Discussing controversial issues in the classroom

Discussion is widely held to be the pedagogical approach most appropriate to the exploration of controversial issues in the classroom, but surprisingly little attention has been given to the questions of why it is the preferred approach and how best to facilitate it. Here we address ourselves to both questions.We begin by clarifying the concept of discussion and justifying it as an approach to the teaching of controversial issues.We then report on a recent empirical study of the Perspectives on Science AS-level course, focusing on what it revealed about aids and impediments to discussion of controversial ethical issues

Towards a pedagogical framework for the teaching of controversial socio-scientific issues to secondary school students in the age range 14-19

Teaching controversial socio-scientific issues presents a significant challenge to teachers because these issues are often based on complex but tentative scientific evidence, and differences between contending parties reflect political, socio-economic and ethical considerations. This thesis aims to develop a realisable pedagogy, underpinned by a theoretical framework, to address such controversial issues. The framework draws on three separate but interwoven strands: McLaughlin’s formulation of nine ‘levels of disagreement’ which conceptualises controversy in a democratic and pluralistic society, the levels ranging from differences based on evidence to differences in worldviews; the ‘communicative virtues’ in which participants need to be schooled to support open dialogue; and Bruner’s ‘modes of thought’ in which protagonists in a controversy aim to convince their interlocutors through narrative and logico-scientific modes. This pedagogical framework operates through constructions of the school-society interface ranging from science as authoritative to science as negotiable. 83 teachers, from 21 different secondary schools and further education colleges in England and Wales, were interviewed about their experiences of teaching controversial socio-scientific issues. Empirical indicators drawn from the teachers’ narratives were mapped onto the framework to construct a picture of current pedagogy. Findings point to a need to support teachers in focusing on specific case studies, particularly those which draw on evidence and its associated logical procedures, to encourage teachers to explicitly draw on student narratives and to educate students in the communicative virtues. Opportunities and limitations are discussed in locating the teaching of controversial socio-scientific issues in the curriculum and in further characterising pedagogy and learning for future research

Teaching Evolution in Schools: A Matter of Controversy?

In a clip from YouTube Richard Dawkins says ‘Who cares about creationists? They don’t know anything’. Like Dawkins, I agree that creationism has nothing to offer as an explanation for the origins and diversity of life on this planet. Although I am not a professional biologist everything I have read and heard, including Darwin’s On the origin of species, has so far convinced me that evolution is a fact, and that while there are different explanations to account for evolution none have to date undermined it

Planning for Teaching and Learning Science

Being able to plan a lesson, a sequence of lessons or a whole course involves being able to construct, ahead of time, a set of events for yourself and 25 to 35 pupils. Learning to plan is an iterative process, where problems that arise as plans are put into action in the classroom, inform the planning process. There are guidelines which can be followed which help to minimise these problems. Nevertheless, you will find planning to be a time consuming part of your work, and you may not feel that you are planning with any degree of confidence until well into your course

Teaching Science Outside the Classroom

This chapter focuses on developing pedagogical support for helping students learn about controversial issues in the How Science Works section of the Science National Curriculum. It discusses how controversial issues can be defined, what is distinctive about their pedagogical demands, the knowledge and skills needed for discussing controversial issues, and exemplars of opportunities for exploring controversial issues in the context of How Science Works

SAQs as a Socio-Political Programme: Some Challenges and Opportunities

In this article I argue for the role that approaches such as Socially Acute Questions (SAQs) can play in confronting the STEM discourse in the curriculum. For SAQs and similar approaches to be effective in enacting issues of social justice educators need to take account of local political contexts, the ethical and political assumptions which underpin values appertaining to social justice, such as concepts of communalism and libertarianism, and democratic practise in the school classroom where the students become co-enquirers in generating knowledge which aims to improve material realities. This is not a straightforward but one that demands reflection and critique throughout the process

Integrating clinician and patient case conceptualization with momentary assessment data to construct idiographic networks:Moving toward personalized treatment for eating disorders

Eating disorders are serious psychiatric illnesses with treatments ineffective for about 50% of individuals due to high heterogeneity of symptom presentation even within the same diagnoses, a lack of personalized treatments to address this heterogeneity, and the fact that clinicians are left to rely upon their own judgment to decide how to personalize treatment. Idiographic (personalized) networks can be estimated from ecological momentary assessment data, and have been used to investigate central symptoms, which are theorized to be fruitful treatment targets. However, both efficacy of treatment target selection and implementation with ‘real world’ clinicians could be maximized if clinician input is integrated into such networks. An emerging line of research is therefore proposing to integrate case conceptualizations and statistical routines, tying together the benefits from clinical expertise as well as patient experience and idiographic networks. The current pilot compares personalized treatment implications from different approaches to constructing idiographic networks. For two patients with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, we compared idiographic networks 1) based on the case conceptualization from clinician and patient, 2) estimated from patient EMA data (the current default in the literature), and 3) based on a combination of case conceptualization and patient EMA data networks, drawing on informative priors in Bayesian inference. Centrality-based treatment recommendations differed to varying extent between these approaches for patients. We discuss implications from these findings, as well as how these models may inform clinical practice by pairing evidence-based treatments with identified treatment targets

Survival in the badlands: an exploration of disaffected students’ uses of space in a UK secondary school

This article considers the understandings of space and place amongst a group of disaffected students within an institution that had been in a state of flux over a number of years. The article explores ways in which students are positioned by institutions into specific spaces, ways in which they use those spaces to challenge authority and ways in which they appropriate both space and place to assert new, and often playful, identities. The authors consider the meanings of the spatial behaviour of students through notions of space and place as developed by Doreen Massey, with reference to a Foucauldian understanding of power. In some ways, the students might be perceived as being marginalised, victims of a hierarchical environment in which their status is low. Yet they also emerge as active agents, forging new interpretations of their surroundings and robust group identities, and reinforcing in-group relationships through spatial behaviour