Tan, Aik-Ling

Biological knowledge for citizenship rests at the nexus of two important concepts -scientific literacy and citizenship education. Scientific literacy, the ability to make sense of and hence decisions related to scientific issues, operates under the broad construct of citizenship. Citizenship education is defined by UNESCO as "educating children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in decisions concerning society". As society moves further into the 21st century, many of the challenges facing 'sustainable societies' require scientifically literate citizens to participate at multiple societal levels. At the international level, many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the world community have a scientific grounding in biology. This suggests that global citizenship education must take cognizance of biological knowledge. Through the theoretical lens of scientific literacy, pressing biological issues of food security, nutrition, biodiversity decline, and climate change are discussed in the chapter, making explicit the importance of biological knowledge for responsible global citizenship. These issues affect citizens at the community and individual levels through decisions linked to matters like food waste, diet, body mass index, and choice of food. Various learning approaches have been used to incorporate these matters into science curricula, such as through real-world learning.

Science as a field of study is defined by epistemic practices of questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising scientific knowledge. These epistemic practices shape the kinds of talk in the classroom as scientific knowledge is “talked into being”. The question that we aim to answer with this chapter is “What is the unique function and role of dialogue in learning science epistemic practices?” Discourse analysis is a means to analyse scientific talk to review the mechanisms and patterns through which scientific knowledge is learnt. As such, to develop our argument, we first delve into the theoretical underpinnings based on a sociocultural perspective of dialogue in science education. This is followed by a review of empirical studies in science education that focusses on talk in four key science epistemic practices of questioning, science inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge. The review provides evidence of dialogue as fundamental to both the enactment and learning of science epistemic practices by scientists and science students. We included a discussion about the way forward for dialogue in science and STEM education research.