Environmental and sustainability issues are at the intersection of several interests, including academic, political, ethical and economical aspects (Sterling 2010). Socio-scientific issues inquiry may thus have an important potential for preparing students for civic participation. In civic education scientific argumentation will be but one of several means to a very different end than academic assessment. Towards this broader aim of educating for citizenship, scientific probation will be subordinate and civic deliberation will be dominant. The term 'deliberation' originally meant weighing on scales, and concerns choice of actions (Kock, 2007). Teacher education aiming at education for sustainable development (ESD) should integrate science topics with education for democratic citizenship (Huckle 2014). The position we propose is that the education of the citizen must aim at developing both knowledge and ability towards deliberative argumentation.

The topic of this presentation is analyses of high school student argumentation during groupwork on socio-scientific issues (SSI), and relevant teaching approaches. We will discuss conceptual and methodological issues and theory on argumentation (Toulmin 2003) related to complex contemporary SSI assignments. Our question is: Is promotion of academic probative argumentation apt to prepare students to participate in civic deliberation?

Studies of conceptual development have shown that students often struggle to understand science concepts and concepts used to express abstract thinking patterns (Wellington & Osborne 2001). Early studies of conceptual understanding have been important for later studies of students’ argumentation in science education. Abstract concepts concerning inferences, contrasts, comparisons and causalities are difficult to learn. Ideas about sequencing, chronology and causality are scarce in student talk. Contemporary analyses of argumentation often focus on understanding the science content, that is: on the analytical evidence based (probative) argumentation. In such studies Toulmin’s Argumentation Pattern (TAP) is used extensively to analyze student argumentation. Prominent researchers in science education and science teacher education, among them Osborne, Erduran and Jimenez-Aleixandre, have used such formal argumentation models in their analyses of student argumentation, as reported by Osborne (2010). In our presentation we will present our concerns about how argumentation models like TAP may fail to cover deliberative aspects of argumentation, and hence fail to integrate civic aspects into the teaching of SSI and ESD.

Erduran and Jiménez-Aleixandre (2012) have presented a definition of argumentation now commonly accepted normative in the community of science education research: “the evaluation of knowledge claims in the light of available evidence” (p. 254). Thus, what counts as «being scientific» in the classroom is regulated by probative norms (Knain, 2005). However, SSI inquiry cannot be reduced to the familiar sets of genres and norms deriving from the institutions of academic science, which have provided a fundament for generations of science teachers. SSI derive from rich public discourses, and is not bound to particular social institutions in any similar manner.

Analysis of student conversation may legitimately function as some sort of tool for assessing students’ skills, measured by norms for scientific understanding and probative argumentation. But students’ conversations also include social and situational aspects. On one hand, there is factual knowledge, concepts and content, and the truth-seeking argumentation about verification according to the standards of a scientific discipline. On the other hand, there is the tangle of societal issues: deliberative argumentation on choice to support informed decision-making, such as in contemporary sustainable development issues. Such deliberation concerns what counts as right, is relevant and carries weight (Kock, 2010). And then there is this: the student’s discussions are situated in school contexts. Their arguments are not only part of deliberative and rhetorical argumentation involving science issues and civic engagement, but also of a situational decision making process aimed at the school assignment.

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