Students’ Social Studies Influences on Their Socioscientific Actions

Abstract

Many jurisdictions have urged educators to engage students in decision-making regarding socioscientific issues, such as debates about human uses of fossil fuels as contributions to climate change. Scholars argue, however, that students also need to take social actions—such as lobbying of power-brokers—to address issues. Experience indicates, however, that such a tack in formal schooling often meets structural barriers—such as tendencies to teach and assess/evaluat e pre-determined knowledge claims generated by the sciences. There is, nevertheless, evidence to suggest that student motivation to act can be enhanced when—based on use of the ‘STEPWISE’ curriculum and pedagogical framework—they self-direct research into relationships among fields of science and technology and societies and environments, results of which they use to inform their actions. In the study reported here, we added to such findings, suggesting—based on constant comparative analyses of qualitative data based on constructivist grounded theory—that students’ local social (correlational) studies influenced motivation for and foci of their socio-political actions. A particularly noteworthy finding appeared to be that commitment to student-directedness of the teacher involved in our study seemed to lead students to enhance their quantitative data with qualitative findings. These, in turn, appeared to contribute to students’ motivations to take social actions to bring about a better world. Implications for promotion of socio-political activism through school science are discussed.