Towards a New Framework for Biodiversity Education: Early Insights into a National-Level Teacher Education Project

Despite extensive national and international efforts, public understanding of biodiversity remains limited and is often accompanied by misconceptions regarding its significance and the threats it faces (GFS Zürich, 2023). This weakens society’s ability to make informed decisions and adopt behaviors that support biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. Formal education plays a crucial role in addressing biodiversity illiteracy, yet current Swiss curricula and teacher-training programs do not systematically integrate biodiversity content. Research indicates that a lack of conceptual understanding hampers effective societal responses to biodiversity loss (European Commission 2019). Both students and pre-service teachers often lack a solid understanding of biodiversity and its importance (Navarro-Perez & Tidball, 2012; Tidemand & Nielsen, 2016; Lindemann-Matthies et al., 2011). This raises questions about how well teachers are prepared to address biodiversity-related content in the classroom and how a dedicated biodiversity-curriculum together with systematic teacher training strengthen students’ competences. 

This four-year project aims to initiate a shift in how biodiversity education is approached within Swiss teacher training and compulsory schooling. It pursues three objectives: (i) developing competency frameworks for biodiversity education in teacher training and compulsory schooling, (ii) designing teacher training concepts and learning materials tailored to different educational levels, and (iii) generating empirical evidence onthe impacts of biodiversity education on the knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviours of teachers and students.

The competence framework, teacher training concept and teaching materials are developed within a design-based research approach in co-creation with a sounding board of transdisciplinary biodiversity experts and representatives from all German-speaking Swiss Universities of Teacher Education. To assess the effectiveness of the teacher training and the learning materials for both pre-service teachers and their pupils we will conduct a controlled pre–post–follow-up study with multiple assessment instruments, involving more than 500 pre-service teachers and around 1,000 students across all stages of compulsory education. The project aims to deliver a comprehensive, research-informed framework for biodiversity education across compulsory schooling in Switzerland, establish a biodiversity literacy monitoring system, and engage key stakeholders for nationwide scaling with transfer potential beyond Switzerland. In this contribution, we present the project’s co-creation processes, study design and planned evaluation strategy.