Towards Student-Centered Climate Change Education Through Co-design Approach in Science Teacher Education

Teachers have a crucial role to empower future makers—children and youth—for a sustainable future. A central question is how to promote understanding of current socioscientific issues (SSI), such as climate change, through pre-service and in-service science teacher education, and to help science teachers teach SSI at different school levels. Earlier research shows that there is a need to strengthen teachers’ scientific literacy in the context of multidisciplinary climate change. In addition, it is known that children and youth, our future makers, wish for broader approaches, incorporating knowledge from different subjects, and learning about possible solutions to climate change. This article describes our experiences of the opportunities and challenges of the co-design approach through a design-based research framework, to build novel student-centered solutions. Two examples are given: i) an international in-service training model within a learning community (teachers, scientists and teacher educators), and (ii) the use of escape rooms in pre-service teacher training. The importance of both empirical problem analysis and theoretical problem analysis in a co-design approach is pointed out. A good co-designing process starts from the needs of the teachers or future teachers, allowing participants to find suitable roles and allocating enough time to manage the process.