Improvisation With/in Science

Abstract

In this chapter I share stories of working with youth in an after school Technology Club to create movies about science in their lives. I use these stories to argue that an important aspect of empowering science education is valuing the role of student agency as both an outcome of the learning process and as a generative contributor to the on-going re-design or transformation of the learning community and of the self. This work draws specifically upon Dorothy Holland’s framing of agency, which defines agency as being when and how individuals or groups act upon, modify, and/or give significance to their worlds in purposeful ways, with the aim of creating, impacting and/or transforming themselves and/or the conditions of their lives (Holland et al., 1998). Embedded within this view is the idea that agency is built upon a critical awareness of one’s world and, in the case of agency in science education, a deep understanding of science and a desire to make a change in one’s life as a science learner (see Basu’s work on critical science agency, chapter 3).