, to fix this problem, they need to be able to communicate effectively about this problem to people who may have differing opinions and perspectives, dissecting the interplay of a variety of factors. Simply developing an understanding that X harms Y and affects Z in multiple ways does not consider the fact that people who cause X are complex individuals acting within even more complicated social contexts. Students must be challenged to imagine how to effectively reshape these social contexts. However, the positivist, reductionist framework continues to plague modern science education, accentuated and exacerbated by the imposition of standardization and aggressive testing measures. This is incompatible with the demands of the modern world, which require students to adapt to rapidly developing situations affected by politics, knowledge, and technology [60, 64, 65, 67].

Today’s youth are inheriting the inequities and injustices that previous generations failed to rectify, many of which have complex intersectional interactions with one another. Imperialism and colonialism precipitated the emergence of the Anthropocene [68] as the wanton exploitation of indigenous peoples and resources simultaneously ushered in devastation of societies and the ecosystems upon which they depended.

In December of 2022, the UNFPA published a brief [69] documenting the intersections of race, gender, environmental and climate justice. The brief summarizes research and expert testimonies from Asia, Africa, North and South America, as well as Australia. It underscores the importance of addressing intersectionality in sustainability issues. Systemic discrimination due to race, disability, and ethnicity is intricately linked with issues of health, well-being, safety, environmental degradation, and climate change. These connections extend to displacement, vector-borne diseases, adverse birth outcomes, deforestation, and numerous other interconnected issues. The consequences of emissions from wealthier nations lead to melting ice, rising sea levels, and increased flooding in poorer nations. In the aftermath of these calamities, women and children are at higher risk of health issues, as well as violence, including sexual assault. On a global scale, women and gender minorities of the African diaspora are significantly more likely to experience adverse health outcomes from environmental pollution when compared to peers from other backgrounds [69]. Even in the wealthiest nations, such as the United States, Black women, and children are significantly more likely to be exposed to pollution and persistent environmental pollutants, while being less likely to have access to green spaces and decent healthcare, leading to shorter lifespans. Similar patterns are evident for indigenous populations around the world affecting every walk of life [70].

An international study of 10,000 youth in 42 countries found youth around the world are experiencing significant levels of anxiety and despair, often feeling betrayed by their leaders [71]. Youth in nations most impacted by climate change, especially poorer nations, were most susceptible. Thanks to the efforts of activists, the tides may be beginning to turn on these trends. Ineza Umuhoza Grace is an ecofeminist who inspires young people to take action. She is passionate about empowering women to lead change towards sustainability. Her youth-and-woman-led Rwandan nonprofit Green Protector fights for environmental improvement. In 2022, Umuhoza played a pivotal role in advocating alongside numerous youth activists at COP27, the United Nations’ worldwide conference on climate change, to demand a fund dedicated to addressing losses and damages stemming from natural disasters linked to climate change. Her effort paid off. World leaders agreed to make contributions to begin offsetting climate change’s effects on the most vulnerable nations. Recognizing the potential of youth and the power of education, she also started an organization called The Green Protector that works to inspire other Rwandan youth to protect the environment. She is a recipient of the 2023 Global Citizen Award [72]. Similar efforts are being undertaken by youth activists worldwide, providing an invaluable opportunity for educators to connect demoralized youth to effective models and role models of change.

7. Acting locally to educate globally

Educators do not need to reinvent the wheel to accomplish the lofty goal of fostering active engagement of youth in sustainable development. Youth already possess the interest; educators just need to work within their local contexts to overcome defeatism and bridge the gap between prescribed curricular content and community/societal needs. Models and examples for how to effectively employ the SDGs towards connecting the realities of human lived experiences to environmental science abound [25, 54, 62, 73].

In light of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [74] and the European Parliament resolution on the climate and environment emergency [75], Rodrigues [51] emphasizes how fostering emotional connections with nature is imperative to addressing the environmental challenges facing humanity and the climate change emergency. She states:

Exploring local environmental problems, using nature as a classroom and inspiration across different disciplines, promoting field trips to nearby natural areas or recreating ecosystems in the school playground, and involving students and their families in projects with visibility, usefulness, and value to the community can foster this emotional connection. (Educational Practice Agenda Proposal and Implications section)

She presents a compelling narrative demonstrating the power of community-centered, intergenerational learning and illustrating how it can have a profound impact on all involved. This approach fosters a sense of mutual respect and communal understanding, strengthening the ability of stakeholders to address important issues [51]. She emphasizes empowering education as dialogic co-construction of meaning. The circle of this dialog extends to parents/grandparents, and the community. Through such engagement, students, family, and community members develop complex conceptual relationships and construct notions of what knowledge is relevant to address identified issues, how to take action to bring about change, and how to mitigate the global problem of climate change within their local community [51]. In the absence of these vital factors, students often emerge feeling powerless, anxious, paralyzed and defeated [69]. Current patterns of inequity are unacceptable and unsustainable. Students today exist within these contexts and will receive the responsibility for subverting or recreating them. We can aid students by introducing them to the data, tools, and skills of sustainability activism. It is not enough for science educators to prepare students to understand ecological issues, sustainability, and conservation. They must also help students understand how these issues fit within the social contexts of their daily lived experiences while teaching them how to be active agents of social transformation.

Climate change education can have significant impacts on individual carbon emissions by influencing behavior [76]. Students should learn how to mobilize and engage with their communities to produce lasting, meaningful change. Climate change education is effective when the program conscientiously connects climate change to the daily lives of students, engages them in cultivating stewardship, and engages students in creating change in the community [25, 76]. Each of these components can be implemented in various educational settings: e.g., schools, homes, libraries, museums, zoos, conservation organizations, and/or community centers. Collaboration between diverse community organizations and stakeholders can have a powerful impression on youth, strengthening their capacity to make deep connections and build a sense of belonging. When the members of the community come together to show youth they care about them and are willing to invest in them, young people can be inspired to reciprocate such altruistic investments.

A particularly stirring example of an effective approach can be found in a school in rural Malawi. The school took part in a participatory action research project under the auspices of Project SUSTAIN [77, 78]. Students engaged in transformative reforestation, creating sustained community development, while revitalizing an ecologically devastated area. They accomplished this by using Participatory Rural Appraisal [79] tools, including asset mapping. The project resulted in a revitalized community, improving both economic and ecological conditions for all of its inhabitants. This astonishing transformation was elicited by the facilitation of dialogic, place, problem, and phenomenon-centered pedagogical practices as championed by Freire [55] and other critical pedagogs. This technique delivered the benefits of recontextualizing environmental science content knowledge within the community’s needs of reducing poverty and increasing equitable access to resources for all the villagers [57]. The teacher could have stuck to the status quo but instead empowered students to collaboratively improve the existing conditions within their community.

Another inspiring example of effective sustainability education emanates from Project SUSTAIN, which worked to develop a program to utilize science education to empower female learners in rural South Africa to reach their full potential [80]. By working in collaboration with a variety of community stakeholders, including students, teachers, local government, and village elders, the researcher was able to co-produce an educational program to revitalize the science education practices of the local school and cement the value of such education in a generation of teachers, students, and community members. Together, the community was able to discover the power of scientific knowledge to produce tangible improvements in their lives, bolstering support for enabling female students to continue in the program long-term, and improving the educational experiences of all involved. Sustainable development goals such as promotion of gender equality, and inclusion of all in quality equitable education guided the development of the program. This produced a demonstrably more valuable learning experience for the learners.

The theme of this section - ACTING LOCALLY TO EDUCATE GLOBALLY - need not only be inspired by school-based initiatives or by educators. Rather, individuals and communities can be the inspirational trailblazers. A book that will surely inspire youth of today and hope for the future, while facilitating a sense of empowerment and inspiration amongst girls with the notion of ‘thinking outside of the box’ and ‘dreaming big’ is Girls Who Green the World: Thirty- four Rebel Women Out to Save Our Planet [81]. The book features such leaders/trailblazers/activists as Catherine Coleman Flowers (an Environmental Health Activist and Founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, p. 29); Rhea Mazumdar Singhal (Founder and CEO of Ecoware, p. 59); Komal Ahmed (Founder of Copia; solving world hunger and food waste, p. 67); Caroline Danehy (Cofounder and CEO of Fair Harbor; recycling plastic bottles into bathing suits, p. 97); Varshini Prakash (Cofounder and Executive Director of Sunrise Movement; the organization’s movement in 2020 made a difference in electing Green New Deal champions, p. 141); Rhiana Gunn-Wright (Director of Climate Policy at Roosevelt Institute and Architect of the Green New Deal, p. 163); and Leah Thomas (Founder of Intersectional Environmentalism; bringing justice to the environmental movement, p. 179).

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is a 23-year-old indigenous climate activist and hip-hop artist noted for his leadership in the global youth environmental movement. His upbringing in Aztec tradition taught him to value nature and humanity’s role in it, inspiring him to begin activism at the age of 6, when he delivered his first speech on environmental concerns. Martinez also formerly served as the Youth Director of Earth Guardians until 2019, an organization dedicated to teaching youth across the world how to use civic engagement and the arts to help solve environmental issues [82]. He explains his passion as follows:

I want to inspire people to bring activism into what they love to do. Whether you are an entrepreneur, poet, scientist, athlete, or artist, you can find ways to use what you are passionate about to have an incredible impact. Our movement desperately needs a diversity of new ideas and ways of thinking to bring forth real change. That’s why we need more than traditional activist tactics. Some of the most impactful work being done in my generation is from people spreading awareness through art, music, and other creative means ([82], p. 212).

In this chapter, we also highlight that social movements often capture the humanizing, lived experiences of individuals within local communities. Méndez [83] notes “environmental justice groups center their advocacy on community-specific public health campaigns” (p. xii). He offers an urgent and timely analysis of the contentious politics of incorporating environmental justice into global climate change policy. He tells the compelling story of people, place, and power in the context of climate change and inequality. He explores the California (USA) environmental justice movement and the advocacy work on climate change and articulates the perspectives and influence low-income people of color bring to their local communities while highlighting the importance of incorporating local knowledge, culture, and history into policymaking to address the global complexities of climate change and the threats facing local communities.

8. Places of empowerment and agency

A place-based perspective challenges the facilitating pedagogue to connect learning to the places where students are engaging with learning. This is especially vital for oppressed and displaced people, who face tumultuous relationships with the lands upon which they live [84]. It can be enhanced, where available, by technology. Facilitators can start by engaging students in open-source citizen science projects. For example, they can utilize freely available citizen science technology, such as the iNaturalist app [85] to identify local flora and fauna, or the marine debris tracking app [86] to collect data on types of trash pollution present in their communities. Now, students are authentically participating in larger-scale studies by contributing to the expansion of evolving data sets. To take things to the next level, educators can engage students in dialogs, shifting the cognitive load to students. Instead of the teacher delivering the answers, they can charge students with making meaning of the data sets and noticing patterns. Then, teachers can help students contextualize those patterns by connecting students to other data sets or research, such as localized or international reports on environmental racism or eco-justice. Finally, students can begin designing community-based solutions to local issues revealed by the data with which they interact. Students can practice communication and outreach skills by contacting organizations and community stakeholders, thereby gaining assistance in their efforts. The teacher’s role now shifts to guiding the learning and research process, providing resources, asking questions, and helping to edit student’s communication for clarity. The best part is students can sharpen a whole host of content knowledge and skills while meaningfully contributing to their communities.

Educators should identify ways in which this placed-based notion of contributing to climate change and sustainability can become school-community-based initiatives. Schools and communities ought to partner with local businesses/industries/NGOs, social service agencies, and/or partner schools internationally to identify ways in which the local communities can work towards climate change solutions. Transformative action research projects should be developed so that schools and communities share their initiatives and accomplishments. Such school-private climate governance initiatives would ensure students and communities become active agents in the process of transformation [29]. Ideally, such an educational orientation would facilitate the emergence of youth-led community organizing, a movement to empower youth while enabling them to make substantive contributions to their communities [87, 88, 89]. Educational experiences ought to be intergenerational, community-based, oriented towards self- and social empowerment, and transformative [29, 78]. Youth have a significant role in contributing to the social and environmental changes that must transpire. The overarching goal of environmental education is to educate citizens who can address environmental issues facing humanity that are yet unforeseen and bring about social transformation. Such an orientation to teaching and learning should enhance the scientific and citizenship skills amongst learners, as well as critical political literacy with respect to local and global inequalities [29].

There is no shortage of issues students may choose to address. Students are constantly surrounded by sustainability-related phenomena, although they sometimes need to be primed to notice how they are related to science and sustainability. Sustainability issues in their community can include low biodiversity around their homes, food insecurity, high prevalence of a debilitating health condition, or plastic waste in the vicinity of their local community. If you simply ask students how their community could be improved, then they will have a plethora of ideas; the educator’s role is to facilitate fitting their ideas into the grand scheme of community development/enhancement. Finally, and most powerfully, educators can work to support students in designing and implementing a solution to the issues identified. This crucial step makes the difference between fostering awareness and preparing students to reimagine and reconstruct the world around them. Solutions can start small; nevertheless, they may require the participation of various stakeholders and community associations. Bringing these individuals and institutions together results in strengthened community partnerships, emboldened students, and long-lasting relationships toward community revitalization. While students may not remember every lesson throughout their educational journey, the emotional impressions and skills gained through their place-based action-oriented projects will leave a lasting legacy [73].

9. Conclusion

Colonial legacies permeate science education around the world [70], including in sub-Saharan Africa [87], North and South America [89], the Caribbean [40], and Australia. Science educators can tap into the suppressed cultures, identities, knowledge, and perspectives. Indeed, colonial legacies insidiously shape all communities, with implications for indicators of well-being, such as health, happiness, and education [68]. Where educators serve homogeneous and/or privileged communities, they still have the responsibility to help students deconstruct the messages they have received about sustainability. For example, students can explore the origin of the resources they use daily, such as textiles or food. Often, they will find developed nations continuing colonial practices of exploitation, to the detriment of poorer nations, in the same destructive and self-indulgent fashion criticized by activists in the 1940’s [40, 68]. It is up to educators to assist students in reinventing the world, to trust them as they meaningfully contribute to a greener planet, and to follow their lead in ending these self-perpetuating cycles [88].

Youth today are being affected by the choices of politicians, policymakers, and corporate leaders. Youth are calling on each of those entities and educators to make substantive changes towards sustainable practices. We must act, and we must equip youth so they can act responsibly as well. The issues framing the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from 30 November to 12 December 2023, are the very issues youth of today will need to act upon in the future, such as global climate action, industry decarbonization and net-zero emissions, energy transition, food, nature, and innovative finance (see Ref. [90]).

Though the challenges of the future loom large and difficult to predict, the youth of today will be responsible for shaping the future. Educators must have the courage and humility to embrace this challenge in collaboration with our communities. Though it exacerbated educational inequities, COVID-19 offered us a glimpse into the future with reduced fossil fuel use and a greener future (see Refs. [91, 92, 93]). With the reduction in the use of fossil fuels, vis-a-vis reduced industry and vehicles on the road; clear, smog-free skies appeared over much of the planet. The global shutdown revealed a greener future is possible! As McDonald notes [94],

Green technology such as wind and solar are already less costly than fossil fuels with other forms following suit. It is also one of the fastest developing sectors of the economy, with tremendous potential for growth as current products improve their performance and new products come online. That means jobs, and more jobs, and a stronger economy…A new green age is upon us ([94], p. 13).

The future truly is now as the youth of today have the opportunity to co-construct a new Green Age.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.