A challenge for teachers is to invite students to, for them, relevant activities when dealing with complex and emerging issues in sustainability education. In this study, we will present findings from a project with the aim to gain knowledge about teaching antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how teaching in science can support the development of students’ knowledge as well as their competence to make decisions based on the subject knowledge, values and different priorities (Mogensen & Schnack, 2010). AMR is emerging as a significant sustainability challenge and one of the greatest threats to global health. Action is required on many levels in society to prevent the development of AMR. Both UN’s sustainable development goals (§26), as well as WHO’s goals in the Global Action Plan on antimicrobial resistance (WHO, 2015) give prominence to education as a means in handling AMR, in order to support awareness and promote the development of responsible habits. AMR is a complex and multi-sectoral challenge. Teaching about AMR can thus be framed as a socio-scientific issue (SSI), which implies that consideration of different perspectives such as ethical, social, ecological, medical, technical or economic perspectives is needed to enable students to take action and make well-founded decisions. In forming and researching teaching, we build on Dewey’s principle of continuity (1938/1997), which points to the importance of letting the teaching form continuity to the students’ past experiences and focusing on the interplay between the individual and the environment. According to Dewey (1938/1997), meaning is created from the different experiences that individuals make in transaction with the surrounding environment. The dynamic interplay between students’ prior experiences (what stands fast) and the environment (different encounters) becomes visible as students create relations between what stands fast for them and what is new in the situation. This theoretical approach, based on Wittgenstein’s (1953/1997) first-person perspective on language, is operationalised in the analytical method Practical Epistemological Analysis, PEA (Wickman & Östman, 2002). Through PEA it is possible to create empirically grounded knowledge on what affects students privileging and learning. We use the approach of didactic modelling (Wickman, Hamza & Lundegård, 2020) in planning and developing teaching that handle complex situations and challenges. Models are developed for specific purposes and take into account certain questions that teachers may seek answers to regarding content or methods (Wickman et al., 2020). Students may also encounter ‘problematic situations’ (Dewey, 1929) in teaching when they meet the content of AMR, where the teacher has an important role in giving students direction for what to pay attention to (Lidar, Lundqvist & Östman, 2006). We will work to gain knowledge about challenges in the teaching and learning of competence to make decisions based on the subject knowledge, values and different priorities in relation to AMR and how didactic models can be used and developed in order to design teaching that favours students´ meaning making. The following research questions will be used:

1. What aspects do students’ discern in discussions including valuation and decision making concerning when antibiotics could be used?

2. How can knowledge about the above aspects be used to support students’ competence to make decisions based on subject knowledge as well as on values and different priorities?

This study is part of a collaboration project between researchers and two biology teachers at two different lower secondary schools. In the collaboration included lessons were designed, analyzed, re-designed and tried out in cycles, where the previous intervention became the origin for the next. The teaching in the study was planned to contain authentic situations that would face students with complex issues concerning AMR, in order to give them opportunities to participate in deliberative conversations. The data collection was made at two occations in 2019-2020 and consists of recordings of lessons from two classes in grade 7 and 8, with 20-25 students in each class. 4 lessons in each class were video and audio recorded. The analyses in this paper focus on a task where students are interacting with the teacher in discussions about leftover antibiotics, which engage students with different perspectives such as social, economic and ethical perspectives. Group discussions, lasting about 10 minutes, followed by a joint discussion in the whole group, were transcribed and analysed. The analysis were made in two steps: firstly, Practical Epistemological Analysis (PEA) was used to to obtain a detailed description of the meaning making process including valuation and decision making. Secondly, we identify regularities and patterns in the students' discussions, what is included and excluded in the discussions and how didactic models can support students in participation in meaning-making processes in relating to for example ethical, social, economic, ecological and medical perspectives of AMR.

In the combination of didactical models and teachers experience about issues in teaching, the models can become useful in supporting and providing students with capacity and coping strategies for taking actions in handling socioscientific issues. The models can also support teachers and researchers challenges in designing teaching for supporting students’ ability to deal with different perspectives of complex issues. Firstly, the results initially show ‘problematic situations’ in students’ encounters with different perspectives about AMR in an authentic situation about leftover antibiotics. Their discussions concern mostly issues about what type of bacteria that the specific antibiotics can treat, the amount of antibiotics needed to treat an individual or the fact that the antibiotics might be old. Secondly, the results show that ethical perspectives, which we expected to be included in the discussions, were not present to such an extent. This results call for further development of a model that can support students’ participation in meaning-making processes relating to ethical, social, economic, ecological and medical perspective. Historically the SSI tradition is founded in the interaction between nature, technology and society (Aikenhead, 1994) but concerns also moral and ethical values (Zeidler, Sadler, Simmons & Howes, 2005). In order to contribute to research about SSI in science education, this study presents results related to students’ learning of AMR and how teaching can be developed to create conditions for learning of subject knowledge as well as values and priorities.

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