Chemistry Teachers’ Awareness of Sustainability Through Social Media:Cultural Differences

Abstract

Sustainability has gained paramount importance in recent years, and scientists play a key role in the efforts to attain it. Chemistry teachers focusing on sustainability must educate future citizens, through effective learning that calls for daily student–teacher social interaction as well as ongoing exposure to everyday life events. Most online social media tools have been developed with the aim of maintaining, managing, and enhancing social interactions between people, and have great potential to raise science teachers’ awareness about important environmental issues. The participants in this study included pre-service and in-service science teachers from both the Jewish and Arab sectors in Israel, representing diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The study was designed to assess chemistry teachers’ behaviour and their awareness of sustainability issues. The research tool was an online questionnaire consisting of closed and open-ended items about the participants’ environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour, as well as their habits regarding the social media. In this chapter we discuss the role of social media in raising awareness of, and interest in, sustainable developments, and examine how cultural diversity among participants affects their awareness of it.