A STEM Education Framework for Empowering Youth to Address the Global Goals

his year’s UNESCO 2021 World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development was held from May 17 – through May 19, 2021. At the conference, UNESCO called for learners of all ages to be empowered to #LearnForOurPlanet and act for sustainability. They wrote:

“The current health crisis has reminded us that climate change and the collapse of biodiversity are major challenges facing humanity. As the pandemic has tragically shown us, our health is inextricably linked with the health of our planet. Education is crucial for raising awareness and generating action to protect the health of our planet and to ensure the wellbeing of all, within the limits of nature. In light of the major environmental challenges the world is facing, education is key as a means of making our societies and economies greener, more sustainable, and more harmonious with nature.” (UNESCO, ESD, 2021)

Across the globe young people are working with educators, scientists, and community members to put in place local actions to address the unprecedented complex global challenges we are all facing. Many of these global challenges, if gone unaddressed, will disrupt our way of life—poverty, education, the digital divide, and urbanization. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, other global challenges, if unaddressed, will eliminate our way of life—including infectious disease, food security, water scarcity, energy security, cyber security, climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem loss, and deforestation. Underlying many of these global challenges is science, which is crucial for solving these problems and understanding the world around us. Today, science educators must not just teach the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for the purposes of workforce development, STEM education must also give students the opportunities to discover, understand and act on the most pressing global issues of our time.

The Smithsonian Science for Global Goals project provides freely available online community research guides for youth ages 8-17 developed by the Smithsonian Science Education Center in collaboration with the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP)—a collaboration of 142 national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine from across the globe—as well as experts across the Smithsonian and beyond. These community research guides use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to focus on sustainable actions that are student-defined and implemented at a local level.

Smithsonian Science for Global Goals brings together inquiry-based science education (IBSE), social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies, and civic engagement. Students engage firsthand with issues of critical importance, such as climate change, the health of the world’s oceans, and clean energy, while examining each issue from multiple perspectives: social, ethical, economic, and environmental. It is our belief that educating youth about complex socio-scientific issues will help to mobilize young, educators, community members, and parents to take action against societal and health problems that can adversely affect their lives.

Each Smithsonian Science for Global Goals guide utilizes a Discover, Understand, and Act framework to guide students’ learning both within each lesson and across the lessons. The framework is based on UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education three domains of learning—social-emotional, cognitive, and behavioral:

1. Discover. In this portion of every lesson (and at the start of every community research guide), students conduct community surveys or analyze local or global data as “scientific phenomena” to discover how the socio-scientific issue is affecting their local and global communities; students create identify maps to better understand themselves and others and prepare to make informed decisions; the goal of “Discover” is to improve social-emotional outcomes;
   
   
2. Understand. In this portion of every lesson (and in the middle of every community research guide), students investigate the underlying science and social science of these issues using their community as their laboratory; the goal of “Understand” is to improve cognitive outcomes; and,
   
   
3. Act. In this portion of every lesson (and at the end of every community research guide), students use their new scientific knowledge to take action locally (e.g., protect themselves and others from COVID-19); the goal of “Act” is to improve behavioral outcomes. 

Through the Discover, Understand, and Act Lesson framework, shown in Figure 1, students move through a learning progression that builds their social-emotional, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes through three stages: (1) Discover – students discover their own identity (including their own learning disposition and background knowledge) and the identity of their community (their own cultural context through questioning others through community surveys); (2) Understand – students understand the underlying science of the issue by engaging in critical reasoning and systemic understanding; in this important phase, young people examine their own values and perspectives (environmental, social, ethical, economic) and reflect on how their perspective changes as they learn more about the world around them; and ultimately, (3) Act – students engage in synthesizing all that they have learned and put their new knowledge to use by taking action. The process is cyclical and not linear, with students revisiting any portion of the framework at any time.

Through the Discover, Understand, and Act framework, young people develop sustainability mindsets and scientific literacy, as shown in Figure 2. We are: trying to encourage the belief that personal action can lead to positive change (developing empowerment and agency); shining a light on the connections between local and global issues and people (creating a global-local interconnection); promoting the respect of oneself, others, and the environment (promoting equity and justice); and encouraging and developing an understanding of different perspectives and contexts for knowledge (leading to open-mindedness and reflection).  By developing Sustainability Mindsets, young people are building new thought routines and habits that set them up to engage with global issues on a long-term basis. By developing an understanding of Global-Local Interconnection, young people are also primed to investigate and explore how what is happening in their local community is connected to what is happening at a global level.

The Smithsonian Science for Global Goals project uses the Discover, Understand, and Act framework to:

• Create a transdisciplinary approach to learning focused on real-world problems.
• Engage young people’s ideas, enthusiasm and energy, inviting them to take the lead on creating a better world.
• Use science and social science to help young people arrive at sustainable solutions.
• Drive young people to become action takers, collecting data in their own communities to better understand the world’s most pressing issues, and arriving at locally sustainable solutions.
• Reflect local communities’ needs, interests, and priorities.
• Support young people to develop scientific literacy and sustainability mindsets.

At the Smithsonian Science Education Center, we believe that the foundation for achieving sustainable development is through education, and specifically through educating youth in STEM subjects. To achieve STEM education for sustainable development, we bring together materials designed for youth, teacher professional development, and leadership development for schools and communities to collectively prepare the next generation of learners to not only be workforce-ready but be prepared to make change in their own communities. Through their actions, students can meet not only their own needs, but the needs of their fellow humans while also ensuring a successful future for the planet.

Editor's Note: This feature was originally published in Diplomatic Courier's UNGA 2021 special print edition.