Abstract:

Socio-scientific Issues (SSI) are potentially a useful teaching area for enhancing learning. It can motivationally promote socially embedded nature of science topics through controversial issues, thus promoting students’ argumentation skills, decision making skills, societal values, personal development as well as economic considerations. With the growing intention to develop active and informed citizenry worldwide, SSI have the potential to promote very meaningful educational skills among the students, teacher ownership of a social scientific relationship is an important field to study and seek ways to promote. This study is intended to serve the purpose to seek teacher opinions and conceptualizations in this specific area with a view to understand their ownership towards using SSI to promote an active informed citizenry.

Relating science education to social aspects, especially where these are familiar or of interest to students, is seen as an important development in education. Within this, SSI are potentially a useful teaching area. Over the years, SSI incorporated other components under its umbrella. In fact, the real significance of SSI could be suggested as arising through involving students in putting forward informed opinions. These opinions, perhaps leading to beliefs, were based on an appropriate conceptualization of the related science, to seek to resolve issues incorporating a range of society factors, seeing this form of enhanced scientific literacy as promoting a more informed citizenry.
To explore the feasibility in real situation, the study puts forward one research question:
1.How far teachers aspire the possibilities of using SSI to promote future citizenry?

The concept of SSI was developed as a bridge between science and its interactions within the society. This provided a potential way forward to address a science education dilemma, meaningfully expressed through two visions of the meaning of scientific literacy, but soundly integrated by recognizing the importance of a wider vision of learning within science education and the need to link science education for all to the promoting of responsible citizenship and science-related careers.

In order to get maximise variation in responses, volunteering teachers were chosen from those:
(a) highly experienced teachers having prior involvement in in-service course,
(b) teachers who recently completed pre-service courses,
(c) recently graduated teachers and
(d) experienced teachers without any involvements in projects or in-service courses.

Teachers were interviewed for approximately 30 minutes using a semi-structured interview guideline based on open-ended questions. Samples were chosen purposefully to identify and select potentially ‘information-rich cases related to the phenomenon of interest’ which, in this case, related to teacher involvement in implementing SSI in the classroom.

The questions were categorised into six segments, seen as helping the interviewer to conceptualise details of the teacher’s teaching perspective in these four categories were:
1. Developing decision making abilities in a SSI (able to know, able to communicate)
2. Establishing values (able to be, self-determination)
3. Enabling personal growth (cognitive, dispositions and psychomotor): (able to do, able to feel) and
4. Enhancing economic development (career orientation, society cohesion, sense of community, able to interact with others).

The findings represent significant results for discussion.

Keywords:

Classroom Discourse, Socioscientific Issues, Teacher Preparation.