Progression in Complexity Contextualizing Sustain

Authors: Beatriz BravoTorija MaríaPilar JiménezAleixandre

Publish Date: 2011/09/16

Volume: 42, Issue: 1, Pages: 5-23

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Abstract

Sustainable management of marine resources raises great challenges Working with this socioscientific issue in the classroom requires students to apply complex models about energy flow and trophic pyramids in order to understand that food chains represent transfer of energy to construct meanings for sustainable resources management through discourse and to connect them to actions and decisions in a reallife context In this paper we examine the process of elaboration of plans for resources management in a marine ecosystem by 10th grade students 15–16 year in the context of solving an authentic task A complete class N = 14 worked in a sequence about ecosystems Working in small groups the students made models of energy flow and trophic pyramids and used them to solve the problem of feeding a small community for a long time Data collection included videotaping and audiotaping of all of the sessions and collecting the students’ written productions The research objective is to examine the process of designing a plan for sustainable resources management in terms of the discursive moves of the students across stages in contextualizing practices or different degrees of complexity JiménezAleixandre Reigosa International Journal of Science Education 141 51–61 2006 understood as transformations from theoretical statements to decisions about the plan The analysis of students’ discursive moves shows how the groups progressed through stages of connecting different models between them and with the context in order to solve the task The challenges related to taking this sustainability issue to the classroom are discussedWork supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation code EDU200913890C0201 Beatriz Bravo’s work is supported by a Ministry of Education scholarship code BES200715075 The authors gratefully acknowledge the teacher and students who participated in the studyManagement of a bay A small town near Santa Cruz in Mexico was hit by a hurricane After it many people were homeless and their harvests destroyed and also most of their cattle was lost Currently the main resource that they have for surviving is a small bay where several fish populations exist for instance sardines herring and salmonYou are the team of a NGO which are sent there in order to help the people in the town to manage the bay so it provides them with food during several months Your objective in this task is to decide how to manage the bay in order to feed the population for as long time as possible In other words you need to arrange the most efficient way of using the fishing resources available and to elaborate a plan explaining how you would carry it out

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