De l’éducation à la vaccination à l’éducation aux controverses socioscientifiques

Abstract

Insisting on the scientific dimension of contemporary issues, Irwin (2001) calls scientific citizenship the possibility given to non-specialist citizens to intervene democratically in the choices of society in terms of techno-scientific innovations. This citizenship calls for an education whose modalities, such as the schooling of socio-scientific controversies, deserve to be questioned. In this chapter, we propose a model of scientific and political education approaches, and the examination of its potential to account for structured teaching-learning situations by the schooling of a socio-scientific controversy. This model is a multidimensional framework anchored in the typology of Levinson (2010). We use it to think about and analyze teaching situations around controversies via a Design experiment type approach. We analyze two biology sessions conducted with French students aged 13 to 15 (grade 4 in middle school). They discussed with their teacher the delicate question of vaccine hesitation, particularly sensitive in France, focusing on the case of the vaccine against the papillomavirus.

Keywords

• socioscientific controversies
• vaccination
• emancipating education
• didactic strategies
• controversies
• awareness