Humanitas Emptor: Reconsidering Recent Trends and Policy in Science Teacher Education

Zeidler, Dana L.; Herman, Benjamin C.; Clough, Michael P.; Olson, Joanne K.; Kahn, Sami; Newton, Mark

doi:10.1007/s10972-016-9481-4

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This investigation lends resonance to work that clarifies how SSI instruction can be a form of sociomoral education that encourages students to develop a sense of character and empathy for others when proposing avenues toward SSI resolution (Herman et al, ; Lee, Chang, Choi, Kim, & Zeidler, ). Such educative approaches are crucial given contemporary media that work against contemplative and empathetic social discourse about technocentric solutions for SSI that impose unanticipated and unequal positive and negative impacts upon people and nature (Herman, ; Hodson, ; Turkle, ; Zeidler et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students' environmental NOS views, compassion, intent, and action: Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction

Herman

2017

J Res Sci Teach

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Preparing students to achieve the lofty goal of functional scientific literacy entails addressing the normative and non‐normative facets of socioscientific issues (SSI) such as scientific processes, the nature of science (NOS) and diverse sociocultural perspectives. SSI instructional approaches have demonstrated some efficacy for promoting students' NOS views, compassion for others, and decision making. However, extant investigations appear to neglect fully engaging students through authentic SSI in several ways. These include: (i) providing SSI instruction through classroom approaches that are divorced from students' lived experiences; (ii) demonstrating a contextual misalignment between SSI and NOS (particularly evident in NOS assessments); and (iii) framing decision making and position taking analogously—with the latter being an unreliable indicator of how people truly act. The significance of the convergent parallel mixed‐methods investigation reported here is how it responds to these shortcomings through exploring how place‐based SSI instruction focused on the contentious environmental issue of wolf reintroduction in the Greater Yellowstone Area impacted sixty secondary students' NOS views, compassion toward those impacted by contentious environmental issues, and pro‐environmental intent. Moreover, this investigation explores how those perspectives associate with the students' pro‐environmental action of donating to a Yellowstone environmental organization. Results demonstrate that the students' NOS views became significantly more accurate and contextualized, with moderate to large effect, through the place‐based SSI instruction. Through that instruction, the students also exhibited significant gains in their compassion for nature and people impacted by contentious environmental issues and pro‐environmental intent. Further analyses showed that donating students developed and demonstrated significantly more robust and contextualized NOS views, compassion for people and nature impacted by contentious environmental issues, and pro‐environmental intent than their nondonating counterparts. Pedagogical implications include how place‐based learning in authentic settings could better prepare students to understand NOS, become socioculturally aware, and engage SSI across a variety of contexts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Students' environmental NOS views, compassion, intent, and action: Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction

Herman

2017

J Res Sci Teach

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“…Some science educators have argued that NGSS reforms are pushing the field in directions antithetical to the goals of SSI teaching and learning (toward technocratic scientific and technology literacy as opposed to the progressive outcomes most SSI advocates call for; Zeidler, ; Zeidler et al, ). While we share some of the concerns raised by these authors (e.g., job preparation should not be the primary purpose for science education), we differ in our interpretation of the extent to which the NGSS necessarily moves the field in these directions of concern.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Student development of model‐based reasoning about carbon cycling and climate change in a socio‐scientific issues unit

et al. 2017

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Carbon cycling is a key natural system that requires robust science literacy to understand how and why climate change is occurring. Studies show that students tend to compartmentalize carbon movement within plants and animals and are challenged to make sense of how carbon cycles on a global scale. Studies also show that students hold faulty models of climate change which thwart their reasoning about how and why climate change occurs. Very few studies have examined how to support students in understanding carbon cycling and reasoning about the relationships between carbon cycling and climate change. To support secondary students in making these connections, we developed a modeling‐centered socio‐scientific issue (SSI) based curriculum unit taught by the same teacher across three sections of a secondary biology class. At three time points within the 2‐week unit, 50 students developed, used, evaluated, and revised their own carbon cycling models to use as sense‐making tools for how individual biological processes create a global carbon system and the relationship between carbon cycling and climate change. A small subset of students (n = 16) were also interviewed about their models. We constructed holistic scoring rubrics to document students’ model‐based reasoning associated with each model and then compared rubric scores across time points to examine potential progression of model‐based reasoning over the course of the unit. Results suggest that students’ must hold a robust understanding of causal mechanisms for transfer and transformation of carbon in order to make connections between carbon cycling and climate change. Once their understanding of carbon cycling becomes robust, their reasoning shifts in complexity to understand interrelationships between carbon cycling and climate change. Implications from this study suggest that embedding the practices of modeling within a SSI unit supported secondary students in building robust understanding of carbon cycling and the interrelationship to climate change. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 10: 1249–1273, 2017

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“…The SSI movement has drawn from a wide swath of interrelated scholarship (e.g., epistemological maturation, sociomoral discourse, emotive reasoning, character education, nature of science and argumentation) that uniquely positions it as a sociocultural progressive framework serving as a counterpoint (or a complement) to recent STEM initiatives as commonly conceived and practiced in academia. That sociocultural perspectives as those advocated in the SSI framework has to be at best, inferred and not explicitly addressed by initiatives such as A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) or the Next Generation Science Standards (2013) in the US, suggests to us that other global initiatives not look to the US as the "Gold Standard" for progressive frameworks (Zeidler, 2014;Zeidler, 2016;Zeidler et al, 2016). In the absence of explicit sociocultural approaches to science education, these past (and even current) trends have, at times, produced tensions between more traditional essentialist expectations and specializations found in discrete discipline "silos" of science and the kind of normative discourses and cross curricular connections typically encouraged in progressivist pedagogy (Bossér & Lindahl, 2019;Elgström & Hellstenius, 2011;Lindahl, Folkesson, & Zeidler, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New directions in socioscientific issues research

Zeidler

Herman

Sadler

2019

Discip Interdscip Sci Educ Res

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206

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The socioscientific issues framework has proven to have a significant impact over the last two decades on many areas related to the development of functional scientific literacy in students. In this article, we summarize and synthesize recent trends in socioscientific issues research that impact both disciplinary and interdisciplinary science education research. These trends represent science-in-context investigations that we propose are advanced by three broad and interrelated areas of research including: 1) Socioscientific Issues and the Central Role of Socioscientific Reasoning; 2) Socioscientific Issues and the Primacy of Socioscientific Perspective Taking; and, 3) Socioscientific Issues and the Importance of Informal and Place-Based Contexts. We discuss the most recent research in those areas and explore the educational significance these new trends.

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Humanitas Emptor: Reconsidering Recent Trends and Policy in Science Teacher Education

Cited by 25 publications

References 13 publications

Students' environmental NOS views, compassion, intent, and action: Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction

Students' environmental NOS views, compassion, intent, and action: Impact of place‐based socioscientific issues instruction

Student development of model‐based reasoning about carbon cycling and climate change in a socio‐scientific issues unit

New directions in socioscientific issues research

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