Science as a human endeavour.

Science and technology contribute to finding solutions to a range of contemporary issues; these solutions may impact on other areas of society and involve ethical considerations (VCSSU090)

Biological Sciences.

Interactions between organisms can be described in terms of food chains and food webs and can be affected by human activity (VCSSU093)

- researching examples of human impacts on specific ecosystems

Learning Intentions:

For students to engage in the process of scientific knowledge used in a community-based dilemma. This will allow students to bring their knowledge of previous topics and involve it in the process of critical thinking. As a result, students will have a deeper understanding of the complexities of a scenario. This will hopefully leave to the ability to evaluate and learn about other perspectives and learn why it is important to keep bias out of certain decisions and science.

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Teacher Input:

You must facilitate the debate and the classroom layout. The layout and all information on how to run the debate can be found in the document below. It is important to establish rules for the debate with the students beforehand. Get students to come up with them and write them down somewhere that the students can see. Your role in the debate is to monitor and make sure the content is on topic and the arguments don’t become personal.  

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Resources:

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Key Outcomes:

By the end of this module, students will be able to

     -critically assess literature for it's reliability and usefulness

     -work collaboratively to create a persuasive argument

     -respectfully listen to others and produce debate rules as a class

     -investigate how research could be used in a real-life setting, where it would be used to inform councils and support agendas

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Assessment:

At the end of the debate students will be assessed by an exit pass. The assessment will be short but will help consolidate the critical thinking element not only the content.

The following questions make up the "exit pass", these could be written on the board or sent to students.

 

1. Which party had the more convincing argument and why?

2. Consider your own bias, did your view change after seeing another perspective?

3. Why is it important for council members and scientists to be neutral in this scenario?