Western Kentucky University
Department of Physics and Astronomy

Colloquium

Dr. Scott Bonham

Department of Physics and Astronomy
Western Kentucky University

"Teaching Scientific Argumentation for the Future of Society"

February 12, 2024 @ 4:00 pm in KTH 2038 (Zoom ID: 93595838321)

Abstract

We are facing a crisis of scientific understanding. Socio-scientific issues (SSIs) such as climate change, vaccinations, energy sources, and more will greatly impact the future of our society, but there is widespread misunderstanding in our culture of how science works and the construction and evaluation of scientific arguments. It is imperative for those of us who teach science to prioritize educating future citizens--particularly non-science students—about the process of how science really works and how scientific truth is established through the construction and evaluation of scientific arguments. In this presentation, I will share the approaches that I have developed for addressing that need in two very different courses. In my conceptual physics course, I have integrated physics content with readings from historical scientists (Aristotle, Ibn al-Haytham, Newton, Hooke and Maxwell) to both illustrate the history of how selected scientific ideas developed and to teach basic elements of evaluating and constructing scientific arguments. I will then describe an upper level interdisciplinary general education course I have developed that tackles head-on socio-scientific issues including origins, climate change, and race in science and technology. In this course we first utilize the Galileo affair as a historical (and thus no longer controversial) case study to explore the interactions of different social, cultural and scientific facets of socio-scientific issues. We next study several contemporary issues, exploring the cultural history and paradigms, evaluating the science and critiquing arguments. Finally, students choose a contemporary socio-scientific issue to break down and then work to develop and present an evidence based scientific argument that takes into account the socio-cultural paradigms and divisions.