Forme scolaire, éducation aux sciences et pratique de la critique

Résumé

Les science studies ont permis de réintégrer les sciences dans le giron du social, en montrant notamment que ce que l'on entend par objets scientifiques correspond à des entités produites, scénarisées, travaillées par des acteurs multiples, dont l'avenir et la pérennité sont fonction de l'extension des réseaux qui en permettent la (re)production ou la mobilisation. Tout en mettant ainsi en évidence que le travail scientifique est traversé par des tensions, des conflits et des négociations que l'on imputait traditionnellement aux seules sciences ≪molles≫, ces travaux ont de plus montré que les objets ou entités qui surgissent des laboratoires peuvent étre source de nouveaux problèmes et de nouvelles incertitudes (telles les thérapies géniques), malgré leurs promesses et l'expertise dont ils procèdent. Du point de vue de l'éducation aux sciences, de telles considérations invitent à questionner la pertinence de la forme scolaire au sein de laquelle cette éducation s'accomplit, compte tenu que cette forme occulte allègrement tout ce qui contribue à faire des sciences un monde autre qu'un monde de savoirs achevés et disant ce qui est. Mais elles invitent aussi, si l'on souhaite aider les jeunes à mieux négocier cette performation du social par les sciences, à s'intéresser aux pratiques interprétatives de ces derniers, à leurs manières de concevoir les enjeux et les conflits qui sont consubstantiels au monde des sciences et à l'expertise qui s'en réclame. C'est ce dont traite cet article, suivant une perspective essentiellement illustrative. Ainsi, après avoir décrit comment un enseignant est amené, à son corps défendant, à reconduire la rhétorique scolaire habituelle sur les sciences, nous examinons quelques‐unes des manières par lesquelles dejeunes québécois du secondaire et du collège s'approprient les désaccords entre scientifiques et envisagent leur résolution.

Executive Summary

Science studies have served to bring science within the purview of the social, in particular by demonstrating that by scientific objects is meant entities that are produced, scripted, and worked out by numerous actors—entities, moreover, whose future and perpetuation stand in direct relation to the spread of the networks through which they may be (re)produced or mobilized. This research has, as a result, not only shown that scientific work is fraught with tensions, conflicts and negotiations that traditionally have been ascribed only to “soft” science; it has also shown that the objects or entities that emerge from laboratories may in turn generate new problems and uncertainties (such as gene therapies), notwithstanding their promises to the contrary or the expertise on which they are based. From the perspective of science education, such considerations raise questions about the relevance of the school embodiment of this education, particularly in light of how this embodiment expeditiously hides from view everything that contributes to making science a world that is different from that of wholly perfected knowledge declaring what actually is the case. However, if the goal is to aid young people to more ably negotiate the configuration of social practices through science, these considerations also prompt one to take a closer look at students’ interpretive practices, as well as at their ways of conceiving of the set of issues and conflicts that are of a piece with the world of science and the expertise deriving its authority there from. Such, in short, is the subject of this article, which has been developed from an essentially illustrative perspective.

We begin by sketching the backdrop to our comments—to wit, that in the classroom, the problematization of science alluded to above has only met with a timid, local reception. Thus, despite the calls for change by numerous observers of the education scene, the transformation of curricula has most often assumed the form of an updating of the concepts to be taught, in conformity with the affinities of the individuals consulted, who hail from precisely the system of experts from whom, hopefully, youth could be encouraged to establish a critical distance (Fenshman, 2002). The situation is scarcely any more subversive where the teachers are concerned—not that they are entirely unaware of the world of tensions and negotiations in which scientific knowledge is produced or of the agonistic character of the interactions occurring between researchers and laboratories. Rather, in their view, such features would attest to bad science, or biased science that has been contaminated by individual interests, which, fortunately enough, do not cause any long‐term harm to the phenomenon of science production. Thus, they tend to teach according to the way they were taught, in deference to the same professional mystique that casts science as a body of knowledge declaring what actually is the case. Nevertheless, this mystique can occasionally become quite cumbersome, as is suggested by the classroom episode we comment on in this article. It is a cumbersome mystique for a teacher dealing with his soccer‐loving students who, accordingly, are well aware that soccer balls fail to obey the uniform, linear movement which, according to the dictates of science, such spheres are supposed to travel along; he thus has no other choice but to impose the Newtonian view on the subject and to tell his students that learning this view will come in handy some day, particularly if they pursue study in science. It is also cumbersome for the students, who are forced to keep mum about their knowledge and relegate this disagreement to the domain of the un‐reflected—which is not to mention that they have thus been deprived of the opportunity, on the one hand, of refining their practices of criticism and, on the other, of gaining access to another approach to des manières de faire des mondes ('worldmaking'), to borrow N. Goodman's (1992) term of choice.

What happens after suffering this system for several years? How will young people be able to use this vision of science as a basis for mobilizing practices of criticism and participating, for example, in debates in which scientific knowledge is the subject of controversy among researchers?

The second portion of our article presents a number of ways in which young people enrolled in the Quebec secondary system appropriated the disagreements between scientists and conceived of approaches to solving them. Generally speaking, the students readily grappled with such situations, although some manifested a certain perplexity over the idea that two scientists (or groups of scientists) • could arrive at opposite conclusions after studying the same phenomenon. It was apparent that they brought into play a variety of discursive resources and rhetorical procedures to justify their comments. They deployed the competencies required in the performance of criticism, particularly in the form of a reserve toward scientists, whereby they came to acknowledge that scientists’ approaches to discussion bore a family resemblance with their own manner of debating. However, once the subject of the discussion was no longer how to explain the disagreement but, indeed, how to solve it, the school rhetoric of science and the attendant empiricist repertoire reasserted its predominance. The students thus believed that being at the same place at the same time to observe the same thing constituted the conditions that would put an end to the debate and ensure that scientists would come to an agreement over the state of the climate—namely, the climate is warming or is not warming, as will be attested to, and indeed prescribed by the data!

However, over the course of their discussions, some groups discovered, with no little astonishment, the extent to which their comments were moulded by the school vision of science and, further, how knowledges are presented according to this approach, which accords no consideration to the scripting of scientific objects or, obviously, to a range of alternative scenarios.