Ideas and evidence in Science

Preparation and Planning

For this lesson you will need to ensure that you have facilities for projecting the accompanying PowerPoint Slides and Video footage. You will also ned to ensure you have photocopied enough Student Worksheets.
Timings given are approximate. There is enough material here for two lessons, should you wish to extend learning around this topic area.

About the MOD Topic

The DCDC (Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre) assists the MOD to provide a detailed analysis of the future strategic context for Defence. Delivering guidance for the MOD on strategic challenges and opportunities its findings may input into policy development over the next 30 years.
In compiling its analysis the DCDC makes use of a broad and diverse evidence base, ensuring its credibility via its independence from MOD decision-making, drawing together thought and opinion from as wide a constituency as possible.
Research areas extend not just to climate-related humanitarian disaster but also to issues pertaining to governance and law and order; knowledge and innovation; identity and to population and resources. In this lesson the fictional role-plays draw on actual research data heralding climate-change and the impact that this will have on global societies.

The following quotation is taken from the preface to the DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036:
'In our analysis, we have tried to steer a measured course between the rocks of simplistic extrapolation from contemporary, emerging features and floating vague, meaningless generalizations and banalities about the future. Many commentators anchor themselves in the familiar present and, exploiting the latest fashion and a series of telling anecdotes, merely tell people what is already happening. Quite honestly, much of what we have to say, with regard to both continuities and discontinuities, does not have a conclusion or an ending, happy or otherwise, because, self-evidently, the future has not happened yet. What we offer are robust judgements across various alternative futures, which concentrate on the challenges of the most likely future themes. We believe that the future will happen as a result of long-wave themes and developments that unite the past, the present and the future. However, one constant evident in history - the power of contingency and surprise - will continue to dominate our future, which will be influenced and punctuated by unexpected events, startling surprises, major discontinuities and the pervasive operation of chance. Quite apart from these considerations, people and countries will conduct themselves in accordance with their social and cultural characteristics and their perception of their historical experience and future prospects. Therefore, this piece of work seeks to identify and examine likely patterns in order to suggest reasonable broad-order possibilities and potential outcomes, whose risks, effects and extremes it might be necessary to mitigate or avoid. It is necessarily a rational attempt at objective, dispassionate assessment, but I would ask readers to remember that, to paraphrase von Moltke, parts of our projected landscape are unlikely to survive first contact with the future, mainly and inconveniently because of the tendency of human beings to interfere with the scenery and to act and react in unforeseen, non-linear ways.'

Further Opportunities for Learning

Divide the class into groups and invite each group to brainstorm aspects of the future into which scientists might be able to give us some insight. Groups should not brainstorm what the future will be but what those aspects might be e.g. the weather, availability of fuels, medical research, GM Foods, threatened species, the future of communications.

This lesson topic area (climatic change and the impact on humans) lends itself to extensive classroom discussion.

Consider a guided debate of the merits (or otherwise) of the extensive media coverage that the topic receives and whether it creates indifference and actually undermines the seriousness of the messages being communicated.

Alternatively consider a discussion into the key messages to which students have been exposed (which will likely throw up some confusion in these areas).

Invite students to research an aspect of climatic change on the internet (perhaps pulling together a vision of 2020). They should rank the various data sources by reliability.

Student worksheet answers

Download the teachers notes PDF to access the answers for this lesson.