Page 138 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

8 Moral–Ethical Character and Science Education 115

potential threats to positions and counter-positions, and form rebuttals” (p. 212).
They recommend that science teachers encourage students to explore their inspira-
tions, assumptions, and the implications of their value systems by following these
suggested guidelines of SSI pedagogy:
Teachers may accomplish these tasks by (a) highlighting the significance of argumentation
in scientific and socioscientific contexts, (b) providing opportunities for students to engage
in these argumentation practices, (c) emphasizing the connections between science and
morality especially with respect to SSI, and (d) scaffolding students efforts to engage in
critical reflection of their own positions and argument patterns as well as those of their
peers (p. 213).
What teachers select as moral–ethical implications to highlight for their students
will depend on their preparedness for ethical inquiry. Often teachers design lessons
and curriculum with the notion of “backward design,” that is, starting with the end
in mind. In other words, when addressing students’ value systems, science teachers
need to know what is important to highlight and what to pay more attention to.
Related to this idea is whether or not teachers should be value-neutral. Often
teachers say that they must be “value-neutral” in the classroom. While this stance
seems, at first blush, appropriate for beginning SSI pedagogy, it is not feasible
under the umbrella of Dewey’s pragmatic progressivism. Concomitant with scien-
tific practices already mentioned, the teacher cannot avoid ethical, political, and
social judgments when working with SSI and reasoning. Teachers share some of the
responsibility for facilitating and guiding SSI and students’ reasoning, which
means that they should help their students to make value judgments and confront
disparities for affected peoples, plants, animals, and the environment. This means
that educators will need to help their students to be aware of their own inspirations,
assumptions, ethical values, and the implications of their actions. While one might
argue that students are impressionable and they will be easily influenced by their
teachers, this argument is not defensible considering how teachers are involved
with SSI and reasoning for longer periods of time than students. Society expects
teachers to have this degree of experience when working with youth to become
informed such that they participate more fully in local decisions. To ask teachers to
be value-neutral appears to contradict the aspects of SSI that make it an appropriate
and significant context for developing moral–ethical character and functional
scientific literacy. Functional scientific literacy then becomes one of participatory
socioscientific reasoning around issues, where teachers and students collaborate
with a full spectrum of knowledge, skills, and learning experiences, which are
inseparable from the community. In other words, ethics play larger roles in reason-
ing when diversity is acknowledged, which aligns with why science teachers ought
to be prepared for ethical inquiry in their classrooms. Teaching with ethics requires
awareness and understanding of students’ interests as well as their larger communi-
ties and ecosystems. The pedagogical value implication here is that teachers should
share some responsibility for local actions. This is the place where functional
scientific literacy merges with Dewey’s progressive pragmatism.
The next section will further demonstrate through the SSI topic of GloFish, the
process of guiding socioscientific reasoning. In the same way that scholars (Zeidler