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Body talk: students’ identity construction while discussing a socioscientific issue

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Abstract

Vision II school science is often stated to be a democratic and inclusive form of science education. But what characterizes the subject who fits into the Vision II school science? Who is the desirable student and who is constructed as ill-fitting? This article explores discourses that structure the Vision II science classroom, and how different students construct their identities inside these discourses. In the article we consider school science as an order of discourses which restricts and enables what is possible to think and say and what subject-positions those are available and non-available. The results show that students’ talk about a SSI about body and health is constituted by several discourses. We have analyzed how school science discourse, body discourse and general school discourse are structuring the discussions. But these discourses are used in different ways depending on how the students construct their identities in relation to available subject positions, which are dependent on how students at the same time are “doing” gender and social class. As an example, middle class girls show resistance against SSI-work since the practice is threatening their identity as “successful students”. This article uses a sociopolitical perspective in its discussions on inclusion and exclusion in the practice of Vision II. It raises critical issues about the inherited complexity of SSI with meetings and/or collisions between discourses. Even if the empirical results from this qualitative study are situated in specific cultural contexts, they contribute with new questions to ask concerning SSI and Vision II school science.

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Notes

  1. The study is a part of a larger project on SSI in lower secondary school, ‘Science In a Societal Context’ (SISC, http://www.sisc.se) with the aim to understand how SSI can be used to increase students’ interest and learning in science. The project (2007–2010) has been funded by the Swedish Research Council. The research group, called SISC (Science in Social Contexts), consisted of Britt Lindahl and Maria Rosberg at Kristianstad University, Christina Ottander, Eva Silfver and Mikael Winberg at Umeå University, and Margareta Ekborg, Malin Ideland, Claes Malmberg and Agneta Rehn at Malmö University. The project has been conducted in three steps. In step 1, six SSI tasks were constructed. In step 2, these tasks were distributed to and carried out by 70 secondary school classes (1,488 students in school year 6–9) in different parts of Sweden. In step 3 a qualitative study was conducted. In this step six new classes worked with three different SSI tasks, and in connection to this we conducted an ethnographic fieldwork and focus group discussions. The data in this article comes from two classes studied in step 3.

  2. The task can be found on http://www.sisc.se, and the developing process of the tasks from an analytical framework is described in Ekborg, Ideland and Malmberg (2009).

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Acknowledgments

First we would like to thank the students and teachers who kindly let us take part in their work and made our focus group discussions possible. We also would like to thank our reviewers, Dr. Wayne Melville and Dr. Randy Spaid for very useful comments on an earlier draft. We also would like to thank our lead editor Dr. Michael Mueller for encouragement and relevant feedback. Finally we want to acknowledge Swedish Research Council which made the study possible through financial funding.

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  1. Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

    Malin Ideland & Claes Malmberg

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  1. Malin Ideland
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  2. Claes Malmberg
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Correspondence to Malin Ideland.

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Ideland, M., Malmberg, C. Body talk: students’ identity construction while discussing a socioscientific issue. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 7, 279–305 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-012-9381-7

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