Biology education as moral education: supporting students' morality within the human-nature context

Climate change, loss of biodiversity, the return of the wolf, the nitrogen crisis.... We face a variety of socio-ecological challenges, within which the relationship between humans and nature has been disrupted. A moral-ethical approach to secondary biology education can respond to these challenges by providing students with the space to reflect upon these dilemmas: how they relate to them and what possible behaviour in relation to these challenges looks like.
This design research focuses on: (1) the development of design principles for secondary biology education which supports students’ skills related to morality within the context of the disturbed relationship between humans and nature (theoretical yield); (2) concretization of these design principles in the development and implementation of an intervention (practical yield). The intervention was implemented in three pre-university education biology classes of 15-16-year-old biology students.
The following design principles resulted from this research: (1) to emphasize the moral nature of the dilemmas, they are introduced with short, topical video clips, which highlight the dilemma from different perspectives; (2) students use an ethical matrix, which they use to investigate arguments and moral values for various stakeholders and to include them in their own moral reflection; (3) students work together in groups in which they are encouraged to take each other's perspective and include it in their own consideration; (4) the ‘Four Component Model’ of morality serves as a guide for tasks aimed at supporting various skills related to morality.
Recommendations are made for theory, research and practice.