Interhemispheric Science Preservice Teacher Collaborations: Struggles Toward Political Conceptions of, and Actions on, Socioscientific Issues

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: Preservice Science Teaching

Abstract

This paper describes a collaborative project between two science teacher preparation programs, one in Canada and the other Australia, that explored how student teachers developed plans to incorporate socioscientific issues into their own teaching. This involved students in each setting describing issues of SSI-based activism of concern to them, and their pedagogical plans for their issues. They shared critique and comment through a purpose built wiki. The results showed that the project was a novel way to address SSI issues, with the inter-hemispheric boundary created helping to deepen student teachers’ understandings particularly in the controversies inherent to issues. Understanding student teachers approaches to socioscientific activism is important to help create science education contexts working for a more socially just world.

Authors

• Lyn Catherine Carter, The Australian Catholic University

• John Lawrence Bencze, OISE/University of Toronto