Communicating about Socio-Scientific Issues: UK students' mapping of the badger - cattle controversy

Abstract

Recently there has been increasing attention to the educational potential of Socio-Scientific Issues within science education. Using Habermas’ (1984) Theory of Communicative Action a small-scale qualitative study design was employed to explore how a group of 13 Biology school students communicate about the badger – cattle controversy in the UK and the types of communicative strategies such as those put forward by sincerity, normative rightness and propositional truth claims that can be employed in order to achieve undistorted communication, developing consensus and understanding. The findings suggest that the way in which the sequence of activities were set up based on mapping controversies, group discussion and online communication, allowed students to focus on the question explored, identify differences in their positioning and knowledge base and raise questions for further research and investigation. In this way a model of undistorted communication about an SSI containing scientific uncertainties and social controversies was developed. Within this model of undistorted communication, both scientific uncertainties and social controversies are made explicit through mapping (raising questions) before blogging (more considered reflective discourse), which then encourages epistemological depth and a consensus on what the main issues are. Implications for teaching and learning using SSIs are discussed.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Andri Christodoulou: orcid.org/0000-0002-7021-4210

ORCID for Marcus Grace: orcid.org/0000-0002-1949-1765

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