Welcome back to our MOOC, Teaching Science in Universities. In this next part of the MOOC, we want to talk about, how can we make science relevant for your students? How can we frame our teaching in a way that students see that the knowledge they're applying is relevant for everyday life, relevant for understanding the news, relevant for talking to the neighbors, friends, and family? Relevance is often connected to the context and the examples we are giving, the concepts and the competencies you need to teach. They are prescribed in the curricula, but the context and the examples you choose, they are up to you. And they really matter if students can take the knowledge and take it from the science classroom to outside the science classroom. So perhaps, we start with two examples from chemistry and geography, and see how two professional colleagues implement real-life contexts into their teaching. >> One of the most emotional points in remote sensing is usually when we show pictures, so photographs taken with normal cameras from the International Space Station, because these were real human beings living in outer space and taking images from the Earth. And the astronauts usually explain, in much detail, why they take these pictures and how they are emotionally attached to these images. >> Often, what comes to my mind, also, during teaching in class, sometimes an example comes. So there are differences from year to year when I teach the same class. I also read newspapers. When I read a newspaper, I also always have in mind, is this something that I could bring in class? Very often, these are examples where the texts, the article in the newspaper is, I wouldn't say total nonsense, but for a chemist, there are obvious mistakes. And I bring these examples just, also, to to bring the students to thinking what they actually read and what they hear. Nowadays, everyone is always swamped with information in our information age. And we have to filter this, and we have to learn to critically look at this, and read it, and think about it. Is this really correct? Does it make sense or not? And especially, the basic courses in chemistry, physics, mathematics, or whatever, they are here to help us understand what is actually going on. Does this make sense? And this is also very good training for later on, because in research, when we do research in the lab, we always have to think about what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Does this make sense? In which direction are we going? Because there, we are really working at the border and we don't know what is coming. So we have to think ourselves. >> Science education research has shown that, especially, implementing socioscientific issues, so issues that connect our knowledge from the science faculties, from the science classroom to the society out there is an important vehicle to increase students' learning. It increases students' interest. It increases students' motivation because they see the relevance of what they are taught about. So what I was, for example, doing is when I needed to teach a general science course, I framed it completely with climate change. And we made clear all the science concepts we needed to teach about in the context of climate change. The idea behind this was that students are able to apply their knowledge about chemical equilibria, about thermal dynamics, about cells and cell division into the context of climate change, and understand better what's going on in the news and what's going on in politics from a science perspective. So we can increase the interest and we can increase the motivation. But what we can also increase is the content knowledge. So we also can increase students' content knowledge, and we can increase how they apply this content knowledge to different contexts. And the most important thing, from my perspective, is that we do not only increase the content knowledge, but we increase the understanding of the nature of science as well. What does this mean? Understanding the nature of science means understanding how we derive our knowledge, and where are the limits. Where does our knowledge break down, and we need new knowledge to explain certain phenomena? So what you can see here is that, obviously, implementing socioscientific issues is an important strategy to increase the quality of your teaching.
