Abstract
ABSTRACTWhat are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class. This teaching innovation, called controversy mapping, has been pioneered in different contexts of higher education before being adapted to school education. Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issues-based science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry.
Highlights
Controversy analysis was central to the growth and consolidation of science and technology studies (STS) as an interdisciplinary field of academic endeavour
What are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class
Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issuesbased science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry
Summary
Controversy analysis was central to the growth and consolidation of science and technology studies (STS) as an interdisciplinary field of academic endeavour. Over many decades such analysis has developed into a significant range of different approaches all of which are united in their ambition to re-envision the dynamics of science and technology (Pinch, 2015). Starting in the early 1970s, a bold new sociology of science emerged dedicated to studying scientific knowledge as ‘constitutively social all the way into its technical core’ Promulgating the socially situated nature of all scientific and technological knowledge claims, the new sociology of scientific knowledge famously adopted the ‘symmetry principle’ as a methodological guideline arguing that the same types of analyses and explanations should be applied to successful and unsuccessful M.
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