Emotional Sense-Making and Critical Thinking in the Era of Post-truth: The Case of Climate Change
Published: 2022
Publication Name: Critical thinking in biology and environmental education: Facing challenges in a post-truth world
Publication URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92006-7_3
Abstract:
How instructors attend to the intersection of school science and people’s identities, that span and cross school walls and boundaries (Aikenhead, 1996; Darner, 2019), have raised important questions about the permeability of classroom walls in science sense-making. In particular, uncertainty exists about how to teach science in an era when ideas that are substantiated and established in science communities are contested by policy makers, world leaders, and the general public. While this anti-science trend is not new, it has become more amplified and powerful in the current post-truth world in which social media use abounds. Critical thinking has been put forth as one tool “for confronting pseudoscience and credulity” (Jiménez-Aleixandre & Erduran, 2007, p. 8). Attending to critical thinking, though, invokes questions about how science teachers grapple with teaching science in ways to accurately represent scientific knowledge and practices while attending to students’ identities. What comes to the fore, then, are the emotions of the teachers and their students, and how teachers navigate critical thinking with respect to emotions. As such, the discussion of what counts as truth, as science, and as critical thinking is embedded in emotional relationships with epistemologies and identities.
Hufnagel, E. (2022). Emotional Sense-Making and Critical Thinking in the Era of Post-truth: The Case of Climate Change. In B. Puig & M. P. Jiménez-Aleixandre (Eds.) Critical thinking in biology and environmental education: Facing challenges in a post-truth world. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92006-7_3