Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO)

ABSTRACT In the wake of colleges and universities being criticized for inadequately preparing their students for the grand challenges of the twenty-first-century, the New American University proposes to prepare future leaders to address these challenges and contribute to a more sustainable way of life. One of the major mechanisms to enact lasting and impactful change toward achieving this goal is educating future teachers in sustainability literacy. This chapter describes a newly required hybrid course at Arizona State University titled Sustainability Science for Teachers. The course, launched in the K-8th grade teacher education program in fall 2012, imparts sustainability lessons in meaningful ways by integrating technology and digital storytelling with in-class activities. The goal of the course is to develop sustainability literacy among preservice teachers by providing engaging content-knowledge and enabling them to employ these concepts in their future classrooms. Analyzing pre- and posttests that capture preservice teachers’ conceptual maps along with preservice teacher feedback provides data for an initial evaluation of this new course. This chapter examines the learning outcomes and lessons learned from creating and implementing a course focused on sustainability targeted to preservice teachers.

This study explores interactive digital storytelling in a university hybrid course. Digital stories leverage imagery and narrative-based content to explore concepts, while appealing to millennials. When digital storytelling is used as the main source of course content, tensions arise regarding how to engage and support student learning while holding them accountable for watching the video. We explore interactive video as a way to mitigate and engage with these issues. The context is a hybrid sustainability course for preservice teachers that used digital stories in a conventional format in which students could start, stop, and pause the video at will, as well as an interactive format with all the same features, plus programmed pauses for required understanding checks. A survey of students (n = 223) indicated they believed interactive digital stories supported engagement, scaffolded learning, and increased learning gains, but did not increase accountability. Evaluation of quiz performance indicated they recalled significantly more with interactive videos, compared to conventional videos. Implications for practice are discussed.

This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report, the authors trace the genealogy of energy security, elucidating how it establishes a morality of efficiency that orients policy action under the guise of security toward the liberalizing of markets in resource states and a robust program of energy research and development in the United States. This evidence challenges the pervasive historical anchoring of the concept in the 1970s and illustrates the importance of the genealogical approach for the emerging literature on energy and sociotechnical imaginaries. Exploring the genealogy of energy security also unpacks key social, political, and economic undercurrents that disrupt the seeming universality of the language of energy, leading the authors to question whether energy security discourse is appropriate for guiding policy action during ongoing global energy transitions.

This chapter focuses on nuclear scientists and engineers, and the effectiveness of small-scale interventions that could be made to prepare them to consider novel kinds of climate disruptions and how such considerations could affect plant design and operations.

The concept of interactional expertise – characterized by sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans as the ability to speak the language of a discipline without the corresponding ability to practice – can serve as a powerful way of breaking down expert/non-expert dichotomies and providing a role for new voices in specialist communities. However, in spite of the vast uptake of this concept and its potential to fruitfully address many important issues related to scientific expertise, there has been surprisingly little critical analysis of it. We seek to remedy this situation by considering potential benefits of interactional expertise and the ways in which the current conception can – and cannot – realize those benefits. In particular, we argue that interactional expertise hasn't reached its full potential for addressing who ought to be involved in scientific research and decision-making, largely owing to an unnecessarily restrictive way of operationalizing the concept. In its place, we offer a broader, more pluralistic account of interactional expertise – one that is in line with the original spirit of the concept, but also captures the diversity that we see as being an important aspect of interactional experts and the value they can bring to the table.