Let’s Kill the Bug: the School Garden as an Educational Scenario for Argumentation and Decision Making
Abstract
The school garden has been a widely used strategy as a teaching resource for the teaching of biology and for environmental education. This research article explores the possibilities of this educational scenario to raise ethical and environmental dilemmas in which interests and benefits are related, and that involve decisions about the life and death of an organism. For this, an investigation was carried out with students in the third (N = 21) and sixth (N = 42) grades of basic education, who were involved in the cultivation of an orchard and in discussions about dilemmas around conservation or eradication of an insect in the garden. Through the justifications of their decisions, the possibilities of this scenario for the development of argumentative and decision-making skills are evidenced. The findings suggest that students privilege the emotional domain over the cognitive in their justifications, that is, that students do not frequently include biological concepts in the reasons that are part of their arguments.
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