From Climate Education to Sustainability Education: Physics Education Across Diverse Educational Contexts

This thesis investigates how science education, and particularly physics education, can contribute to sustainability education across different educational contexts, using with climate change as the main entry point. More specifically, the work explores how the understanding of climate-related physical phenomena can support broader educational approaches capable of engaging social, cultural, political, emotional, and epistemological dimensions of sustainability. The work began from the analysis of students’ mental models, explored through drawings as a way to make visible how learners represent complex climate-related phenomena. Starting from this disciplinary perspective, the research gradually expanded toward a broader view of sustainability education. A central part of the work focused on the design and analysis of multidisciplinary teacher training course, aimed at supporting teachers in connecting scientific concepts with environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions. The international experiences further broadened this perspective. In Portugal, the work highlighted the importance of adapting sustainability education to specific educational and institutional contexts through interdisciplinary activities with pre-service teachers, while also opening a small comparative extension of the drawing-based methodology with younger students in a different educational setting. The mobility experience in Brazil opened a complementary reflection on epistemological plurality, social justice, and the role of different ways of knowing in science education, bringing greater attention to the cultural and political dimensions of sustainability. Alongside formal educational settings, the thesis also considers science theatre as a non-formal space where scientific issues can be explored through emotional, narrative, and participatory engagement. Taken together, these lines of work suggest that sustainability in science education cannot be addressed at a single level. It requires connecting conceptual understanding, teacher education, context-sensitive educational design, and broader reflections on how knowledge is constructed and shared. From this perspective, physics education becomes part of a wider educational project aimed at supporting more critical and transformative ways of engaging with global challenges.