Page 129 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

106 M.P. Mueller and D.L. Zeidler

Withstanding social justice scholars who emphasize more than human-centric
concerns, a review of the literature in science education will often reveal a concern
for nature while the implications of that concern remains limited to humans. By
contrast, we suggest that social justice is better served and characterized by socio-
scientific movements (Zeidler and Sadler 2008) when the welfare of ecosystems
becomes inseparable from communities. Ecojustice, under our view, is an enlarged
conceptualization of how this idea is cultivated through SSI.
The second premise of this chapter rests on the idea that socioscientific issues
can provide a contextualized learning environment for understanding the complex-
ity of living and nonliving interrelationships, both in the classroom and in natural
settings. Ironically, many of the teaching methods employed within the SSI frame-
work are not separate from what occurs within professional science, yet science
education tends to lag behind the times and schooling is slow to change. With the
emerging SSI movement, however, students debate, discuss, argue, and reflect on
the pros, cons, and the many shades of grey and green on environmental issues such
as the impacts of local food movements or renewable fuels. Unfortunately, many of
these issues are taken for granted by society as inherently good or bad, when these
issues almost always require a more nuanced analysis. Similar to scientists working
within the professional sector, youth are not limited to scientific evidence when
constructing solutions to ethical, political, and social dilemmas. They discuss previ-
ous knowledge and experiences, beliefs and values, and philosophical ideals, and
wrestle with their actual decisions.
Our third point is that the literature shows that socioscientific issues cultivate
moral–ethical reasoning and the development of character, which should be part of
school sciences (Fowler et al. 2009). A large part of SSI pedagogy is responsible
for guiding students through epistemic and ontological or character development.
This pedagogy fosters what is termed socioscientific reasoning (Sadler et al. 2007).
Socioscientific reasoning entails the recognition of complexity inherent in SSI, the
consideration of issues from pluralistic perspectives, the recognition of ongoing
inquiry relative to SSI, and the demonstration of a healthy degree of skepticism
when confronted with evidence and data. This type of reasoning runs the gamut of
rationalistic, intuitive, and emotive thought and evokes imaginative thinking to
navigate through the landscape of ill-structured problems (Sadler and Zeidler
2005). Socioscientific reasoning specifically involves wrestling with morals and
ethics, and personal views, that is, fundamental beliefs and values (Fowler, Sodler
and Zeidler 2009). Moral–ethical reasoning of this nature has not always been rec-
ognized as part of how students learn in science education. But this oversight does
not negate the fact that students’ shared values are partly shaped by the social
norms of people who lived during a particular time, inculcated as metaphors,
encoded and reproduced intergenerationally.
As a context for deeper consideration and analysis, this chapter will elaborate on
significant moral dilemmas facing schools today, and discuss how teachers should
be prepared to deal with the topic of genetically modified species. With increasing
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) such as Yorktown Technologies’ patented
TM
GloFish making their way into classroom laboratories, socioscientific issues and