A Whale of a Time: Engaging in a War of Values for Youth Activism in Science Education

Exposure and experience with ethical dilemmas and controversial socioscientific issues provide a link to students' lives or a pathway for sympathy/empathy and care, where youth use emotion to engage with the scenario and develop critical thinking skills to respond to ethical issues. For this theoretical paper, I focus on how informal science can be used in science classes to provide such exposure and experience, creating spaces for students to foster erotic relationships with the nature-Other and their local environment. More specifically, this paper aims to discuss how educators can use these informal science experiences, and in this case--those involving marine mammals, to find value for natural phenomena through erotic generosity and phenomenological experiences within the environment and use their knowledge and power to act responsibly.