From black and white to shades of grey

Abstract

Traditional school science has been described as focused on indisputable facts where scientific processes and factors affecting these processes become obscured or left undiscussed. In this article, we report on teachers' perspectives on the teaching of sociocultural and subjective aspects of the nature of science (NOS) as a way to accomplish a more nuanced science teaching in Swedish compulsory school. The teachers (N = 6) took part in a longitudinal study on NOS and NOS teaching that spanned 3 years. The data consists of recorded and transcribed focus group discussions from all 3 years. In the analysis, the transcripts were searched for teachers' suggestions of issues, relevant for teaching in compulsory school, as well as opportunities and challenges connected to the teaching of these issues. The results of the analysis show that (a) the number of suggested issues increased over the years, (b) teachers' ways of contextualizing the issues changed from general and unprecise to more tightly connected to socio-scientific or scientific contexts, and (c) the number of both opportunities and challenges related to NOS teaching increased over the years. The most evident changes occurred from the beginning of year 2 when the focus group discussions became more closely directed towards concrete teaching activities. Tensions between the opportunities and challenges are discussed as well as how these can be met, and made use of, in science teacher education.

Nature of Science for Social Justice: Why, What and How?

“…Zacharia and Barton 2004) and add perspectives and new questions to science education research. NOS scholarship challenges teaching traditions where science is taught merely as facts (Leden et al 2017), and where myths about science continue to be propagated (McComas 1998(McComas , 2020. It questions the image of science communicated as "sort [ing] things crisply into black and white, true and false, without any 'shades of grey,' partial conclusions or residual uncertainties" (Allchin 2003, p. 333).…”

“…It questions the image of science communicated as "sort [ing] things crisply into black and white, true and false, without any 'shades of grey,' partial conclusions or residual uncertainties" (Allchin 2003, p. 333). Thus, discussing issues about NOS in science classrooms challenges traditional science teaching not only due to incorporating new content, but also because of disputing those binary notions of true/false or black/white that are part of traditional school science, as different perspectives exist to approaching many NOS issues (see also Leden et al 2017). SJ literature, for its part, challenges traditional school science through visions that problematize many aspects of what characterizes traditional school science.…”

Establishing an everyday scientific reasoning scale to learn how non-scientists reason with science

“…Much of the learning focuses on content knowledge and skill development, and does not emphasize the nature of science, its complexity, and/or its uncertainties (Capps and Crawford, 2013). Furthermore, science in the classroom often does not relate to students’ experiences and interests outside of the classroom nor discuss ways in which science can be relevant and useful in everyday life (Leden et al, 2017). This makes the process of applying knowledge (both content and procedural) to daily contexts more complex and often unachievable.…”

Combining debates and reflective activities to develop students' argumentation on socioscientific issues

“…However, they did not come to integrate uncertainties about knowledge or future evolutions associated with the SSIs into their argumentation. This may be because students are rarely invited to discuss the limitations of scientific knowledge being taught in class (Leden et al, 2017; Lee et al, 2014), and are therefore not used to include uncertainties in their argumentation. Common science teaching practices tend to present scientific knowledge as truth that is stable and certain, what leads some students to develop a lack of tolerance for uncertainties (Lee et al, 2020).…”

“…Concerning the uncertainties norm, one study (Morin et al, 2014) found that students were able to integrate uncertainties related to future risks in their argumentation on an SSI, but this was for graduate students only. Another study pointed to the great difficulty that high school students encounter in incorporating knowledge uncertainties into their argumentation in science (Lee et al, 2014), which can be explained by the fact that teachers do not get them used to consider and discussing uncertainties in the science classroom (Leden et al, 2017); they may immediately reduce uncertainty when it rises in science activities (Chen et al, 2019). In the context of SSIs, some students even exhibit a lack of tolerance for uncertainties (Lee et al, 2020).…”