Despite a near universal consensus among scientists regarding the perils of climate change for human civilizations, climate change has not emerged as a key issue among science educators. This position paper advocates for the centrality of climate change in science education. Using Polanyi's critique of market in capitalist societies, it positions global climate change as an outcome of commodification of nature in market dominated societies. Thus, the paper argues that global climate change is primarily a societal issue that needs a societal response much more than a technological one. Further, it presents a case for considering science education as an important element of societal response to global climate change. In the end, the paper presents some ideas for reimagining science education for the global climate change era.

Scientists' science differs remarkably from school science. In order to be taught to students, science is recontextualized from scientific research communities to science classrooms. This paper examines scientific discourse in scientific research communities, and discusses its transformation from an internally-persuasive and authoritative discourse to a purely authoritative discourse under recontextualization. It presents the challenges that recontextualization of science poses for achievement of science literacy goals, and discusses remedial steps that science education community can take to meet them.

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Phenomenon: Attendance at UK medical school teaching sessions is on the decline. This research aimed to explore the reasons for this reduction.Approach: Attendance was assessed, by way of head counts, at 3 rd year students' lectures, tutorials and problem based learning (PBL) sessions at the University of Liverpool. Reasons for absence were explored using a questionnaire sent via email to the year group. Findings:Compulsory lectures attained greater attendance than non-compulsory lectures. Access to PowerPoint presentations prior to lectures correlated with a decline in attendance as did long timetable gaps. Lectures held oncampus were poorly attended compared to those held at hospital sites where students undertook clinical placements. Unsupervised PBL sessions, with sign in sheets, achieved excellent attendance however, turnout was poor when monitoring wasn't present. Similar trends were observed for lecture attendance, indicating that students may be motivated to attend by fear of reprimand. 75 students responded to an online questionnaire exploring reasons for attendance and their responses largely agreed with our findings, however one discrepancy was highlighted. Students reported that access to lecture slides before teaching sessions would not affect attendance, although our evidence showed that when slides were available attendance declined.Insights: Attendance could be improved if teaching coincided with hospital placements. Sign-in sheets, fewer gaps between sessions and multiple lectures on one day would see a marked increase in attendees. In future, medical Nevins E, Moori P, Alexander L, Richards B, Bleasdale V, Sharma A MedEdPublish https://doi.org/10.15694/mep.2016.000078Page | 2 schools should consider these factors to enhance student motivation to attend teaching sessions.

Science education has a central role to play in preparing a scientifically literate citizenry that is capable of understanding complex environmental challenges facing human societies and making well-informed and evidence-based decisions that help resolve these challenges. However, evidence suggests that most Americans are poorly equipped with the knowledge necessary for informed environmental action. In this study, we attempted to understand how the language of science textbooks works to represent the world for students in distinct ways that have serious implications for their ecological literacy. Using a methodological framework based on critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, we focused on clarifying the textual representations of the relationships between natural and social systems as portrayed in a seventh-grade science textbook that is widely adopted in middle schools in Georgia, United States. Results indicate that this science textbook offers outdated representations of natural systems' relationships with social systems and the role of human agency in these relationships. We discuss implications of these textual representations and call for reformed science textbooks that underscore the ecological embeddedness of the social world. C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 2015