Into the cycle of sustainability: Fostering students’ life cycle reasoning in secondary chemistry education

Abstract

Sustainability has played an increasingly important role in recent years, due to depletion of natural resources, global warming and the large amount of waste that is produced by the humanity. All actors in society, including government, industry and the public need to be well-informed on issues regarding science-related social issues, including sustainability. There is no better place to educate the public than teaching sustainability to youngsters and use education as an instrument to engage the public in thinking about sustainability issues. A variety of skills is considered important for the future generations to deal with sustainability issues. Examples are skills related to validation and justification of claims, argumentation, morality, decision making, and the ability to discuss.

This dissertation describes how we can support students in secondary education to reason from the chemistry perspective when making decisions related to sustainability. This dissertation describes four studies that were conducted to answer the main research question: How can secondary chemistry education contribute to the life cycle reasoning of students? Our studies demonstrate the development of (initial) reasoning of students about sustainability in the context of plastics. And based on our findings, we give a set of guidelines in order to provide educational designers, practitioners and teachers with useful heuristics for teaching LCA in upper secondary science education.