Webinar: Creating Case Studies to Teach Socio-Scientific Issues – Nov 10

Posted by PHENND on October 13, 2026

Please join us on November 10, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM for a webinar, Creating Case Studies to Teach Socio-Scientific Issues.

Teaching socio-scientific issues in biology is challenging. In this webinar, we will share our process for overcoming these challenges and developing culturally-relevant case studies that improve perspective articulation, socioscientific reasoning, and bounded evidence justification in undergraduate students.

Case study teaching methods are well known for their influence on improved performance, helping students work through complex topics like evolution, and improve critical thinking. Beyond basic science content, there is also a growing movement to incorporate socio-scientific issues (SSI) in biology teaching. However, many educators find it hard to incorporate these ideas because they are not “content”. To address this challenge, we have developed a framework for content-centered SSI that brings critical analysis to topics traditionally taught in STEAM classrooms, strengthening both conceptual and nature of science knowledge. Our framework, ASPECT-STEAM, uses case studies that scaffold students in understanding how the same evidence can support multiple explanations, the boundaries of evidence and STEAM concepts in real world applications. This deepens content while students explore complex topics that resonate with their intrinsic motivations. In this webinar, we will showcase one of our case studies, and share our process for incorporating multiple perspectives and repositioning argumentation for humility. Participants will work in groups based on similar institution demographics and disciplines to incorporate our model in an existing case study.

Webinar Outcomes – After the workshop session, participants should be able to:

• Describe the importance of culturally relevant case studies
• Identify content related to their course and student demographics to consider when creating a case study
• Create an outline of their case study that integrates new socioscientific reasoning practices

Register here.