How Do Biodiversity Researchers Reconcile Professional Knowledge and Personal Nature Experience?

An Attempt to Clarify Socioscientific Issues

Abstract

With respect to the Model of Educational Reconstruction, the clarification of science contents is usually done with the aim to identify basic ideas and representations. In the context of this study, we widened the scope of the scientific clarification, as we included biodiversity researchers’ personal nature experiences. The underlying assumption was that these experts seem to have established an individual relationship to biodiversity beyond their professional knowledge. We used group discussions to collect data and analysed it by coding steps of the Grounded Theory methodology. We reconstructed two different phenomena: dissociating both approaches and conciliating both approaches. According to the model, we also investigated students’ perspectives on biological diversity. For this purpose, we carried out group discussions with 18 adolescents. The data was also analysed qualitatively. Our findings show that students refer to scientific concepts as well as to subjective and emotional aspects, when they think of biodiversity. We finally compared the students’ perspectives with those of the experts and derived guidelines for teaching biodiversity.