Sustainability and Science Education: Exploring Roles and Challenges

This open access book examines how science education can respond meaningfully to the challenges of sustainability in a world marked by uncertainty, value conflicts, and contested knowledge. Rather than treating sustainability as an additional topic to be inserted into existing curricula, the volume explores how sustainability invites not only a deeper reconsideration of the purposes, practices, and responsibilities of science education, but also on education in a larger perspective. Across diverse educational contexts, the chapters illuminate how scientific knowledge, ethical reflection, and civic engagement intersect when learners are prepared not only to understand the world, but also to deliberate and act within it.
Addressing philosophical questions, curriculum innovation, learner perspectives, and classroom practices, the book offers critical and constructive insights into how science education can foster agency, critical judgment, and informed participation in sustainability-related decision-making. It is particularly attentive to tensions between disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary demands, between evidence and values, and between knowledge acquisition and action.