“Content-Teaching First, Socioscientific Issue Next” as Mutant SSI Instruction: Making Sense of Hong Kong Preservice Science Teachers’ Pedagogical Decisions

  Despite the acknowledged benefits of socioscientific issue (SSI)-based instruction, preservice teachers (PSTs) often face challenges when designing SSI-based instruction. This study aims to offer a scope of the challenges that are often overlooked in existing studies, that is, how sociocultural and political contexts shape PSTs design and approach to SSI teaching. Rather than assuming that PSTs are reluctant to changes, we focus on making sense of their pedagogical considerations within the contextual questions of ‘what counts as learning?’, ‘what are the roles of teachers?’, ‘what are the values of schooling?’ and ‘which issues are important and acceptable (and not) in specific contexts?’. Data sources include lesson plans, artifacts, and semi-structured interviews, where PSTs deliberate on their pedagogical decisions, including the selection and development of focal SSI for teaching, and rationales behind their judgements. We found that while their SSI-based lessons align with established instructional models in a broad sense, there are variations in values of SSI teaching (i.e., learning of SSI serves content mastery, which relates to university entrance as a cultural achievement). We also observed valuable cultural resources that PSTs bring to identifying focal SSI (e.g., healthy diets and contraception). In this connection, for better global uptake of SSI teaching, we suggest that researchers could acknowledge such ‘mutations’ as a given, and examine how teachers develop mutant-SSI instructions in specific sociocultural and political environments.