Prof Lesley Le Grange, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies in the Faculty of Education was recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB) in the United Kingdom in recognition of his contribution to biology education.
The RSB offers different categories of membership and fellows are elected from all sub-disciplines of biology. A maximum of 2000 fellows are elected worldwide.
Prof Le Grange has always been passionate about biology and environmental education.
He was founder member of the first non-racial Biology Teachers' Association in the Western Cape, the Peninsula Biology Teachers Association (PBTA) and he taught Biology Didactics to both pre-service and in-service teachers for ten years at Stellenbosch University (1996-2005). Despite pursuing other research interests and taking up management positions at the university for almost a decade, he has continued to conduct research in the field of biology education. He has documented the history of school biology in South Africa and has written about several contemporary challenges facing the field including issues related to sustainability, food security and indigenous knowledge.
Currently, he teaches an honours module in environmental education in which he draws on insights from biology.
"Environmental education is a relatively new discipline, but some of the key challenges in the world today relates to this field, for example: Artificial intelligence, some of the dangers associated with the development of nano-technologies, the possibility of bio-warfare, climate change, the frequency of natural disasters, the availability of water, etc."
However, in his research Prof Le Grange has found that environmental education is only being addressed cosmetically in schools and at tertiary level. He recently attended an Invitational Seminar on Environmental Education Research (ISEER) with other eminent academics in the field to discuss the state of environmental education in the world and to talk about the way forward.
"Implementing environmental education remains a big challenge worldwide," he says.
The next invitational seminar on this topic will be hosted by Stellenbosch University in 2018.
