Acting on Sustainability

This special issue of RISE makes a timely contribution to the growing literature on research on teaching and learning about socio-scientific issues (SSI), particularly focusing on the topic of sustainability. The SSI agenda when applied to school science represents a significant attempt to reconceptualize this subject’s fundamental rationale, goals, and methods. The traditional curriculum where students confirm canonical theories, concepts and processes through predictable classroom-based inquiry, is replaced by study of complex science-based real-world problems, where science is understood as a powerful resource, knowledge base, and repertoire of methods and strategies, for contributing to possible solutions. The traditional certainties around what science content should be studied, how and why, and what should count as optimal student learning are all problematized by this shift to an emphatically applied focus. While researchers in this field now broadly agree on the rationale for a SSI orientation, and concur about broad principles for its enactment, many areas remain under-researched and emergent. The seven papers in this special issue collectively contribute to this agenda, but also indicate the diversity of theoretical and practical matters at stake. In this short response I highlight new insights provided by these articles, as well as future challenges arising from this work.