Nineteenth-century educators worried that blind children were particularly susceptible to moral apathy, religious decay, and atheism because they could not see the beauty of nature. These educators used instruction in biology, zoology, and natural history to teach blind children about the beauty of the natural world and the breadth of God's creation. Instruction techniques included innovative but expensive apparatuses and tactile models. Despite cost challenges, educators of the blind devoted time and ingenuity to expand the science curriculum, particularly nature study programs, to help their students become successful, productive, and pious citizens equal to their sighted peers. Teaching blind students about nature ensured the blind would not become burdens on society but could be brought into the proper, civilized, religious sphere of the sighted.

The language we speak, the culture in which we grew up and where we come from have a tremendous impact on the way we learn astronomy. Additionally, the historical predominance of Western culture has influenced the way our modern society sees the world, and of course, the sky. In this work, we will share author’s experience working as science advisor in an outreach institution, where he explored different strategies to reach diverse communities and bring astronomy closer to broader audiences.

Even though the construction of world-renowned astronomical observatories in Chile has boosted the interest in astronomy on the community, many challenges have not yet been addressed. One of them is to raise awareness about the ancestral heritage of Chilean’s first nations. Finally, we would like to highlight the importance of learning astronomy in our own language and therefore assure inclusion, diversity, and equity in our countries.

Polar Educators International (PEI) is a volunteer-based organization designed to build collaborative relationships between educators and polar researchers. Founded in 2012, PEI was created out of the networks formed during the International Polar Year 2007–2008. This paper explores PEI’s first five years (2012–17) of successes, challenges and opportunities that have led to the creation of an organization with over 1,500 members. Using a ‘level of participation’ framework for communities of practice, we examine the evolution of this educator-researcher network and focus on two key questions: 1) who has PEI reached and served over this time?, and 2) what are barriers to participation? Barriers include sustained engagement with researchers and establishing value within institutional frameworks that generally undervalue activities referred to as ‘education and outreach’ (EOC). EOC activities continue to be perceived as extra-curricular in both educator and researcher communities. Working to deepen collaboration with polar researchers and targeting a greater diversity of PEI’s membership to fill core leadership functions should be future areas of focus for PEI as it looks to continue to shape polar EOC. Advancing and enhancing polar EOC extends well beyond PEI and should be a priority for the broader polar science and education communities.

The case study reported here seeks to promote the sharing of successful practice in Education for Sustainability (EfS). It uses literature and three personal and professional autobiographies as background to the development of a set of sustainability educational practices integrated into a primary/middle school teacher education program. The set of activities focus on developing in students an understanding of EfS and of processes appropriate to it that they can use in their classrooms on graduation. It is the authors’ view that their collaborative building on shared beliefs, contemporary ecojustice literature and three decades of developing enabling pedagogical practices has assisted their efforts to ‘get’ EfS, and to ensure that their students, particularly as beginning teachers, ‘got it’. The ecojustice principles for teacher education programs are outlined in this article and are believed to have wide applicability in many aspects of ecojustice approaches to pro-ecosocial education.

With the introduction of the Australian National Curriculum containing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-Curriculum Priority (CCP) and Intercultural Understanding General Capability, there has been a renewed push to embed Indigenous content into secondary school subjects. This paper considers the attitudes and beliefs of a group of secondary school science teachers to the current imperative to include Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in classroom practice. Through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) cycle, teachers contextualised and conceptualised the CCP in terms of social justice, pedagogy, and student engagement. The PAR process allowed them to develop a personal and intellectual engagement prior to attempting to teach Indigenous knowledges in their classrooms. Teacher attitudes and beliefs are identified in terms of their vision of a science education inclusive of Indigenous content, their hopes for the inclusions and the impediments they perceive to implementation in classroom practice. Allowing teachers the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue resulted in the articulation of a path forward for their teaching practice that aligned with their political and social justice concerns.

Science education in the Australian primary school curriculum is a relatively rare event. Several studies over the past twenty five years have all reported disappointingly low amounts of science being taught and the reluctance of primary school teachers to make science a priority in their teaching. Similar outcomes have been reported for environmental education. Even though primary aged children are very interested in science and the environment, primary school teachers often struggle to teach science/environmental education because they are not confident and competent in the content, lack curriculum resources and equipment, have inadequate time to prepare, and have difficulty finding a place for science/environmental education in what they perceive as an already overcrowded curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the experiences of primary schools involved in the Victorian Science in Schools Research Project which was concerned with improving science teaching and learning strategies but which also unexpectedly led to more environmental (“sustainability”) education occurring. The paper will also suggest a curriculum strategy for achieving more widespread acceptance and implementation of “sustainability education” through primary school science curricula.

Constructivism, as a set of theories about how learners learn, has been an important discourse in the educational research literature for a number of years. Interestingly, it has been far more visible in science education research than in environmental education research. This article considers conceptual change theory within constructivism as a contested concept, outlines differing expressions of constructivism in science education and environmental education, and argues for approaches to environmental education that adopt socially constructivist perspectives with respect to the character of the subject matter content as well as to learners' apprehension of such content. In considering implications for research, this perspective is juxtaposed with a recent United States Education Act, which prescribes a far more objectivist approach to educational research and which serves as a reminder that research itself is a powerful factor in shaping how we construct the nature of subject matter, learning and the implications of these for teaching practice.

This article reports on an inquiry that used permaculture design thinking to create a science and sustainability education intervention for a secondary science class. The aims were to cultivate student attitudes towards science, towards learning science in school, and towards the environment, and to trellis learning of science and sustainability. Research into impacts of the intervention took the form of an interpretive, mixed methods case study, which included the use of questionnaires, interviews and observations. As a context for learning, local permaculture food production projects, as experienced through field trips in the intervention, appear to promote the relevance of science and sustainability learning and the ability to engage students. Science and sustainability learning outcomes appeared to vary among students, although nearly all of them reported they enjoyed learning science with a focus on the environment, including one group of students who reported they did not generally enjoy learning science in school. There was some evidence that the teacher transformed his own thinking through his participation in the intervention.

Like earth and planetary scientists, most children are curious about the world, the solar system and the rest of the universe. However, for various reasons primary schools emphasise language and calculus rather than natural sciences. When science is taught, examination systems often favour knowledge of the ‘right’ answer over the process of investigation and logical reasoning towards that answer. In order to continue to spark children's curiosity and their motivation to learn and discover, science education hubs at universities and science museums could collaborate more with schools and teachers, and are beginning to do so. The objective of this position paper is to report on recent experiences in earth and planetary science education for pupils in primary and secondary education, to provide examples and inspiration for scientists. We report three examples of initiation and consolidation of science education in primary schools in the Netherlands: (1) a focus on asking questions and seeking information to reason towards the answer, initiated with a classroom game, Expedition Mundus, (2) bringing pupils and teachers together outside their school in the science museum to gain confidence and self-efficacy, and (3) having children ask their own questions and do their own research guided by the empirical cycle, for example on experimentation on sandbox scale models of channels and crater lake deltas as found on Mars. The focus on other planets, fictitious and real, stimulates pupils to ask questions about planet Earth. Finally, we argue that involvement of more scientists in science education would not only benefit primary and secondary schools and future students but also university education and science communication with society.

With the aim to visualize the span of time since the formation of our Universe we have set up a nature and hiking trail called ‘Time Trek’. The 13.7 km length of the trail corresponds to the age of the Universe, and portrays its history including events important for Earth and life. One kilometre corresponds to a billion years, and one metre to a million years of time. The trek combines astronomical, physical, geological and biological time lines, and presents a holistic view of the history of time. It helps people to comprehend the causal and temporal connections of different phenomena. To the trekker, it offers a concrete experience of the lengths and proportions of different time periods, which otherwise are very difficult to understand.

Eyes have evolved many times, and arthropods and vertebrates share transcription factors for early development. Moreover, the photochemistry of vision in all eyes employs an opsin and the isomerization of a retinoid from the 11-cis to the all-trans configuration. The opsins, however, have associated with several different G proteins, initiating hyperpolarizing and depolarizing conductance changes at the photoreceptor membrane. Beyond these obvious instances of homology, much of the evolutionary story is one of tinkering, producing a great variety of morphological forms and variation within functional themes. This outcome poses a central issue in the convergence of evolutionary and developmental biology: what are the heritable features in the later stages of development that give natural selection traction in altering phenotypic outcomes? This paper discusses some results of evolutionary tinkering where this question arises and, in some cases, where the reasons for particular outcomes and the role of adaptation may not be understood. Phenotypic features include: the exploitation of microvilli in rhabdomeric photoreceptors for detecting the plane of polarized light; different instances of retinoid in the visual pigment; examples of the many uses of accessory pigments in tuning the spectral sensitivity of photoreceptors; selection of opsins in tuning sensitivity in aquatic environments; employing either reflection or refraction in the optics of compound eyes; the multiple ways of constructing images in compound eyes; and the various ways of regenerating 11-cis retinals to maintain visual sensitivity. Evolution is an irreversible process, but tinkering may recover some lost functions, albeit by new mutational routes. There is both elegance and intellectual coherence to the natural processes that produce such variety and functional complexity. But marginalizing the teaching of evolution in public education is a continuing social and political problem that contributes to the reckless capacity of humans to alter the planet without trying to understand how nature works.