21st Century Science Education: What does it mean for Teachers?

Global challenges such as complex climate change, rapid spread of scientific misinformation and mistrust in science have necessitated science curricula to go beyond cognitive outcomes. Science curricula should include students’ non-cognitive attributes such as affective-motivational dispositions, reflecting the nature of agency in the era of the Anthropocene. It follows that 21st century science education requires an exploration of alternative cross-curricular content and pedagogical principles, the implementation of which will demand a lot from science teachers. This legitimises a careful rethinking of what science teachers need to know and be able to do to adequately prepare students for the 21st century. In this regard, we reconsider the specialized knowledge of science teachers about their subject matter and how to teach it to support students’ understanding, called Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK).

This workshop aims to re-examine PCK considering the changing goals of science education, both in terms of pedagogy (P) and content (C), and to resolve some fundamental epistemological issues (K). Two key questions guide the workshop: (1) What do science teachers need to know and be able to do to prepare students for the 21st century? (2) How can PCK be reconceptualized so that it remains a useful construct for describing teacher knowledge in the context of 21st century science education?