ABSTRACT
Ecology education has the difficult task of teaching students the structure and function of the world’s ecosystems as well as their interrelations with humanity. The teaching of ecology poses important challenges to educators due to the very nature of ecological relationships and processes, such as the systemic nature of ecological phenomena. Deficiencies in teaching approaches that result in generating and transmitting misconceptions through ecology education are discussed and an educational framework for teaching ecology is proposed. The proposed educational framework is based on the ‘Structure-Behavior-Function’ model for teaching complex systems (developed by Hmelo-Silver and her colleagues) and it combines outdoor activities, computer simulations and laboratory experiments in a series of learning sequences that could help students to gradually grasp the increased complexity of ecosystems’ functions and human-nature interactions.
