Critical Thinking Across Disciplines in University General Education: Obesity as a Socioscientific Issue

Abstract

Arguably, we are now living in a post-scarcity era. Production is geared towards human desire rather than towards fulfilling basic needs. For the first time in human history, there are more people who are overweight than underweight. Conventional school science has often portrayed obesity as a biological problem; the way to avoid obesity is to eat a healthy diet and to lead a healthy lifestyle. Implicitly, obesity is regarded as a self-inflicted problem. Such a view, however, ignores social, political, marketing, technological, cultural and economic factors that shape an environment that determines individual eating and lifestyle patterns. This chapter reports on our university general education course that aimed to develop in students a more sophisticated view of obesity as a socioscientific issue, with the particular intention of engaging critical thinking on all these factors. We start by making the case that obesity is more than just a biological problem. Then, we expound on our course structure and pedagogy. This is followed by a report on students’ learning outcomes (n=114) in terms of the overall changes they made in their thinking about obesity. Implications for our course development and for science education in the broader context are also discussed.