Students' recognition of educational demands in the context of a socioscientific issues curriculum

Abstract

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of different forms and demands of knowledge and discourses typified by Science-in-Context initiatives, such as within the socioscientific framework, exemplifies this development in science education. Here, the diffuse boundaries between school subjects and other silos of knowledge lead to considerable difficulties for students to interpret what is expected from them. Such contexts having diffuse boundaries between, for example, subject discourses and other forms of knowledge, have been describes as contexts with weak classification. The present study aims to explore students' interpretation of what knowledge or meaning they are requested to produce in contexts with weak classification, here exemplified within an SSI-task. We use Bernstein's concepts of recognition rules and classification to analyze how 15to 16-year-old students develop their discussions in groups of 4-6 students. This study reports how students' recognition of the educational demands enabled integration of different discourses in their discussion, and that the use of both universalistic and particularistic meanings can produce new understandings. Students who had not acquired recognition rules were found to keep discourses apart, expressed either as rejection of the relevance of the task, answering questions as in a traditional school

Examining tensions in the socioscientific issues classroom: Students' border crossings into a new culture of science

“…In related research (Chistenson, Chang‐Rundgren, & Zeidler, ), social science majors were able to generate more justifications of arguments during discourse over science majors to SSI issues related to those used in the present study suggesting that the inherent nature of the discipline background contributed to the students degree of flexibility in discussing less structured types of issue. This is consistent with the idea that strong classification of traditional school discourse is more prevalent in cultures of science classroom learning while weak classification tends to be more accessible to social science cultures where border crossings of discipline silos tends be exercised with greater ease (Bernstein, ; Lindahl et al, ). The present study confirms those findings as we aimed to explore the tensions that might arise when a more progressive approach like SSI was introduced into traditional science classrooms and to provide instructional suggestions for SSI classes.…”

“…In summary, SSI classes require a more progressive instructional atmosphere to contend with the myriad of SSI of everyday life. (Lindahl et al, ; Zeidler, Applebaum et al, ). We expect that such tensions and phenomenon that may arise in SSI classes can serve as instructional cues, helping science teachers facilitate change not only to how students structure the formation of epistemological beliefs, but also in the formation of their attitudes about science and science learning.…”

“…Such changes often bring challenges not only to teachers, but also to students who have been conditioned to receiving traditional lecture‐based instruction. Students may tend to avoid participating, particularly without prompting or facilitation, in such discourse, or they present indifferent or ambivalent attitudes (Chang & Lee, ; Lindahl, Folkesson, & Zeidler, ). Although SSI can play a role as a good strategy to promote peer interactions, stimulate reasoning, and construct shared social knowledge, some students may experience initial difficulties when transitioning into a community of SSI discourse.…”

“…Although SSI can play a role as a good strategy to promote peer interactions, stimulate reasoning, and construct shared social knowledge, some students may experience initial difficulties when transitioning into a community of SSI discourse. Lindahl et al () explained that the transition from traditional classroom structures into SSI classroom environments may be hampered, at times, by the inability, resistance, or lack of opportunity for students to acquire cognitive recognition rules with respect to the educational demands that signal a shift in terms of what are fundamentally different discourses expected in each educational context. Hence, students who have become complacent in teacher‐centered learning environments, where learning outcomes have been relegated to the authority of teachers and textbooks, develop a dependence on only the non‐normative components of science.…”

New directions in socioscientific issues research

“…That sociocultural perspectives as those advocated in the SSI framework has to be at best, inferred and not explicitly addressed by initiatives such as A Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) or the Next Generation Science Standards (2013) in the US, suggests to us that other global initiatives not look to the US as the "Gold Standard" for progressive frameworks (Zeidler, 2014;Zeidler, 2016;Zeidler et al, 2016). In the absence of explicit sociocultural approaches to science education, these past (and even current) trends have, at times, produced tensions between more traditional essentialist expectations and specializations found in discrete discipline "silos" of science and the kind of normative discourses and cross curricular connections typically encouraged in progressivist pedagogy (Bossér & Lindahl, 2019;Elgström & Hellstenius, 2011;Lindahl, Folkesson, & Zeidler, 2019).…”