Science and Environmental Education: Can They Really Be Integrated?

Environmental Education since its emergence, through the international conferences of the 1970s, has been described as an interdisciplinary field which means that it requires contributions from a number of other disciplines, science being one of them. Many educators have questioned the possibility of traditional school disciplines to promote the Belgrade Charter view of environmental education, because of the content taught, the authoritarian teacher-student relationships, the methodologies followed in teaching, the avoidance of handling controversy in the classroom, etc. In this paper, it is suggested that taking into account the poor delivery of environmental education (after about thirty years of its existence in educational systems), it would be more productive to try to find the aspects that unify science and environmental education. In this paper, firstly, the current status of environmental education in school curricula and the current views about science education are briefly examined. The organization and content of, and the processes followed in, teaching a science course for prospective primary school teachers are described. This course is inspired by the ideas expressed in the STS (Science, Technology, and Society) movement. Some evaluation results are presented supporting the thesis that merging science and environmental education is mutually beneficial. (Contains 24 references.) (Author/YDS)