Epistemic practices and SSI approach with a focus on the explicit teaching of ethics and morals

Abstract

In this research we investigate epistemic practices that emerged in a teaching approach with socio-scientific issues (SSI) with a focus on ethical and moral reasoning. We analyzed the interactions of Chemistry teachers in initial training during the development of an activity on the "Consumption of animal meat". We identified the epistemic practices that emerged in the discussions from categories created a priori and a posteriori. In order to analyze the content of the undergraduates' justifications, we based ourselves on the relations between contingent and necessary in the field of ethics and on the tendencies of moral consideration of the ontological perspectives anthropocentrism and biocentrism. We conclude that the SSI approach and the opportunity to develop epistemic practices contributed to an expansion of the undergraduates' thinking about human actions beyond cultural relativism, and the understanding and differentiation of moral consideration tendencies. This article presents the intertwining between epistemic practices and SSI in an empirical way in a proposal of explicit teaching of ethics, bringing advances to the area of Science Education.