Designing and making design a controversy map



Working on a socially acute question requires the teacher and the learner to have an understanding of the problem in the light of the ethical, scientific, technical, social and emotional controversies at stake within the scientific world, and the social actors involved in the issue of animal welfare. This overview of the controversies can be formalized through a controversy map. This map can have different interests. (1) It allows the teacher to prepare a training in a concern of impartiality, taking into account the different social representations, the different scientific conceptions. (2) It allows the teacher to take a critical look at the choices and points of view made by the learners involved in a situation-problem: to which ethics do they correspond? Which ethics are they opposed to? Which stakeholders do they involve? How do they present them? What do they fail to highlight? What controversies are cited? Are they conceived as such, or does the learner take sides and in what direction...? All these observations can be used to “institutionalize” the learning. (3) It therefore also makes sense to have students draw up their own map of controversies. Not only does it allow them to step back from the situation-problem that they manage, to better understand the issues at stake, but it can also lead them to question their own positioning in the issue, to relativize it, and even to question their prejudices. The aim is to enable them to support their point of view (becoming aware of the relativity of their ethics, developing new arguments…).
This map can then become a real reading grid for the movies of farmers practices and of experts.

How to achieve it? There is no single way to design a controversy map. This requires a significant amount of reading in both the media and research articles, and even interviews with stakeholders. To help the reader, we propose one. But there are probably as many controversy maps as there are designers.