UC Santa Barbara

The field of science education has historically focused on developing mastery of discrete content at the expense of scientific practices (Zeidler, 2016). This emphasis has shifted in recent years through a new vision for science education put forth in documents such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013). New standards like the NGSS focus on developing well-rounded students by incorporating practices and concepts that accurately reflect the real-life work of scientists. However, these standards do not adequately consider the social-political and cultural perspectives of the students they are meant to serve. For example, if issues such as climate change are considered only as science dependent, students are not exposed to the impacts that climate change has on communities that are disproportionality those of color (Feinstein & Kirchgasler, 2014). Since preservice teachers are trained in their teacher education programs to teach the NGSS, they are not being adequately trained to address these perspectives as well. In this study, I utilized an exploratory sequential design to examine how 66 preservice teachers reported being prepared and empowered to address social justice science issues, specifically climate change. From interviews with science education and climate change experts, I identified core ideas for climate change education and a developed a survey for preservice teachers as a result. I then collected and analyzed teacher responses from the survey utilizing a framework that integrates key concepts from culturally empowering pedagogy, justice-centered pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017), civic science education (Rudolph & Horibe, 2016; Levy et al., 2021), youth participatory science (Morales-Doyle & Frausto, 2019), and professional teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2016). Results from this study provide areas of focus for teacher education programs to consider in order to empower teachers to be agents of change to help develop transformative students. Implications from this study offer a framework for teacher education programs to utilize to empower teachers as agents of change and strategies for educators to utilize to support the development of their students as transformative individuals.