Developing sustainability awareness among pre- and in-service science teachers via social media spaces

Muhamad Hugerat, Marina Tal, Dina Zriki  and Avi Hofstein

Sustainability has gained paramount importance in recent years, and scientists play a key role in the efforts to attain it.  Science teachers focusing on sustainability must educate the future citizens, through effective learning which calls for daily student-teacher social interaction as well as ongoing exposure to everyday life events. Most online social media tools have been developed with the aim of maintaining, managing, and enhancing social interactions between people, and have great potential to raise science teachers’ awareness about important environmental issues.

The participants in this study included pre-service and in-service science teachers from both the Jewish and Arab sectors in Israel, representing diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The study was designed to assess science teachers’ behavior and their awareness of important sustainability issues. The study was conducted in two phases. We assessed all teachers’ (198) level of sustainability awareness based on the on-line questionnaire and then part of them (74) were exposed to a workshop focused on sustainability issues has been mentioned earlier in the questionnaire. Finally, teachers were evaluated based on an assignment relating to sustainability issues using social media.

The research tools included: (1) an online questionnaire developed consisting of closed and open-ended items about the participants’ environmental awareness and their habits regarding the social media, (2) posts they designed using social media networks related to important environmental issues.

In this lecture we will discuss the role of social media in raising awareness of and interest in sustainable developments. In addition, we will present a novel method for training and teaching based on social media focusing on sustainability.