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Creating Spaces for Rethinking School Science: Perspectives from Subjective and Social–Relational Ways of Knowing

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Science | Environment | Health

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Abstract

This chapter argues that critical pedagogy based within relational, participatory ways of knowing science provides a well-grounded rationale for change in science education. This argument is based on the notion that changing curriculum and pedagogy involves fundamental questions of teacher’s and student’s worldviews that have not been addressed in past attempts at change. Because the discourses of science (education) are socially constructed, understanding how young people come to construct meaning and knowledge in their science studies through social learning seems a promising way to accommodate socioecological, political, and cultural issues within a newly conceptualized science education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pinar et al.’s (1995) skepticism is in response to Kliebard’s (1986) discussion of discourses on curriculum where “humanists” were characterized as guardians of an ancient tradition linked to the power of reason and elements of Western cultural heritage. This tradition is associated in American curriculum debates with “academic rationalists,” a group quite distinct from the “reconceptualists” where, arguably, many critical environmental educators ground their curriculum theorizing (Apple 1975; Giroux 1981).

  2. 2.

    School science is used here because the onto-epistemological frames have widened within science education proper.

  3. 3.

    Employing the term “text” (as in intertextually) acknowledges that the field of curriculum is composed of various discourses and suggests issues involved in understanding science education curriculum and pedagogy that have been ignored prior to post-critical or poststructural mappings of the field. Thus, textualist mappings of science education have links to poststructuralism.

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  1. University of Regina, Regina, Canada

    Paul Hart

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Hart, P. (2012). Creating Spaces for Rethinking School Science: Perspectives from Subjective and Social–Relational Ways of Knowing. In: Zeyer, A., Kyburz-Graber, R. (eds) Science | Environment | Health. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3949-1_7

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