Abstract
In his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens begins his dialogue with the now oft cited quote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Ironically, today’s nations (“cities”) share in Dickens’ dilemma. Never before have Earth’s peoples been able to so easily share their diverse experiences, accomplishments, knowledge, and aspirations for the future. But, in part, this journey to get to the best of times may well be taking us to the “worst of times.” Through a pathway of exponential population growth and/or consumption, the unconscionable overuse of Earth’s limited resources – extinctions and environmentally dangerous by-products have become a part of our everyday global experience. We have entered a new geological era so distinct that it is aptly being called the Anthropocene. In order to better understand what our future might bring, paleoanthropologists are investigating what happened to our hominin ancestors in the context of past climatic events. Three phenomena provide a rich context to begin classroom conversations focused on the intersection of climate change, geological history, and hominin evolution. Scientists and science educators share a responsibility in guiding future science teachers’ understandings of this conceptual triad. More explicitly science teacher educators need to know how we can best meet the “unknown” needs of the twenty-first-century students. Given Dickens’ metaphoric tensions for the “best and worst of times,” we decided to explore what some of our pre-service secondary science teachers knew about climate change and hominin evolution as they designed, implemented, and reflected upon lessons for high-school students. In our chapter, we provide some perspectives on what they knew and expand our findings to include a starting point of our vision for what science teachers need to know in preparation for teaching in their twenty-first-century classrooms.
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The authors wish to acknowledge the University of Georgia STEM Education Program, Improving Instruction and Enhancing Success in STEM disciplines, fir their support of this work.
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Thomson, N., Tippins, D.J. (2013). Envisioning Science Teacher Preparation for Twenty-First-Century Classrooms for Diversity: Some Tensions. In: Mansour, N., Wegerif, R. (eds) Science Education for Diversity. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4563-6_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4563-6_11
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