Facilitating Learning of Socio-scientific Issues through An Adaptive Critical Pedagogy Module

This study explores Grade 9 students' engagement with microplastic pollution as a socio-scientific issue (SSI) using a critical pedagogy approach in Mumbai, India.Through a two-day workshop involving Foldscope microscopes, students transitioned from limited initial engagement to active, inquiry-driven exploration.Analysis highlights the influence of cultural contexts and the potential of critical pedagogy to enhance understanding and critical thinking about SSI.Recommendations for culturally adaptive, scaffolded, and sustained pedagogical interventions are discussed. SSI and microplastic pollution: Context settingMicroplastic (MP) pollution has emerged as a complex socio-scientific issue (SSI), intersecting environmental, public health, and socio-political domains.Nuanced understanding of SSI requires critical pedagogical practices that help learners identify problems embedded in their everyday lives by carefully examining, reflecting and establishing its inter-connections with seemingly unrelated aspects of broader elements.This perspective is aligned with broader goals of scientific literacy that stress moral and ethical reasoning in scientific decisionmaking (Sadler, 2004), and the relevance of contextualized science learning (Eastwood et al., 2012).Socioscientific issues require not only scientific reasoning but also moral and cultural judgment (Zeidler & Nichols, 2009), making them especially relevant to learners from diverse socio-cultural contexts. Research design, method, and analysisThis is a qualitative study based on classroom engagement, observation and intervention among 16 Grade 9 students (9 girls, 7 boys) from a School located in a slum area of Mumbai, India.Data includes multiple videos captured through multiple cameras, audio recordings of facilitator-student conversations, and detailed ethnographic observations of school surroundings and transcriptions of interactions with students.Data were analyzed through interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), employing the Jeffersonian transcription method, allowing nuanced capture of conversational dynamics, speech patterns, gestures, and non-verbal engagement.Keeping critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework, transcripts were carefully coded, identifying shifts from passive to active engagement, conversational hesitations, peer interactions, and responses to facilitator strategies.These analytical practices provided clear evidence of how students navigated through the intervention and how their responses related to their socio-cultural context.