Prof. Dr. Dietmar Höttecke | Science Communication on Climate Change in a World of Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Fake News.
Presentation by Prof. Höttecke for download.
Personal details
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Höttecke is Professor of Physics Didactics at the "Universität Hamburg" and a member of the board of the "Gesellschaft für Didaktik der Chemie und Physik". His research interests include education for sustainable development.
About the presentation
Good science education prepares students for their role as citizens. The world today is largely determined by scientific discovery and thinking. Therefore, citizens should be able to participate in scientific public debates beyond school, to evaluate facts in an expert manner, and to make well-founded decisions. To this end, science education provides basic knowledge, for example, about the physics of the greenhouse effect.
But is that enough? For those who are not becoming climate researchers, scientific knowledge is brought to the people via mass media, the Internet and increasingly social media. The conventional mass media are assigned important functions (gatekeeper, agenda setting, alarming) in order to classify scientific statements and to check their reliability. Since young people in particular are increasingly informing themselves online, this control function of journalistic media is rapidly shrinking, while the importance of social media and their problematic side effects (aggregated news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, fake news) are increasing. Unfortunately - and this is also shown by the Corona crisis - scientifically hard findings are then often mistrusted. Scientific expertise is even publicly discredited!
In addition to basic subject knowledge, students therefore require
- a developed understanding of science, to recognize that trust in science has a basis (keyword "Nature of Science"),
- basic knowledge about the role of media in science communication, and
- Knowledge about the dynamics of social media and how they relate to our own basic psychological needs ( keyword avoidance of cognitive dissonance).
In the lecture, the three aspects will be explained by examples and in their context in order to derive didactic implications for school teaching and successful science communication.