Page 135 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

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

environments important to students and anchored in their everyday lives (Walker
and Zeidler 2007). In other words, class discourse focused on the significance of
the students’ backgrounds may alleviate some fears of participating more fully in
conversation around issues. Dialogue includes their interactions with community
members, cultural events and ceremonies, and narrative. The SSI framework is a
way of teaching and a way of conceptualizing how we might organize situated
science curricula such that scientific issues that are controversial, and embedded
with moral–ethical characteristics will be approached through augmentation or
socioscientific reasoning.
Under the SSI framework, “reasoning” is not meant to subjugate emotion, intuition,
or other forms of human knowledge and experiences. Reasoning is what we do
when we invoke a spectrum of thought – combining rationalistic, emotive, and
intuitive justifications and actions. Socioscientific reasoning is aligned with
Dewey’s (1916/1966) classical theory of American pragmatism despite some of the
limitations of how progressivism may be interpreted by some scholars as limited to
rejecting the old for the new (Bowers 2001). Progressivism is also thought of as
connecting the new with the old. Pragmatists generally believe there is a direct link
between thought and action, that existence and time are relational and fluid, thought
is ecosociocultural and historically contextual, and universal truths are problematic.
Pragmatists focus on their experiences and the experiences of others. Dewey
(1938/1963) used pragmatist philosophy to learn about the disconnections between
thought and action embedded in contemporary societal problems. He advocated
that teachers should share some of the responsibility for setting things right in soci-
ety. Pragmatism is a philosophy of becoming informed so that we can participate
more fully in the choices of the community including advocacy for affected others
who may otherwise be excluded (Zeidler 1984), including animals and plants
(Mueller 2009).
Similar to Dewey, SSI scholars (Zeidler et al. 2005) believe that socioscientific
reasoning involves the psychological and epistemological growth of the child; hence
it differs from science–technology–society (STS) approaches that do not typically
aim to develop moral characteristics or virtues. In contrast, socioscientific reasoning
purposefully elicits students’ moral–ethical commitments, personal values and
beliefs, and the use of evidence-based reasoning. With few exceptions, traditional
STS has not been interpreted as a way to develop moral–ethical character and func-
tional scientific literacy (Zeidler et al. 2005) in the science education literature.
Historically, for the most part, traditional science teaching corresponds to the notion
that science should not involve ethical, political, and social judgments.

Value Judgments

Universities may require new scientists to have some background in ethical inquiry
or Internal Review Board training, and some corporations require ongoing ethical train-
ing as part of the job. But consider additional cases where ethical reasoning is considered