Navigating the uncertain seas of controversies – A pedagogical wind rose

The Arlon conference brought together lecturers willing to share and discuss aspects of their practice of “controversies”, seen as a teaching/learning method suited to the contextual needs and demands of higher education environmental studies. The paper contributes to this joint reflective effort by providing conceptual tools helping to interpret the practice, to question what it puts at stake and to detect, from a pedagogical viewpoint, key issues and upcoming questions. The contribution falls within the Conference's aim n°2: “share theories or conceptual propositions that make it possible to equip the teaching approaches and to give them theoretical and methodological foundations” (Program Arlon Conference 2014, p. 2). The article takes a traditional stance, looking at the contributions to the conference through “constructive alignment”(Biggs, 1996), a basic principle meant to secure the pedagogical validity of any given learning situation by establishing a triple consistency (Kovertaite & Leclercq, 2006; Leclercq, 1995; Petit, Castaigne, & Verpoorten, 2007; Tyler, 1949) between objectives, methods and assessment.