Paper short abstract:

Introduces critical constructivist pedagogies as a remedy for the reasoning dilemmas of controversy based teaching.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents some teaching methods of the critical constructivist classroom to move beyond the controversy. Constructivism is the learning theory based on the idea that people create their knowledges. Critical constructivism is a learning theory and a social epistemology that moves beyond constructivism, integrating critical, reflexive, situated, performative, and ethical materials into a praxis, moving the students into a position where they both are creating their knowledge and critiquing the creation of their knowledge. They learn to recognize and acknowledge their own critical positionalities in the learning process. The science controversies to these students become matters of common sense instead of choices, contradictions, and challenges to beliefs.

The methods presented will be active learning exercises and workshops that allow students to both build and reflect on their building of this knowledge. They vary from term projects oriented in ethnographic methods or technology to single-class and multi-class exercises.

The exercise centers are students' praxis, working together in groups to apply theory through action. The exercises are: 'material semiotics and the semiotics of materiality,' in which students attempt to map their understandings of signs and the symbolic to their mechanical world, and 'technographies of transit,' in which students map their own transit experiences as an ethnographic project; and 'networks of art, cultural networks' in which students engage in a several week project to understand the networked structures of our world by examining art networks. These examples will help teachers understand the possibilities of the critical constructivist classroom for STS.