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Globally climate change (CC) is scarcely addressed in school curricula, and school graduates are mostly uneducated about climate change. The purpose of this paper is to make a case for conceptualising CC as a discipline, and to further argue why CC should be included in school curricula as a disciplinary-subject. An initial examination of CC in curricula globally reveals that the main approach for including CC in the curriculum is the cross-curriculum approach. The problems associated with this approach are discussed in regard to the challenges posed to the integrity of the CC body of knowledge, and to the teaching and learning. The paper continues to build a case for conceptualising CC as a discipline in its own right. It explains the notions of: disciplines, subjects, and disciplinary-subjects. Further, it describes the disciplinary characteristics of CC, and the benefits of including CC in the curriculum as a disciplinary-subject. However, curricular resistance issues are identified and discussed. These resistances are addressed by considering evidence derived from curriculum theory, cognitive psychology and philosophy of science for supporting the inclusion of a CC disciplinary-subject. Finally, the challenges in establishing a CC disciplinary-subject are discussed. The paper concludes by considering implications for further research.

The challenge of climate change means that school education is more important than ever in preparing young people for an uncertain future. The focus of this research is climate change education and its status in the compulsory middle school years (approximately years 7-10) across six countries (Australia, Israel, Finland, Indonesia, Canada and England). The authors investigated formal published national curriculum documents, specifically science and geography, to determine the presence of climate change topics, and the way they are addressed in these subjects. The key findings are that: (1) the term 'climate change' appears in the formal curriculum of all six countries in science or geography; (2) approaches to climate change in the curriculum differ substantially across different countries; (3) climate change is often presented as a context, example or elaboration for other science concepts rather than a discrete topic; (4) the presence of climate change in most curriculum documents is scattered and spread over multiple years and (5) knowledge about causes of climate change predominates over action and behavioural changes. These findings raise questions as to whether current school curricula provide sufficient guidance for teachers to develop students' understandings, skills and values regarding climate change.

The study developed and applied an index for measuring the level of complexity of full authentic scientific inquiry. Complexity is a fundamental attribute of real life scientific research. The level of complexity is an overall reflection of complex cognitive and metacognitive processes which are required for navigating the authentic inquiry through high levels of uncertainty, from the unknown to the known. To develop the index, an educational framework was set up, in which five teams of high school students were conducting a full authentic scientific inquiry, using online facilitation. Protocols obtained from the teams' on-line communications were used for developing the Level of Complexity of Scientific Inquiry (LCSI) index. The index measures complexity by measuring the number of deviations from a linear straightforward inquiry process and the magnitude of these deviations. In structured teacher guided inquiries, the index measurement would be zero. The more students activate self-regulatory processes and grapple with the unknown, the higher is the obtained measurement.

Increasingly, international and national statements are calling for the development of local sustainability scenarios within partnerships between schools and their communities. The present study addresses the question of reciprocity in such partnerships, by comparing the sustainability agendas underlying schools' educational programs to the sustainability agendas of the students' parents. The study was conducted among four urban school-community systems in Israel, implementing sustainability education. The results revealed a lack of reciprocity. Schools and parents belong to two different populations, with different sources of influence. Schools' agenda seems to be mostly influenced by ministerial centralization. Schools' and parents' sustainability agendas were compared against the 15 perspectives of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development International Implementation Scheme. Parents' agendas were highly compatible with the perspectives, whereas schools' educational programs, focusing mainly on environmental science, lacked compatibility with the perspectives. The suitability of the perspectives to school settings is questioned. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

University-led STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) outreach forms one potential avenue to address the continuing decline of tertiary student enrollments. Yet to-date the impact of these programs is not well understood, due to an historical emphasis on "delivering the goods" that obscures debate on which outreach programs to deliver, why and to whom. At a time in which the academy faces growing pressures to "perform," it is argued that explicit consideration of program purposes and efforts to assess efficacy may facilitate discussions about the possible role of university-led outreach in attracting school students to STEM careers. This article reports on findings from a study of the outreach efforts at nine Australian universities, revealing two key barriers: limited institutional support structures; and limited explicit consideration of disparate, and at times, competing outreach stakeholder needs. These barriers problematize the contribution that universities can currently make toward raising future STEM aspirations.

Community-school partnerships are an established practice within environmental science education, where a focus on how local phenomena articulate with broader environmental issues and concerns brings potential benefits for schools, community organisations and local communities. This paper contributes to our understanding of such educational practices by tracing the diverse socio-material flows that constitute a community environmental monitoring project, where Australian school students became investigators of and advocates for particular sites in their neighbourhood. The theoretical resources of actor-network theory are drawn upon to describe how the project--as conceptualised by its initiators--was enacted as both human and non-human actors sought to progress their own agendas thus translating the concept-project into multiple project realities. We conclude by identifying implications for sustaining educational innovations of this kind.

This paper addresses the positioning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programmes within universities' operations. Though universities in many respects form a rather homogenous international community, there is wide diversity in regard to the provision of STEM outreach by different institutions. To explain this diversity, a conceptual framework was developed by using the Theory of Legitimacy as an organising concept. The framework considers two opposing scenarios that form a continuum between them, namely: "top-down" initiative by the university governance "versus" "bottom-up" grass-roots initiative. Using the Theory of Legitimacy, internal and external outreach relationships are characterised and explained under the two scenarios. The framework was applied to two settings chosen due to their essential differences in outreach provision, namely, Australia and Israel. The differences that were found in internal and external legitimacy provide a useful lens for examining the low-performing, fragile system in Australia as compared with the high-performing, thriving system in Israel.

The present study revisits a subfield of environmental education: significant life experiences, which studies the influences that shape the development of environmental stewardship. In the present study, we examine the effect of various formative experiences on a group of adults and analyze the role of school, as a formative influence on the parents of the students. By employing factor analysis, we were able to differentiate between groups of variables influencing attitudes and those influencing behavior. Cluster analysis enabled us to differentiate between types of respondents in accordance to their responsiveness to influencing experiences. The results draw attention to (a) the different pathways by which environmental attitudes and behaviors are influenced; (b) the important role of the inner self ("personality") in organizing and giving meaning to all other formative influences; and (c) the effectiveness of environmental schools in urban communities in Israel, in influencing the behavior of students' parents.

This article addresses issues regarding implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) within formal education systems. In particular, it seeks to identify the basic essential components of ESD pedagogy. The authors present a theoretical pedagogical framework based on accumulated theory and experience in the field. The framework aspires to encompass the majority of prevailing pedagogies within a simple set of four basic principles. It will be argued that the four principal pedagogies are basic and indispensable prerequisites for achieving the goals of ESD, and the lack of one is sufficient to undermine the ESD's pedagogical construct. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)