"Misinformation" as Socioscientific Expertise in Student Podcast Development

• In Event: Using Storytelling as an Approach to Researching, Teaching, and Learning About Complex Community-Based Socioscientific Problems

Abstract

Objectives
Advancing socioscientific issues requires coordinated insight and expertise across a range of knowledge domains and stakeholders. Podcasting projects leverage story-based epistemologies to create opportunities for marginalized stakeholders to collaborate in problem solving as experts. We explore the role of “misinformation” in buttressing narratives that ultimately make valuable headway on complex socioscientific issues. We show that there are important junctures in which standards around knowledge and knowing can conflict with privileged forms of scientific understanding.

Perspective(s)
Engaging classroom experiences is essential for ensuring persistence in science education for middle-school aged students (Maltese & Tai, 2010). When such narrative engagement taps valued community funds of knowledge and identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014), learning can deepen students’ connections to communities and build cultural well-being (Immordino-Yang, Darling-Hammond, & Krone, 2018). However, understanding of complex issues is often based on imperfect combinations of knowledge across a range of sources. Even “incorrect” knowledge (Wells, 2008) in the form of spontaneous concepts (Vygotsky, 1987) is a viable means of problem solving in some forms of everyday understanding.

Methods
We examine podcasts from a short-term environmental podcasting collaboration between university students and educators from the US, and ecology professionals, teachers and students from partnering middle schools and community programs in Goa, India. School-age students worked with community members to make podcasts about locally relevant environmental issues.

Data
This paper focuses on critical incidents of factual inaccuracy in students’ podcasts. Thematic analysis of translated and transcribed podcasts is supplemented by project team notes and exit interviews.

Conclusions
We focus on “expert misinformation” from a student podcast on waterway pollution. Students report that decreased supply of fish in recent years (a) is the result of household pollution, and that demand is being met by fisherfolk (b) using chemicals to make inferior fish appear “bigger and tastier” at market. Both (a) and (b) function as key narrative anchors and were central to the stories they heard from community members; however, are likely scientifically false. In the podcast, a local scientist points out that overfishing, and perhaps not household pollution, is a key culprit of decreasing fish supply. Another local scientist points out that the intentional chemical contamination of fish was a source of considerable community speculation, but was likely isolated.

The “expertise” revealed in this story is an expression of community priorities – perhaps, the desire to continue consuming fish at levels that were accessible to households in the past. We describe a possible limitation of podcast and community storytelling in which “good stories” carry a requirement that problems are personified, which is not easy to do with aspects of some socioscientific issues. This misalignment of genre and fact creates narrative space that misinformation helps to fill.

Significance
Our findings describe how the flexibility of misinformation can reveal aspects of socioscientific issues that are “value hot spots” for community members. Epistemological and political divisions between school and communities often obscure the value of false facts, despite their ubiquity in all communities and ways of knowing that all people engage with worldwide.

Authors

• Andrew D Coppens, University of New Hampshire

• Sara Clarke-De Reza, Washington College