Page 45 - Climate Conference - EBook 2023: Al-Qasemi Academy

Developing climate change awareness among
science teachers using social media spaces
Prof. Muhamad Hugerat

Lecturer and Researcher – The Academic Arab College
for Education-Haifa

ABSTRACT
Climate change has gained paramount importance in recent years, and scientists play a
key role in the efforts to attain it. Science teachers focusing on climate change must

educate the future citizens, through effective learning which 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 science teachers’ behavior and their
awareness of important climate change issues. The study was conducted in two phases.
We assessed all teachers’ (198) level of sustainability awareness based on the on-line
questionnaire and then part of them (74) were exposed to a workshop focused on climate

change issues has been mentioned earlier in the questionnaire. Finally, teachers were
evaluated based on an assignment relating to climate change issues using social media.
The research tools included: (1) an online questionnaire developed consisting of closed
and open-ended items about the participants’ environmental awareness and their habits

regarding the social media, (2) posts they designed using social media networks related to
important climate change issues.

In this study we discuss the role of social media in raising awareness of and interest in
sustainable developments. In addition, we present a novel method for training and
teaching based on social media focusing on climate change.

Keywords:Climate change awareness, Science education, Science teachers training,
social media, Sustainable Science education.