is working as a university lecturer of geography education in University of Helsinki, Faculty of Educational Sciences. She is an adjuct professor (the title of docent). Her research interests are climate education, global education, geography education and phenomenon-based learning.
This study uses qualitative content analysis to examine 355 open-ended questions, presented by 16-19 -year-old international students, to find out what students want to learn about climate change. The study finds that students have a high level of consideration towards scientific, societal and ethical aspects of climate change and that students' questions are multidisciplinary and complex in nature. Most importantly, the findings show that students ask questions on the same themes that researchers say should be addressed in multidisciplinary climate change education. Based on the findings, this article suggests that climate change education could be developed by adopting guided inquiry.
Non-formal education has been suggested as becoming more and more important in the last decades. As the aims of non-formal education are broad and diverse, a large variety of non-formal learning activities is available. One of the emerging fields in many countries, among them Finland and Germany, has been the establishment of non-formal laboratory learning environments. These laboratories were established in universities and research institutes to aim at enriching opportunities for primary and secondary school students to do more and more intense practical work,e.g.in chemistry. The primary rationale of these laboratories, in the beginning, was mainly to raise students’ interest in the fields of science and engineering, possibly inspiring them to pursue a career in these fields. However, recently the movement has started offering more programs aiming at all learners, but especially those students who are sometimes neglected in traditional science education in the formal sector. A focus on all learners is suggested to help raise students’ level of scientific literacy when connecting practical science learning with the societal and environmental perspectives of science. Chemistry learning connected to sustainability issues offers many contemporary topics that are often not yet part of the chemistry formal curriculum but can easily form contexts for non-formal learning. Because of its flexible character, non-formal education can help implementing aspects of sustainability into chemistry education and also can take a gander at the growing heterogeneity of today's students. This paper derives a joint perspective from two non-formal chemistry education initiatives from Finland and Germany focusing education for sustainability for both talented and educationally disadvantaged students in the foreground of a more general perspective on non-formal and sustainability education in chemistry.
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