Does Pollution Only Affect Human Health? A Scenario for Argumentation in the Framework of One Health Education

Abstract

Schooling should equip citizens with the scientific knowledge necessary to make informed decisions about health problems arising from the current environmental crisis. Given the scarcity of educational proposals that integrate evidence-based argumentation, One Health education and complexity-based solution proposals, this study aims to introduce a scenario linking the use of pesticides in agriculture to infertility, and to analyse the extent to which it promotes students to apply these three approaches. The activity requires 10th graders to rank 6 cities from most to least polluted, using evidence on the reproductive problems of different organisms in the ecosystem (humans, harlequin flies). Moreover, students have to propose solutions to avoid the toxic risk caused by pesticides. Group discussions are analysed to determine learners’ performance in using evidence and formulating causal explanations to justify their rankings, as well as in proposing reasoned solutions, considering different perspectives. The results show that most groups rank cities as expected. Although they do not use all available evidence, the design of the activity encourages students to establish frequent causal relationships between human, animal, and environmental health data (argumentation integrating the One Health approach). Moreover, most solutions are palliative rather than preventive, respond to an anthropocentric interest, and their consequences are rarely assessed. In doing so, students only foresee their environmental or economic impact, but not their ethical or political consequences. Educational implications are discussed.