Cultural Studies of Science Education

https://link.springer.com/journal/11422

List of Papers (Total 166)

Creative pedagogies in digital STEAM practices: natural, technological and cultural entanglements for powerful learning and activism

This paper delves deeply into the creative pedagogies which support cutting edge digital STEAM practice across primary and secondary school settings. It contextualises the research within current STEAM agendas including transdisciplinarity, and STEAM and technology and goes on to offer insight from the novel context of ocean learning to develop and extend a theorisation of...

Exploring risk perceptions: a new perspective on analysis

When secondary school students were asked about the socioscientific issue of using sodium fluoroacetate (1080) poison to control New Zealand’s possum pests, they provided a wide range of responses. Their responses showed that they considered this method of control to be risky and contentious. Such contentious issues are an example of the complexity involved in using a...

The role of teacher support in students’ engagement with representational construction

In this article, we study the role of teacher support in a collaborative learning setting that involves students’ constructions of visual representations in the environmental education context. Despite the consensus in the field of science education research that engagement with visual representations—such as diagrams, animations, and graphs—can support students’ conceptual...

Performing legitimate choice narratives in physics: possibilities for under-represented physics students

Higher education physics has long been a field with a disproportionately skewed representation in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Responding to this challenge, this study explores the trajectories of “unexpected” (i.e., demographically under-represented) students into higher education physics. Based on timeline-guided life-history interviews with 21 students enrolled in...

Gesturing in plain sight: dialogical enactments of sustainable futures as being and doing in the world

Addressing the critical question posed by Gudrun Jonsdottir and Anne Kristine Byhring who are asking what place for a common future in the science classroom, this paper focuses on and expands on the construct of dialogical space. Not simply as an abstract concept to describe the presence of divergent ideas or the exchange of idioms, but a space filled with metaphors and material...

The dominant model of meat production and consumption as a socially acute question for activist education

Public debate often centers on issues that affect our lives and which reflect interests of various social groups and scientific communities, leading to controversies about what we may call socially acute questions (SAQs). In this paper we focus on two SAQs linked to the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries, namely its impact on the environment...

What is meant by scientific literacy in the curriculum? A comparative analysis between Bolivia and Chile

Scientific literacy is still being identified and recognised as one of the main goals of science education. However, this concept has multiple interpretations and its definition changes continuously depending on its social, cultural, and political contexts. In this paper, scientific literacy is conceptualised through visions I, II and III. The first one is focused on the content...

“I can do data for my people”: experiences of giving back for Native undergraduates in computing

This paper focuses on the undergraduate experiences in computer sciences (CS) disciplines of eight Native women and two-spirit undergraduates and how their values and experiences around the communal goal of giving back enable them to persist in computing. The paper draws from a one-year study that included participants across the U.S.A from predominantly White institutions...

The pernicious whiteness of coloniality in elementary science classrooms: the multigenerationality of subtractive schooling in El Sur de Tejas, Aztlán

Our study traces the pernicious whiteness of coloniality in elementary science classrooms in El Sur de Tejas, Aztlán. Our research method was an ethnographic case study that enabled us to explore participants’ identities within bioregional contexts. In our findings, we emphasize the pernicious whiteness of coloniality via the participants’ personal and professional identity...

Evolutionary stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum

There has been little consideration in the science education literature of schools or curricula that advocate creationism. Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) is among the world’s largest providers of creationist science materials with a curriculum divided into a system of workbooks which students complete at their own speed. This article examines the ways in which ACE presents...

Beyond neat classifications: A case for the in-betweens

Simplified, reductionist approaches to curriculum design and delivery are pervasive in science education. In ecological curricula—particularly in, but not limited to K-12—biomes, ecosystems, habitats, and other units of study are simplified and presented as static, easily identified and described entities. Characteristics, components, and representative phenomena of each are...

Expanding the border of science education through the lens of Buddhist mindfulness

This is a hermeneutic phenomenological study that describes and interprets Wong’s, the first author lived experience in the borderlands of science and Buddhist mindfulness as a science education doctoral student in Thailand. I explore my experiences in learning with multiple mindfulness teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh from Buddhist traditions. and Additionally, I explore the...

Science teacher beliefs in conflict-affected zones of Jammu and Kashmir

This study examines science teacher beliefs working in the conflict-affected zones of Jammu and Kashmir. Research in these areas indicates that teacher beliefs influence their classroom practices and student learning outcomes and that teacher beliefs are highly context sensitive. Using data collected from a questionnaire and focussed group discussions, this research elucidates...

The emergence of remote laboratory courses in an emergency situation: University instructors’ agency during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study examines and describes how various online remote laboratory courses, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, were implemented at Hankuk University in Korea in 2020. We compared four general undergraduate laboratory courses, one each for physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science, and two major-level laboratory courses taught during the spring and fall of 2020...

The concept of alterity: its usage and its relevance for critical qualitative researchers in the era of Trump

Alterity is a concept with an extensive yet elusive history. Popularly conceived of as radical difference and Otherness, I identify alterity as the source of much of the virulent forms of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and other dichotomies in society that pit one group against another. Coming out of the tradition of critical qualitative inquiry, I offer a genealogy of the concept...

Reimagining Freire: beyond human relations

By bridging critical pedagogy and environmental praxis, the contributions in this forum build on Freire’s legacy while stretching his work. As the authors attend to more-than-human life, they theorize and enact relational ways of knowing. Through participatory and multisensory pedagogies, they counter dichotomies between nonhuman and human nature, student and teacher. In this...

Decolonial scientific education to combat ‘science for domination’

In this article, we argue that mainstream science education is contaminated by neoliberal values and functions in the service of political domination and exploitation and that a neoliberal and exploitative science education does not contribute to the building of a sustainable and just world. The work from Paulo Freire and Enrique Dussel underpin the tenets of decolonial...

Sociopolitical solidarity in STEM education: youth-centered relationships that resist learning as just achievement data

In this paper, we—a participatory action group—use the tenants of critical pedagogy to articulate how youths developed relationships for and with STEM disciplinary practices through participation in spaces outside of the official scripts of their high school STEM classrooms in the United States. Spaces included their robotics team, a hybrid digital collaborative space, and in an...

Reflecting on Freire: a praxis of radical love and critical hope for science education

In this introductory manuscript, we present our vision for this special issue as a space for cultivating collective becomings in/with love, critical hope, and solidarity. We also contemplate our intentions and goals for putting together a special issue such as this one. We then take a position as insider–outsiders of science education, moved by values such as attention, humility...

Freirean inspirations in solidary internationalism between East Timor and Brazil in science education

The aim of this work is to reflect on the challenging trajectory of international cooperation between East Timor and Brazil, which focused on the need to rethink teacher education from a critical intercultural perspective, aiming to build emancipatory relations, love, and solidarity. From 2009 until 2016, we coordinated the Qualification of Teachers and Teaching of the Portuguese...

A Freirean liberatory perspective of community colleges education: critical consciousness and social justice science issues in the biology curriculum

This paper discusses the value of a Freirean liberatory perspective in community colleges, countering the traditional “second chance” or “social reproduction” viewpoints attributed by scholars to the education offered in these institutions, emphasizing its vital need in science and healthcare careers education. I explore the potential of this perspective by providing illustrative...

“The freshness of irreverence”: learning from ACT UP toward sociopolitical action in science education

This article explores ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) through a Freirean lens of critical consciousness, dialogue, and transformation. The purpose is to draw from where there have been processes of engagement of sociopolitical action in science and how these spaces can become meaningful entry points to take toward making a “sociopolitical turn” in science education, as...

Exclosure (or what we risk losing)

This is a story of becoming. In this creative non-fiction essay, I share a case study of an informal science program for high school aged youth that took place over 5-weeks one summer in an urban park in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. I conducted observations, interviews, and artifact analysis to explore how youth environmental interest and identity developed through relational processes...

Freire’s hope in radically changing times: a dialogue for curriculum integration from science education to face the climate crisis

This article advances a dialogue for understanding curriculum integration as a form of radical pedagogy, starting from science education in times of climate crisis. The paper weaves Paulo Freire’s work about a radical form of emancipatory pedagogy, bell hooks’s proposal to transgress boundaries in teaching, and the landscape of identities for science persons in order to embrace a...