“I think It Would Just Go Over Their Heads”: An Exploration into Teachers’ Developmental Views of Elementary Students’ Learning about Socioscientific Issues.

The children of today are destined to inherit a future marked by insurmountable environmental and societal challenges. To cope, students need to be adequately prepared to become active citizens, equipped with vital knowledge, skills, and motivation to understand and make informed decisions about these challenges. While conversations surrounding the incorporation of socioscientific issues (SSI) in the classroom have been ongoing, a gap remains in understanding how to introduce them at the primary (Grades 1 to 3) level. Guided by the SSI theoretical framework and underpinned by theories of child development, this article explores one element of a larger research study which, in part, assessed how elementary teachers’ understanding of child development influenced their SSI teaching practice. The findings examined the qualitative phase of the broader mixed-methods study, in which 10 primary teachers from Ontario, Canada participated in semi-structured interviews. Collectively, these teachers indicated a strong concern that primary-aged students were not capable of learning SSI. Further, they demonstrated a rhetoric-practice cognitive dissonance through inconsistency in their declared beliefs in students’ abilities and their teaching practice. Educators, in one sense, were aligned with developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists who recognized the value of complex science-based learning experiences, while in another described elements of a current child’s developmental stage as a barrier. Informed by these findings, to support both in- and pre-service teachers in integration of SSI topics, this article offers several developmentally appropriate pedagogies rooted in storytelling, alongside general recommendations for teacher education programs and professional learning. Keywords: socioscientific issues, child development, elementary science education, storytelling, preservice teachers