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Environmental Citizenship can take on different meanings in different countries and discourses as outlined in other chapters of this book. When Environmental Citizenship becomes part of the educational system, another level of complexity is added to the construct, the diversity of the educational systems in various countries. In this chapter, we will address this issue with a focus on formal secondary education. In the previous chapter on primary school and informal education, much has been written about how to practice different teaching approaches related to Education for Environmental Citizenship. In this chapter, we will focus on how to overcome the demands in order to be able to enact such teaching approaches in secondary education, with students aged 11–19 years old. In secondary education the subject or discipline comes into focus. As a result, students are taught by several subject specialists from different disciplines. To enact Environmental Citizenship, these different teachers need to collaborate. Moreover, secondary schooling might have different aims compared to other school forms, and it is often regulated with specific subject syllabi. In this chapter we discuss how Environmental Citizenship can be enacted considering these challenges.

Recent school science curriculum developments in many countries emphasise that scientists derive evidence for their claims through different approaches; that such practices are intimately bound up with disciplinary knowledge; and that the quality of data should be appreciated. This position paper focuses on the role of Biology to understand evidence, an essential component of ‘scientific practice’. Biology is an empirical science, using evidence to support claims. Yet biological practice is diverse – including, inter alia, observations, lab-based experimentation, field trials, ecological surveys, randomised controlled trials – so how can we teach, within the time-constraints of the curriculum, to help pupils really understand about evidence in biology? In this paper biology is shown to be the ultimate context for teaching about evidence and ‘scientific practice’. The paper draws on a body of research that presents an understanding of the validity of data as a set of conceptual relationships, shown on a concept map. Using examples from biological practice, the paper shows how teachers can illustrate the application of the network of all these ideas and their inter-relationships within the biology curriculum, to help pupils develop the necessary ‘thinking behind the doing’. The paper explores ways in which this understanding is inherently related to underpinning disciplinary ideas of biology.

In this study, we aimed to investigate whether pre-service primary teachers’ epistemological beliefs predict their informal reasoning, while trying to manage health Socio-Scientific Issues. We used dual-process theories to represent the underlying cognitive process. These theories postulate two distinct processes of reasoning –heuristic/spontaneous processes and analytic/reflective processes- that compete for the control of the response constructed by participants during reasoning tasks. 243 pre-service primary teachers were asked to construct, during spontaneous and analytical thinking, different types of arguments − social, economic, ecological, scientific and ethical− as well as counterarguments and rebuttals after they had read scenarios on a health socio-scientific topic. To assess participants’ epistemological beliefs, we used the multidimensional perspective. The results indicated that relatively sophisticated epistemological beliefs, especially relatively sophisticated beliefs about the structure of knowledge, positively predicted the number and quality of arguments, counter-arguments and rebuttals as well as the scientific and ethical arguments related to health socio-scientific issues that the pre-service primary teachers constructed, during spontaneous and analytical thinking. We discuss the significance and health educational implications of these findings. 152 169