Remote sensing and electromagnetic wave behaviour to measure vegetation phenology with physics

Abstract

Interdisciplinary models of teaching have been present in education systems for at least 30 years. The idea of the interdisciplinarity is to show students the contextualisation of subject knowledge, its relation to real-life problems and to build skills across traditional disciplinary boundaries. This is essential to future competitiveness since innovations frequently occur at the interface of disciplines when people are able to collaborate. Schools try to respond to the need to prepare students for an interdisciplinary and collaborative job market by modifying the curricula and training teachers. But one of the most primary and difficult problems is preparing a truly interdisciplinary lesson or a project. It seems that all complex issues could be good examples for this purpose. One of these complex issues is the study of climate change, which requires the collaboration of different specialists and a comprehensive understanding of the problem in different scientific fields: physical, geographical, biological, social, engineering, etc. The paper presents an interdisciplinary project which links knowledge within a few different science areas around the real-life problem important for students. The work shows the developed and tested interdisciplinary educational project 'Panta Rhei' which integrates physics and other STEM subjects to present the biological and social consequences of changes in vegetation periods for different climate zones. It shows how Earth observation research can be utilised in schools for teaching physics and other science subjects. The project was validated on a group of Polish teachers. In the paper we present the whole project together with teachers' opinions.