Scaffolding Elementary Preservice Science Teachers’ Exploration of Clean Water and Sanitation to Further Global Science Learning

This project explores preservice science teachers’ perceptions of global science learning in a content-focused integrated science undergraduate required course for elementary education majors. Before this year, this course focused on place-based curricula emphasizing local, rural ecosystems as most students teach within our state school system. To add a global perspective, we addressed the United Nations Sustainability Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitization for 8 weeks. Our findings indicate that before this course, students had never considered water resources from a global perspective and had a limited understanding of local water quality. Even with this, student learning activities, student self-reflection, and our personal reflections did capture a slight positive movement on the four domains of global competence. We conclude the chapter with ways our innovation could be adapted better to support preservice elementary teachers’ global competence development.