Who Benefits from the Natural Gas in Israel? Using a Public Debate to Teach All Components of Education for Sustainable Development

The natural gas export dilemma refers to the debate over preserving the Israeli natural gas for local use or exporting it to increase revenues. It can be framed as a sustainability dilemma between the long-term utilization of a nonrenewable energy resource (inter-generational question) and the current diverse economic interests (intra-generational question). A learning unit was developed and taught to in-service teachers. We describe the context, the learning unit development, and the study that aimed at understanding the characteristics of decision-making and the learners’ arguments on the natural gas dilemma before and after its enactment. We found seven reasoning strategies: Unsolved Dilemma, Trade-off Compromise, Gainful Decision, Minimizing Losses or Risks, Justice and Ethics, Subject-Focused, and Action Plan. Additionally, we found changes in strategies used before and at the end of the learning unit. Altogether, five domains of arguments were identified: the environmnet, economics, energy, ethics and society, and foreign affairs (politics). The Participants who advocated “banning export” policy, based their reasons on environmnetal and energy security considerations; while the ones who advocated “export allowance” policy, based their reasons on economic and foreign affairs considerations. We suggest that both schools and informal science institutions are a sphere where future citizens can learn about such sustainability dilemmas and communicate socio-scientific issues that are relevant to citizens in a democratic society.