The aim of this session is to invite science teachers practising ESD to honestly examine their inner relationship to change-making, and discover what the IDG framework offers in response. Also to equip participants with practical, IDG-grounded techniques to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living, not merely a body of knowledge.
"ESD is more than knowledge and skills — it is a way of living." If this is true: Are we living it? And what might quietly prevent us?
This workshop holds space for both. You'll be invited to notice — honestly and without judgement — how your own sustainability work feels from the inside: the urgency, the satisfaction, the fatigue, and perhaps the subtle resistance when genuine progress appears. You'll encounter the identity trap: the deeply human tendency to become so invested in change-making as a source of meaning that we unknowingly slow our own progress.
Far from a counsel of despair, this is an opening. The IDG framework offers a practical map of the inner capacities that ESD actually demands — and techniques for cultivating them, in yourself and in your pupils.
You'll leave knowing which IDG dimensions your teaching currently develops and which remain untouched — and with a few concrete techniques to help yourself and your pupils experience sustainability as lived reality rather than distant abstraction.
Participants should be able to: > Recognise the identity trap in their own ESD practice and approach it with curiosity rather than resistance > Identify which IDG dimensions their current teaching cultivates and which remain underdevelope > Apply at least one embodied, IDG-grounded technique to help pupils experience sustainability as a way of living
Background: A 2010 School Science Review article observed that ESD requires "tenacity and a specific way of working — it is a way of living." Yet years working across sustainability groups revealed a paradox for me: the more committed the change-maker, the more likely they were to have lost felt, embodied connection to what a sustainable future actually looks like to inhabit. Busy change-making had quietly replaced the lived experience of the change itself. A second, more confronting pattern emerged: we often unknowingly derive identity, purpose, and meaning from the change-making process. When genuine solutions surface, they are subtly resisted — completing the work would require reinventing ourselves. Kegan and Lahey (2009) name this the immunity to change: competing commitments operating largely beneath awareness.
The Inner Development Goals framework (IDG Foundation, 2021), co-created with over 1,000 researchers and practitioners, maps 23 inner skills across five dimensions — Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting — as the missing complement to the SDGs, and offers a rigorous developmental path for the inner work ESD actually demands.
Failure and experimentation are fundamental parts of STEM, but in practice SEND students can find the 'trial and error' of STEM incredibly challenging. By creating scaffolded, flexible lesson plans and building our own STEM confidence, we can deliver more accessible and inclusive lessons for our students in environments where they truly feel safe. In this interactive workshop the Lightyear Foundation and members of their youth advisory panel will share their lived experiences, explore best practice and facilitate a space for teachers to grow their skills and confidence in inclusive STEM.
Outcomes: - Participants will understand some of the barriers facing disabled and neurodivergent students in STEM, and how they can be reduced or removed. - Participants will be feel more confident delivering accessible and inclusive STEM lessons. - Participants will feel empowered to reach out to each other & the SEND in STEM Network for support.
Background: As a disabled-led organisation specialising in accessible and inclusive STEM, we regularly work with teachers who struggle delivering STEM lessons with their SEND students. One of the main barriers they face is the emotional dysregulation which can follow an "unsuccessful" science experiment, or a tricky maths problem. Teachers tell us that "SEND students aren't allowed to fail", and when this combines with their own low subject confidence, teachers can end up feeling anxious and unsure about their STEM lessons. Our experience delivering accessible and inclusive STEM, combined with the expertise of our youth advisory panel, has shown us that embracing failure as a fundamental part of STEM is just one of the practical steps that can lead to 'safe-to-fail' classroom environments, and grow student and teacher confidence.
In this session attendees will be introduced to Model-Evidence-Link (MEL) instructional materials designed to assist American learners as they construct arguments to evaluate the plausibility of evidence connected to models and the research base that supports using these scaffolds. These MEL diagrams allow students to think critically about socio-scientific issues by evaluating connections between lines of evidence and alternative explanatory claims.
Explorations that utilize the MEL scaffold promote changes in epistemic judgments, including claim plausibility, and help students move toward a more civically minded and scientific stance. Student discourse is a critical part of these activities and include negotiation toward scientific consensus.
MEL activities for available for teaching about socio-scientific issues include climate change, dead zones, energy, extreme weather, fracking, freshwater resources, fossils, moon formation, nuclear energy, origins of the universe, soil and food security and wetlands. All materials are freely available under a Creative Commons license. Participants receive access to all instructional materials and instructional guides, found here:
AI technology is changing the fabric of scientific knowledge building. In biology, for example, AlphaFold predicts the structure of proteins and other biomolecules, changing how drugs are developed and diseases are studied. In medicine, AI-powered image generation is changing medical diagnostics. In chemistry, AI tools are automating and accelerating organic chemistry and material discovery. In physics, complex AI-based simulations accelerate research across topics, while AI-based robotics is driving change in engineering. Further, scientific inquiry requires new skills for scientists, such as designing ‘AI experiments’, navigating data ethics and governance, evaluating AI models, and interpreting AI system output.
How, then, is school science changing to teach about this new way of scientific working and these new discoveries? What new AI-related real-world science concepts and skills might be taught?
The aim of this workshop is to start this discussion. We will lead a workshop to brainstorm candidate uses of AI in real-world science and consider what concepts and skills might be introduced at different stages of science education. We will provide examples of how basic AI literacy concepts have been introduced in existing AI lessons covering topics such as ecosystems and healthcare. We will use these to spark discussion on what content might be taught in classroom science lessons to showcase `AI in real-world science’. We are particularly interested in stimulating discussion on how scientific inquiry in school might change in the light of AI technology.
The outcome from this workshop will be that participants will become more familiar with AI literacy concepts and begin to form ideas about what AI literacy for Science might look like. They will also start to develop ideas for lessons that introduce `AI in real-world science’ into their science classrooms. We do not have the answers to what should be taught and how about `AI in real-world science’, but as computer science education researchers, we would like to facilitate this discussion with science educators to help work towards this goal.
Climate change education is becoming increasingly important within secondary science education. However, biodiversity, ecosystems, and climate change are often taught separately, limiting opportunities for students to develop connected understanding of environmental issues and sustainability challenges.
This session introduces an integrated curriculum framework developed to support the teaching of climate change through biodiversity and ecosystems in Malaysian secondary schools. The curriculum was developed as part of a PhD project using a design-based research approach informed by curriculum analysis, teacher perspectives, and iterative refinement.
The session aims to support secondary science teachers and curriculum developers in exploring practical approaches for integrating climate change concepts within existing science and geography topics. Participants will be introduced to the structure of the curriculum framework, including integrated learning objectives, inquiry-based learning approaches, differentiated learning strategies, and examples of classroom activities.
Examples from selected lesson plans and teaching materials will be shared to demonstrate how biodiversity and ecosystems can be connected meaningfully to climate change using local environmental contexts and real-world environmental issues. The session will also discuss practical considerations identified during teacher piloting and curriculum refinement, including curriculum alignment, classroom feasibility, and interdisciplinary integration.
Participants will have opportunities for brief reflection and discussion on how similar approaches could be adapted within their own educational contexts.
Participants will:
- identify practical approaches for integrating biodiversity and climate change concepts within secondary science education - explore curriculum integration strategies and lesson design approaches - reflect on teacher-informed approaches to climate change education - consider how curriculum materials could be adapted for their own contexts
