Abstract
In this article, we argue that students’ unfolding discourse on socio-scientific issues (SSI) can be fruitfully analyzed by using dialogical theories of language and communication (Bakhtin 1986; Linell 2009). While research in science education often reports on how individual reasoning changes when bringing SSI into the classroom, we argue for the relevance of analyzing how the individual is “in dialogue” with present as well as remote interlocutors and contexts on the internet. We suggest that the analytical approach is particularly sensitized to illuminate how students’ handle multiple perspectives. A dialogical perspective takes as its premise that SSI are part of society, where politicians, interest groups, and scientists engage in debates and offer perspectives that are often in conflict. Rather than assuming that the individual student is the primary unit for analysis, a dialogical approach is premised on an analysis that incorporates several perspectives and voices—a multivocality that also resides with the individual. Arguing for the relevance of this analytical approach to studies of SSI in the classroom, we analyze a group of students in upper secondary school as they discuss hydraulic fracturing after having worked with online data. The results illuminate how students discursively manage multivocality and multimodality inherent in the following SSI online. We describe a set of discursive means that the students use to handle the many perspectives involved when communicating about the issue. In addition, we describe and articulate what kind of communicative competences that are involved and, hence, could be cultivated through education, when engaging in public debates.
Highlights
This study aims to contribute to our understanding of how upper secondary school science students handle uncertainties and differences of opinion regarding issues generated by technoscientific innovations as they are performed on the Internet
Studies of socio-scientific issues (SSI) are predominantly derived from analytical traditions that presuppose that knowledge is transmitted through language and where single-student utterances are understood to be indicators of what they believe
Our argument here is that consideration of voices when students are engaged in communicative projects can offer a more nuanced understanding of how students are in dialogue with and engage in managing multiple discourses on SSI
Summary
While the introduction of SSI in schools has typically emphasized the exploration and appropriation of different scientific forms of reasoning and attention to ethical considerations to support individual decision-making (Sadler 2011; Nielsen 2013a, b), the engagement with controversy mapping provides alternative routes to engage with socio-scientific issues. The aim of the latter is to train students in exploring and visualizing socio-scientific controversies online through the use of these digital tools (Venturini 2010a, b). We investigate how students navigate the discursive complexity of an issue through dialogue, making multiple voices present in their discourse
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