Abstract:

Sustainability is a broad and powerful concept that goes belong environmental issues but needs to feed from them to be meaningful in terms of improving peoples’ life. Due to its relevance for society, settled on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), school should be a key agent to promote environmental awareness and build a sustainability competence not only for the tomorrow’s citizenship but for the people of today. Therefore, sustainability is becoming progressively more present in the curricula but lack of training, time constraints and work overload may prevent teachers to transfer it to their daily teaching. This study represents a successful case about how to face this issue framing the curricular content about Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity in a sustainability context.
Regardless the teaching-learning difficulties widely reported in the literature concerning this topic, Evolutionary Biology itself can be understood as a compendium of interconnected disciplines and sub-disciplines that explain the natural processes of Biological Evolution and that could help to understand important key challenges for the European Green Pact such as biodiversity loss or habitat destruction. This places Evolutionary Biology as an ideal field from which to work on sustainability.
For this purpose, this work shows the design, the implementation and the impact on students of an educational intervention, aimed at the third year of Primary Education and carried out at the school CEIP Ponce de León located in Torredonjimeno (Jaén, Spain). The intervention is based on an inquiry methodology that was carried out through a teaching-learning sequence articulated around the school garden as the central educational resource. In general, the learning objectives proposed for the intervention refer to the understanding of the evolution of species, the biodiversity and the environment, in order to promote sustainability consciousness and attitudes. This intervention lasted two weeks and involved 19 students that participated in different learning tasks such as exploration of digital resources to learn about natural selection, research about changes in the school garden crops due to domestication (artificial selection), observation and classification of the school garden biodiversity or analysis of the ecological role of each species found in the school garden.
Furthermore, the impact of the intervention on the students has been evaluated using a pre/post validated questionnaire including context adaptations for the collection of quantitative data and a qualitative approach through a dynamic for self-evaluation. Preliminary results derived from this research show that after the intervention students showed gains in terms of knowledge and acceptance of biological evolution, scientific literacy, perception of science relevance, interest and self-efficacy in science as well as sustainability consciousness. Finally, the qualitative evaluation of the intervention shows how it is able to arouse students' knowledge, interest and motivation. Therefore, it is feasible to promote sustainability while tackling evolutionary biology in schools to foster the competences needed to address the current challenges of society.

Keywords:

Biodiversity, Evolutionary Biology, Sustainability, School garden, Educational research.