Socioscientific Issues in Science Education

In this thesis, we emphasize a vision of science education that integrates critical perspectives, situating science within the social, political, and ethical context. Broadly, we synthesize theoretical perspectives that support this position and employ them to critically examine the national science curriculum documents related to science education and the higher secondary biology textbook (chapters 2 and 3). Furthermore, we report on exploratory empirical work conducted with higher secondary biology students as they engage with a controversial socioscientific issue (chapters 4 and 5). In chapter 6, we argue that critical science education should persist in higher education and review initiatives in higher education that articulate this need. Here, we employ the example of genetic determinism and its potential to help students understand science within a sociopolitical context to further develop our ideas on critical, contextualized science education.

This thesis fits broadly within the field of critical studies in science education. As Bazzul (2016) states, "The goal of a critical scholar (of science education) is to render what seems commonsensical, strange." This interpretation challenges mainstream science education, critically questions the science curriculum, the ideological assumptions underpinning it, and proposes alternatives (Bazzul, 2013; Bencze & Carter, 2011; Carter, 2005; Cross & Price, 2002; Hodson, 2003; Raveendran & Chunawala, 2013). Research in this area, as described by Levinson (2013), "embraces feminist, post-colonial, critical pedagogy agendas and broadly aims to interrogate the representations of science education in a social world distorted by late capitalist and neo-liberal economics" (p.113). The theoretical perspectives informing this research area derive from various fields, including philosophy of science, educational philosophy, sociology of science, science studies, sociology of education, and Science-Technology-Society (STS) studies, among others. These perspectives have been operationalized in empirical investigations involving students and teachers (Bencze, Sperling & Carter, 2012; Levinson, 2007; Roth & Lee, 2004).