ABSTRAC r Thi.'i paper seeks to address assumptions on the effectiveness of fieldwork as a mode of leartiinfi in geography. This is approached from an intertiational perspective, both in review of available evidence, which demonstrates a need for rigorous research into the issue, and in providing preliminary findings oj research into the value of fieldwork from universities across three continents. Common themes ta emerge concern the effectiveness of fieldwork in terms of learning and understatuhng of the subject: providing first-hand experience of the real world, whichever pan of the world the students are in: .skills development (transferable and technical): und social benefits. The extent to which fieldwork develops tratisferahle skills depetids on the context in which the fieldwork is undertaken. The paper points to avenues of future research to he investigated to deepen our understanding of the role fieldwork plays in student learning and to address the question, 'how effective is fieldwork in improving learning?'

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Climate change is a global concern, and the need to address it is urgent. Therefore, climate change education has been developed in recent years. Meaning making, coping strategies, and solution-oriented climate education tasks enable and maintain hope for positive results with regard to climate change. However, there is still uncertainty as to how students’ knowledge of climate change mitigation measures affects their attitudes. In the present study, elementary and secondary students in Finland (n = 950) responded to an online questionnaire. A principal component analysis, a hierarchical regression analysis, a correlation coefficients, a t-test, and a Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance were used for the analysis to understand what kind of hope students had towards climate change and how their knowledge and optimism regarding climate change affected their hope. The data revealed that the students had a relatively high constructive hope rather than denial hope when it comes to climate change. Additionally, this hope was not built on a minimisation of climate change. The results indicated that the significant predictors for climate change mitigation were gender, climate change knowledge, and constructive hope. A typology of student positions with regard to climate change is introduced as conclusions.

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Inquiry-based teaching has been at the heart of science education since it was first outlined in national standards over a decade ago. The general idea behind the inquiry guidelines is that pupils would adopt ways of conducting science, in addition to conceptually learning, thus attaining also the epistemological dimension of science. Although curricula are based on these ideas of inquiry, all too often authentic inquiry is hindered by overly authoritative approaches and teacher directions. To avoid this, the communicational ways in which teachers can encourage pupil reasoning during different phases of inquiry should be explicitly addressed. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a dialogic inquiry-based approach to science education. This approach combines the principles of inquiry and dialogic teaching. Based on this framework we investigated a number of primary student teachers’ (n=28) conceptualisations of science teaching and evaluated to what extent dialogic inquiry-based teaching informed these conceptualisations. Analysis revealed that dialogicality was not present in student teacher pre-conceptions, their pre-conceptions rather focused on traditional practices related to science teaching. The learning trajectories created for six cases, however, indicate an increased awareness of inquiry-based teaching including the dialogic aspect over the duration of the course.