1.3. Pragmatism: an epistemology to take pluralism into account
Pragmatism is a philosophical school developed at the turn of the 20th century in the United States by Charles Sander Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. Pragmatism acknowledges the fact that humans as well as ecological systems are not static but change over time (Dewey, 1939). As such, our knowledge of the world is never complete nor perfect: it is rather a fallible and perfectible outcome of our experience and practices, related to our actions, at a given moment.
In this perspective, practicing science
through a CS pedagogic project and exchanging their experiences of the world could lead to changes among the participants (students and their teachers). Such an evolution may be analyzed thanks to a pragmatist epistemology.
The objective of this subsection is to introduce a few concepts that you could find relevant to build your own CS pedagogic program. In order to help you to related those theoretical elements to practical projects, you may find at the end of each paragraph an example derived from the hypothetical research projects presented in Exercise 1 (subsection 1.2.C) and a question that relates to your own previous experience. In the next section, we will provide further examples.
1.3.C. Values dynamics: reflecting on the effects of Citizen Science
Question:
In project A, citizens are only invited to collect data. The observation protocols actually invite them to pay attention to organisms that they may have ignored so far or simply seen without further thinking about their role in the local ecosystems, about their needs, about the evolution of their populations... Thus, while participants start paying attention to birds and hedgehogs in practical terms (first by counting and identifying them, maybe later by changing the way they manage their garden or by creating hosting areas...), participants may actually start to consider that those organisms matter. In this perspective, the CS process has led to the creation of new values related to biodiversity among the participants. Yet, investigating such effects needs to develop adequate tools used beyond the sole objective and timeline of the biodiversity data sampling protocol. Have you ever intended to monitor the effects of a pedagogic sequence on students and on the way they conceive a topic, a given concept, their relation to the world or to other people, and particularly, on the way they define what is important for them ?