The use of Cartography of Controversy within socioscientific issues-based education: students’ mapping of the badger-cattle controversy in England

This qualitative study examines the pedagogical potential that a Cartography of Controversy (CoC) approach has in enabling secondary school students to unravel the complexity of socioscientific issues and to communicate about them. The aim was to examine the types of knowledge and the ways in which students approached uncertainty when asked to explore the badger-cattle controversy in England using the CoC approach. A learning sequence focusing on mapping controversies was designed and implemented across three lessons. Data collected from the students’ cartographies and the audio-recordings of their group discussions during the mapping tasks showed that students were able to use scientific, economic, cultural, social, moral and political types of knowledge in their exploration of the controversy. Identifying tensions between different types of knowledge and becoming aware of their own uncertainties about the issue through posing and recording questions allowed students to identify where uncertainty existed within the SSI explored. The CoC approach allowed affordances for understanding the SSI depending on students’ framing of the task (familiarisation, exploration, consolidation) and on the cartography’s function as an observation, visualisation, and reflection tool at different stages of the learning sequence. Implications for further research and practice for developing students’ socioscientific reasoning are discussed.

本定性研究旨在探讨争议地图法（Cartography of Controversy，简称CoC）在中学教育中激发学生解构社会科学问题复杂性并就其进行交流的教育潜力。研究目标在于分析学生在运用CoC方法探索英国獾牛争议时，所运用的知识类型及其处理不确定性的方式。设计并实施了以争议地图绘制为核心的学习序列，贯穿三个教学课时。从学生的地图绘制作品及小组讨论的音频记录中收集的数据表明，学生在争议探索过程中能够运用科学、经济、文化、社会、道德和政治等多种知识类型。通过提出并记录问题，识别不同知识类型之间的张力，以及认识到自己对该问题的不确定性，学生能够明确在所探讨的社会科学问题（SSI）中不确定性的存在。CoC方法为学生提供了根据任务框架（熟悉化、探索、巩固）以及在不同学习序列阶段地图绘制功能作为观察、可视化和反思工具来理解SSI的便利。关于进一步研究和实践以发展学生社会科学推理能力的启示被广泛讨论。