Abstract
Sustainability is included in numerous European primary and secondary school curricula, and science is one of their mandatory subjects [1]. In this context, sustainability education scholars seek to uncover ways to effectively transfer knowledge to students while simultaneously looking for appropriate contexts to present science topics [2, 3].
Moreover, these experts pursue methods for helping students develop skills such as critical thinking, scientific thinking and reasoning or analytical thinking. Yet, despite the consensus on the advantages of combining sustainability and science teaching, connecting scientific knowledge to environmental issues and conveying these links to teachers remains a challenging task [4].
For this reason, we argue that approaches aimed at helping students gain knowledge and develop skills by combining science and sustainability education content and methods should start with teacher training at the university. In our paper, we present the results of our three-year action research on a teacher training university course.
Based on our findings, sustainability indicators are the most effective ways to connect often isolated knowledge about sustainability themes and science knowledge. Sustainability indicators also enable us to show university students how to appropriately develop more general skills such as analytical or critical thinking in a natural way.