(Re)considering Nature of Science Education in the Face of Socio-scientific Challenges and Injustices

Abstract

Throughout the past decades, challenges of socio-scientific nature such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate degradation and scientific racism have brought many relevant and pressing questions to the fore of the science education field, prompting science educators into (re)thinking the purposes and roles of science education within a landscape where the links between science and socio-political challenges, injustices, citizenship and democracy have become increasingly complex. In this theoretical paper, I seek to examine what Critical Pedagogies and Decolonial Studies can bring to science education in the face of these challenges and injustices of socio-scientific nature, with a focus on the area of Nature of Science (NOS). In particular, drawing on scholarship from across these fields and on some illustrative examples from common science education topics, I seek to propose ways in which an approach to NOS grounded on a critical-decolonial perspective may be used to support the learning of school students and science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s entanglements with social justice and socio-political issues.

1 Introduction

Over the past decades, global challenges of socio-scientific nature such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Alsop & Bencze, 2020), climate degradation (Gandolfi, 2023) and scientific racism (Guiton, 2021) brought many relevant and pressing questions to the fore of Science Education. Misinformation, climate change denialists and anti-vaxxers (Osborne & Pimentel, 2023; see also volume 31 - issues 5 and 6 in this journal), unequal distribution of health access and outcomes (Ahmed et al., 2022), and the return of fringe scientific racism discourses (Saini, 2019) have been pushing science educators—both at school and at science teacher education levels—further into (re)thinking the purposes of science teaching within a landscape where connections between scientific knowledge and practices, socio-political challenges, injustices, citizenship and democracy have become increasingly complex (Alsop & Bencze, 2020; Bazzul & Tolbert, 2019; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017).

Science education across many parts of the world, however, still tends to be grounded on a ‘technical rationality’ view (Rezende & Ostermann, 2020), with both science as a body of knowledge and as a school subject often being framed under a naïve positivist perspective as neutral, objective and detached from power, ideology, culture and the wider socio-political arenas. This has resulted in many approaches to school science devoid of critical engagement with complex socio-political, axiological and justice issues surrounding science (Tannock, 2020; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017), running in direct opposition to what recent scholarship has been advocating around the relevance of innovative, ethical and socio-political awareness and participation to overcome socio-scientific challenges in socially just ways (e.g. Ahmad, 2022; Latour, 2020).

In order to challenge such naïve technical-rational scenario, recently, we have seen the strengthening of calls, including across this journal (e.g. Moura et al., 2021; Valladares, 2021; Waight et al., 2022), for science education to further its critical engagement with areas that have been broadly framed under the umbrella term of ‘science-in-context’ (SinC), that is: ‘ways in which science may be associated with other disciplines and other segments of societies and environments’, as summarised in a recent review by Bencze et al. (2020, p. 827). Different science education initiatives have emerged in the past decades in association with this aim of exploring the links between science, society, and environments, such as those framed as science-technology-society-environment (STSE), socio-scientific issues (SSIs), socio-scientific controversies and socially-acute questions (SAQs) (Bencze et al., 2020).

As part of these initiatives around SinC, the specific area of Nature of Science (NOS)—generally understood as learning about science as a process of knowledge development with particular epistemic and socio-institutional features (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Erduran & Dagher, 2014)—has been positioned as an important component that can support such initiatives (Dagher, 2020; Khishfe, 2023; Moura et al., 2021; Osborne & Pimentel, 2023). For instance, Laurence Simonneaux and Jean Simonneaux (in Bencze et al., 2020, p. 838) recently noted the central place of NOS aspects in their work on SAQs, drawing on Paulo Freire’s view of education and its relationships with issues of socio-political issues and injustices:

[Science] education must transcend teaching of ‘content’ (e.g., laws and theories), delving into related domains such as economics and politics aimed at improvements to and transformation of the human condition. Associated with such learning, students should develop and use epistemological expertise—regarding, for instance, the nature of science, characteristics of societies and the nature of vocational knowledge. This would involve much in the way of high-level critical thinking, through such activities as identifying conflicting interests of stakeholders, evaluating risks and uncertainties, generating debate and pinpointing fallacies, cultivating socioscientific reasoning, identifying actors’ values, assessing evidence and critically analyzing research methodology.

In this paper, I then seek to explore the role that NOS might play in supporting reflections—both at school and at science teacher education levels—around the critical, socio-political and social justice elements that ground global socio-scientific challenges such as the ones outlined above. In particular, given the recent rise in interest around the potential connections between NOS and social justice (e.g. Hansson & Yacoubian, 2020; Waight et al., 2022), my aim in this paper is to contribute to such scholarship by reflecting on how an approach to NOS grounded on a critical-decolonial perspective may help bringing science’s social justice and socio-political entanglements to the forefront of science educators’ work on challenges and injustices of socio-scientific nature.

2 Science Education and Challenges and Injustices of Socio-scientific Nature

As I started to outline above, within the landscape of challenges of socio-scientific nature, different school-based and science teacher education-based initiatives have emerged in the past decades around the notion of SinC, often in close connection with what has been named as Vision II of scientific literacy, by Roberts (2007): that is, understanding science in terms of its links with societal aspects (and with environments, in some proposals). For instance, when recently discussing the STSE area, Erminia Pedretti describes it as ‘a holistic entity that focuses on relationships among science, technology, society and environment, placing science within social, technological, cultural, ethical and political contexts’ (in Bencze et al., 2020, p. 828). On the SSIs area, Dana Zeidler explains it as grounded on an ontological position that the moral landscape of science, the activity of science and an education in science cannot be separated, that is, that normative (moral) and non-normative (e.g. processes and contents of science) components need to be intertwined in science education practices and curricula (in Bencze et al., 2020). Meanwhile, Laurence Simonneaux and Jean Simonneaux summarise their work with SAQs within science education as raising ‘questions regarding interdependence among cognitive, affective and judgemental (axiological) components of education and training (…)’ through engaging ‘in considerations of complex and controversial open-ended questions that are embedded in real contexts’ (in Bencze et al., 2020, p. 837).

While reviewing the particularities of each of these SinC approaches in more depth is beyond the scope of this article—and something that has been done recently by the authors mentioned above in Bencze et al. (2020)—in common, they share a focus on and concern about a reductionist approach to science education that simplifies it as solely the learning of core science contents and skills (akin to a Vision I of scientific literacy, according to Roberts, 2007), which they argue to ‘significantly compromise students’ education about larger contexts involving politics, economics, cultural studies, etc.’ (Bencze et al., 2020, p. 845). In particular, as I (Gandolfi, 2021, 2023) and other colleagues (Carter, 2017; Levinson, 2018; Moura et al., 2021; Valladares, 2021) have also argued, such emptying of science education practices and curricula from a critical engagement with SinC areas has little to contribute to teachers’, students’ and wider societies’ engagement with the complexity found at hearth of socio-scientific challenges.

However, as raised by Moura et al. (2021) and Valladares (2021), the most common educational approaches to STSE and SSIs seem to still be shying away from centring a crucial component in the exploration of such topics and, more generally, of the relationship between science and society: the political element.¹ While SAQs seem to be more in tune with this political dimension in their approach to SinC (see more in Bencze et al., 2020), this field has historically tended to explore such dimension as simply one element of SinC, with apparently less importance placed in understanding such entanglements between science and politics than, for instance, in moral-philosophical-existential perspectives (Levinson, 2018). That is, while central to our understanding of and action in relation to, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate degradation and scientific racism, the diverse entanglements between science and politics both at state-level governance and at public (counter)hegemonic praxial and discoursive arenas have been less prominent across the wider SinC scholarship,² as also noted by Levinson (2018), Bazzul (2020) and Valladares (2021).

Indeed, more than two decades ago, Hodson (2011) criticised SinC initivatives from that period as not being critical enough in their exploration of the political dimension of the relationship between science and society. According to this author, SinC done under a Vision II approach to scientific literacy has been often centred on technical-instrumental aspects (i.e. contributions of techno-scientific development to society) and/or on individualistic moral-based views on decision-making. More recently, Valladares (2021) has linked such Vision II to a ‘functionalist’ conception of science-society relationship, whilst Levinson (2018), Galamba and Matthews (2021), Moura et al. (2023), Rudolph and Horibe (2016) and Morales-Doyle (2017) have similarly called our attention to individualistic and depoliticised discourses around decision-making and citizenship in the context of certain SinC initiatives.

A couple of reasons can be linked to this scenario. First, as I mentioned in the previous section, drawing on Rezende and Ostermann (2020), science education across the world still tends to be grounded on a ‘technical rationality’ perspective detached from power, ideology, culture and the wider socio-political arena, as also noted by other colleagues (Dunlop et al., 2021; Eaton & Day, 2020; Tannock, 2020; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017). As a result, we have a culture of school science often devoid of critical engagement with complex political issues intertwined science. Or, as argued by Moura et al. (2021), a lack of critical engagement with the concept of ‘political epistemology’, that is, with the understanding that science in not simply ‘influenced by’ or an ‘influencer of’ society, but intrinsically intertwined (or hybridized) with socio-political contexts.

Along the same lines, Bazzul (2020) has recently argued that science education has ‘domesticated’ SSIs, such as the ecological-political ones affecting communities across the world, through a sort of collaborationism with neoliberal and anti-social justice interests. Drawing on Lemke (2011), the author goes on to argue that such domestication has happened due to ‘science education [being] distinctly conservative in character’ (Bazzul, 2020, p. 89). An example of such domestication of science, and more specifically of SinC, is presented by Galamba and Matthews (2021) in their work on the relationship between science and fascism, both historically and in contemporary discourses. In their article, the authors ask, for instance, why the complex (and diverse) relationships between science and fascist ideas—which range, contradictorily, from anti-science to scientific racism (e.g. ‘Aryan science’) ones—are not treated as a SSI and, as such, properly dealt with by SinC initiatives: ‘Not recognising the rise of fascism as a socio-scientific issue which must be openly addressed in classrooms leaves mainstream science education not recognising such a threat to democracy and inclusive societies’ (p. 584).

Such avoidance of a full recognition of (and then a critical engagement with) science’s socio-political entanglements cannot, however, be only attributed to the specific traditions of school science. As Galamba and Matthews (2021) also note in their article, written from the context of England’s education system, a widespread avoidance of political education has been particularly notable in pushing for a depoliticisation of school-based education as a whole, well beyond science education. This scenario can be positioned within a larger global movement of neoliberal educational policymaking that privileges performativity and metrification through large-scale testing, one-size-fits-all curricula, national and international standardisation and compliance-driven school inspections (Apple, 2007; Ball et al., 2012; Gandolfi & Mills, 2023), instead of an education grounded on notions such as social justice, critical thinking, emancipation, participation, etc. As argued by other colleagues in the wider field of education and policymaking, this landscape is intertwined with authoritarian and neoconservative policy discourses (Clarke, 2023; Unsworth et al., 2023)—as recently seen for instance, in Brazil,³ England and the USA⁴—which have been pushing the nature of curricular and pedagogical practices across the world against the kind socio-political and social-justice informed thinking and practices I have been arguing for here. For instance, in England, where I write from, we have recently seen the emergence of ‘political impartiality’ policies around curricular and pedagogical practices, culminating in the publication of a policy guidance on Political impartiality in schools in 2022 by the Department for Education (DfE, 2022). Among other things, these discourses have been placing on schoolteachers the expectation of presenting knowledge about socio-political issues, including SSIs, through an apparent ‘impartial’ approach and without encouraging students’ socio-political action around such issues, as also recently noted by Dunlop and Rushton (2021) in relation to climate change education and action across schools and policies in the country.

If we also consider the widely known absence of political education across many teacher education programmes across the world, both at initial and continuous development levels (cf., Picower, 2013; Avelar & Ball, 2019; Unsworth et al., 2023), it is then understandable that schools, and the science teaching community in particular both at school and teacher education levels, will opt out from engaging with such complex political entanglements within their own subjects. That is, science education initiatives are encouraged to stay focused on Vision I or, at best, on a technical-instrumental and individualistic approach to Vision II. However, as recently raised by colleagues working in the area of environmental education, such as Eaton and Day (2020), Tannock (2020) and Dunlop et al. (2021), such obstruction of socio-political engagement with, for instance, environmental issues is central to the maintenance of neoliberal and neocolonial paradigms within environmental education around the relationship between societies, peoples and environments, and has very little to contribute to the global challenges emerging from environmental destruction.

To attempt and challenge such depoliticised and ‘functionalist’ science education, another perspective for science literacy, Vision III (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018)—or science education for social transformation—has been advocated more recently, drawing on seminal pieces by Hodson (2009, 2011) and Santos (2009) that paved the way for pushing SinC approaches further into science’s socio-political entanglements. Such Vision III has been outlined as ‘a politicised science education aiming at emancipation and socio-ecojustice’ (Sjöström & Eilks, 2018, p. 67), grounded on socio-political participation (Levinson, 2018) and on notions of equity and social justice (Santos, 2009). In particular, the work of Santos (2009), which draws on Paulo Freire’s concept of emancipation from contexts of oppression and alienation, has the potential of bringing the socio-political turn of Vision III closer to social justice demands through calling our attention to how the socio-political entanglements between science and society have particular and pervasive implications to social injustices (Morales-Doyle, 2017).

Valladares (2021), however, has recently criticised the lack of attention paid by both original and recent initiatives emerging from this Vision III to a more intersectional perspective on such social injustices. This author argues that Vision III might still risk universalist and one-size-fits-all approaches to how ‘participation’, ‘emancipation’ and, more widely, ‘justice’ are conceptualised and realised by science education initiatives across widely diverse socio-historical-cultural-political landscapes, such as in the contrasting cases of an ‘indigenous, female, lesbian, Latina student’ and of a ‘male, white, heterosexual, European student‘ (Valladares, 2021, p. 570). Here, what Valladares calls our attention to is that for a truly socially just turn of science education towards transformation to happen, this needs to be grounded on an understanding of science’s socio-political entanglements through intersectional lenses: recognising not only class-based injustices emerging from capitalism and neoliberalism, etc., but also from intersections with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.:

It is mostly in multicultural contexts that an expanded concept of emancipation is of particular relevance for science teaching, because it has played a prominent role in the colonial process (…); it is common in these contexts for science to present itself as the only legitimate and emancipatory knowledge, competing and erasing the various alternative forms of knowledge that have been generated outside the European scientific matrix (…). Approaching science as a liberating and emancipating force that frees humans from local beliefs, myths, and ideologies in contexts where different forms of knowledge coexist (personal, popular, indigenous, traditional, rural, and mainstream academic knowledge) carries the risk of reinforcing a scientism and a neocolonialism that are commonly expressed as the educational effort of displacement, eradication, or substitution of alternative forms of knowledge for scientific knowledge, regardless of the potential value that these alternative forms of knowledge might have (…) (Valladares, 2021, p. 581).

Emerging from this debate is then the importance of recognising the intersectional nature of science’s socio-political and social justice entanglements in the face of diverse challenges of socio-scientific nature. As noted by Valladares (2021), scientific knowledge and practices have been historically, and in contemporary times, deeply implicated in generating and supporting discourses that essentialise, other, exclude, marginalise and oppress certain groups across different societies ontologically, epistemologically and physically. As such, recognising and critically engaging with this scenario is relevant when we consider the role of science education in the face of socio-scientific challenges which are also deeply intertwined with issues of social injustices.

Let us take the case of environmental degradation and climate change as an example: an understanding of the connection between this well-known SSI with social injustices can lead us to reflecting on the role of scientific knowledge and practices—and of wider notions of scientific development—in what is known as ‘environmental injustices’: an unequal exposition of already marginalised communities to the impact of environmental degradation resulting from land, knowledge, labour and monetary exploration; and the widespread restrictions imposed onto certain groups within our neoliberal and neocolonial societies around their connections with more-than-human entities and flows within the environment, such as land, water, animals, plants, and air (Acserald, 2010; Braverman, 2021). In this particular case of SSI, it is no coincidence that the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) in terms of measurements of environmental impact (Young, 2021) generally coincide with groups facing socio-historical marginalisation, such as global South, and Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) communities, women, LGBTQIA + communities, etc. living anywhere in the world⁵ (Voskoboynik, 2018; Eckstein et al., 2021). For instance, the historical deadly floods across Pakistan have connections both to global climate change processes that have been driven by global North countries for centuries, and to specific socio-historical processes faced by that community (i.e. colonisation by the British Empire and now neocolonial incursions by global North countries, such as the USA), which have resulted in deeply unequal, exclusionary and oppressive ways of engaging, exploiting and living from that country’s natural resources, particularly water (Ahmad, 2022). Another example deeply intertwined with physical, ontological and epistemological marginalisation of particular communities for (neo)colonial exploitation of natural resources for scientific-technological progress is the case of the Brumadinho tragedy in Brazil in 2019, which involved the collapse of a dam owned by the mining company Vale⁶ and affected already socio-historically marginalised communities in the region.

Morales-Doyle (2017) called such entanglements between socio-scientific and social justice issues a ‘social justice science issue’ (SJSI): socio-scientific themes that are also issues of social injustice, such as environmental injustice, scientific racism and medical apartheid. Waight et al. (2022, p. 1496) offers another example of SJSIs in the recent case of vaccination hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic:

The news media has continuously reported the scepticism among Black and Brown communities and their refusal to get vaccinated, furthering racialized discourses that perpetuate false narratives about nondominant communities. Rarely do these discourses address the histories of science and medical technologies by which Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, their bodies, and health have been exploited, experimented, violated, discriminated, and dehumanized in the name of science and research.

So, what might such entanglements between socio-scientific challenges with issues of social injustices (or SJSIs) be asking of science education? Drawing on Santos (2009), Valladares (2021) and Morales-Doyle (2017) above, the seem to be asking science education initiatives to lean more explicitly and meaningfully on an intersectional perspective around the socio-political turn embedded in the Vision III of scientific literacy: one that is centred on the acknowledgement that the socio-historical-cultural-political landscapes grounding socio-scientific challenges affecting, for instance, a ‘indigenous, female, lesbian, Latina student’ (i.e. a MAPA case) will be different to (albeit still interconnected with) those affecting a ‘male, white, heterosexual, European student’. Such complex landscape surrounding socio-scientific challenges is then:

• 1. Not just a socio-political issue that can be addressed by increasing democratic participation and socio-political action by individuals or groups at local (or even national) level;

• 2. Nor it is an issue of social injustice that can be simply addressed through purely techno-scientific solutions ‘made for’ marginalised communities, or through a depoliticised neoliberal take on inclusion and diversity lacking socio-political awareness⁷ (Ahmed, 2007), as I have also argued elsewhere (Gandolfi, 2023). Instead, it asks of science education initiatives (at school and teacher education levels) an approach that brings social justice together with science’s socio-political entanglements.

To further contribute to such growing reflections, across the rest of this paper I examine the particular role that one area often associated with science teaching and learning at both school and teacher education levels—Nature of Science (NOS)—might play in this endeavour. I first briefly review existing scholarship looking at NOS teaching and learning, particularly in relation to socio-scientific challenges and social injustices. Drawing from such scholarship, I will move onto proposing a critical-decolonial perspective to initiatives around NOS teaching and learning, which I will then illustrate through some cases that can be used to support the learning of school students and/or science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s social justice and socio-political entanglements. Through such work, I seek not only to explore NOS ‘as it is’, but also to propose a reconsideration of what NOS could/needs to be in order to foster social justice and socio-political awareness from within science, inspired by the words of Waight et al. (2022, p. 1494): ‘instead of focusing on the general public’s mistrust of science, or minoritized populations specifically, the questions should be reframed to focus on what scientific and science education communities need to do to dismantle existing injustices built in our technologies rooted in histories of colonialism and racism’.

3 Nature of Science, Socio-scientific Challenges and Injustices: An Overview

Historically, studies in the field of the Philosophy of Science have been closely implicated in understanding the processes involved in the production of scientific (and technological) knowledge, and often also central to proposals for teaching and learning of Nature of Science (NOS). According to Lederman (2007), the incorporation of philosophical aspects of science into science education has been advocated since the beginning of the twentieth century across the western world to varying degrees; in the 1930s, for instance, debates in this field across the USA and the United Kingdom were related to the ‘pupil-as-a-scientist’ approach, where learning about NOS would mean learning how to work as a scientist by following the so-called ‘scientific method’. In the subsequent decades, western science education became attached to views of science and technology ‘shaped by post-World War II celebration of science and technology and by Cold War politics’ (Allchin, 2011, p. 526; Agar, 2012). As a result, the fields of History and Sociology of Science—in the western world, particularly driven by seminal works of scholars like Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Harry Collins, Trevor Pinch—started to receive more attention from those engaging with NOS in science education (Kelly et al., 1993). In particular, aspects such as the relationship between science and societies and how scientists work as social groups (e.g. collaborations, competitions and disagreements) became important for understanding NOS, including how these social features and contexts of scientific work relate to knowledge production, that is, to science’s epistemological aspects (e.g. theory construction, observations, data interpretation and experimentation). As outlined by Turner (1980, p. 589) more than 40 years ago:

The intellectual content, methodological orientation, and professional organization of science cannot be separated from its social and cultural environment. Scientists in their capacity as observers and interpreters of physical nature still remain part of the larger social order, and between them and it there exists a dialectical relationship of mutual influence and interaction. As one result of this situation, scientists find that they must justify their activities to the political powers and other social institutions upon whose good will, patronage, and cooperation they depend.

Several proposals have then been developed across the past decades around NOS teaching and learning, with Hansson and Yacoubian (2020, p. 2) recently summarising this area’s overall goal as ‘the teaching of what science is; how knowledge is developed within science; and in what ways societal, cultural and human elements are involved in these knowledge processes’. Within this landscape, we find, for instance, the NOS proposal widely known as the ‘consensus view’, one of the most prominent ones found in this area (Khishfe, 2023) and which outlines a list of the core tenets of NOS as: tentative; empirically-based; subjective (theory-laden); partially based on human inference, imagination and creativity; socially and culturally embedded; theories vs. laws; observation vs. inference (Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000; Lederman et al., 2002). Recently, however, this approach has received criticism from other science educators (e.g. McComas, 2008; Erduran & Dagher, 2014; Hodson, 2014; Gandolfi, 2019; Park et al., 2024) who disagree, for instance, with the rigid separation between science’s epistemological and social elements in its outline of NOS, and with the foregrounding of more empirical-philosophical elements at the expense of an in-depth engagement with those of more sociological and historical natures. Recent scholarship, albeit in different ways, has been advocating for more holistic and intertwined approaches to the diversity of epistemological and social aspects of NOS, such as seen in the works of Erduran and Dagher (2014), Allchin (2012) and Hodson (2014), and as reflected in more recent review pieces, such as by Khishfe (2023) and Park et al., (2024).

In particular, recent work have indeed focused on how these more holistic and intertwined approaches to NOS teaching and learning by school students and science teachers can be central to a more in-depth understanding of socio-scientific challenges and injustices facing communities worldwide (e.g. Park et al., 2024; Dagher, 2020; Walls, 2016). Bazzul (2020), for instance, reflects on the crucial role that understanding NOS can play in engaging with political struggles around climate change, environmental racism, etc., because science itself has been playing an important role on both sides of these issues: their emergence and their mitigation. Similarly, Hansson and Yacoubian (2020) recently discussed how knowledge around NOS can help challenging both the positivistic approach to scientific literacy (Vision I) and the neoliberal utilitarian take on Vision II outlined in the previous section. Galamba and Matthews (2021, p. 592) also argue that teaching science only grounded on scientific knowledge (or the ‘products’ of science) ‘will do very little to tackle fascist-related views’; instead, they call our attention to how learning about, for instance, science’s socio-historical connections to social injustices can be crucial in this scenario.

However, proposals for NOS teaching and learning still have some way to go to achieve such potential, particularly in relation to centring critical, socio-political and social justice-informed perspectives. Bencze and Carter (2020), for instance, have criticised how the influence of pro-capitalist voices in shaping scientific and technological development at both state and private levels (and its implications to policymaking and discourses around SSIs) are often absent from NOS initiatives, as similarly criticised by Bazzul (2020, p. 5, my emphasis): ‘The growing antiquation of current NOS research, policy, and instructional approaches related to nature of science, is not because many of these paradigms originated in the 1990’s, but because they do not take seriously enough the pressing wicked ethical, social, and existential problems of the twenty-first century’. What we might be facing then is once again the challenge of ‘domestication’ mentioned in the previous section, now in relation to NOS. That is, while understanding NOS can be indeed crucial to addressing the kinds of socio-scientific challenges and injustices I have been mentioning throughout this paper, as also advocated by Hansson and Yacoubian (2020) in their co-edited book on Nature of Science and Social Justice, not many proposals so far have attempted to properly centre socio-political and socio-justice imperatives in that kind of work, as noted by Dagher (2020) in the same book.

There are, however, some exceptions to this scenario. Moura et al. (2020), for instance, discuss the importance of learning from perspectives and experiences of scientific work and development in the Global South to a more nuanced understanding of NOS is/can be, going beyond western socio-historical constructions of discourses around science. Along the same lines and drawing on Walls’ (2016) review of NOS research across the science education community in the USA, Waight et al. (2022) call our attention to the lack of consideration of racialised experiences of scientific development in how understandings of NOS are presented by most proposals in this area.

Dagher (2020), on the other hand, explores how one of the existing NOS proposals within science education scholarship—the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) (Erduran & Dagher, 2014)—can be supportive of such socio-political and socio-justice work. In particular, the author highlights the more prominent space occupied by the understanding of ‘science as a social-institutional system’ in this NOS framework, which includes notions such as science’s relationships with political power structures (e.g. colonialism, race, gender) and with financial systems (e.g. commodification and commercialisation). Such approach, according to Dagher (2020, p. 53), is then supportive of an exploration of socio-political and socio-justice imperatives by science teachers and science teacher educators because it can involve: ‘[e]xploring how scientific aims and values, methods, practices, knowledge, social ethos, political interests, financial considerations affect and are in turn affected by the local or global context, allows students to situate the gained knowledge in its proper perspective.’ However, such framework is still not centred on socio-political and social justice dimensions; indeed, Dagher (2020) recognises that most teaching and learning initiatives and empirical studies grounded on it remain focused on epistemic elements, less frequently engaging with socio-political and social justice-related ones.

What might still be missing here then is a more in-depth engagement with the notion of political epistemology mentioned earlier in this article, drawing on Moura et al. (2021), around how most NOS proposals deal with science’s socio-political and socio-justice entanglements. In other words, the acknowledgment that epistemic elements cannot be dissociated from such entanglements and, as such, that work with such NOS elements cannot be done without also engaging with, for instance, ‘science as a social-institutional system’. In this paper, I particularly seek to explore such possibility, hoping to contribute to the question recently raised by Hansson and Yacoubian (2020, p. 14) for the science education community: ‘What NOS concepts should be given priority in science teaching with the aim of empowering students in relation to societal issues? and What could such teaching look like?’. In attempting to do so, however, I am also mindful of Moura et al.’s (2021) comment around the importance of not essentialising science through unbalanced, reductionist and one-size-fits-all approaches to NOS. In the face of the rising misinformation and fake news (Osborne & Pimentel, 2023), mistrust in science (Allchin, 2020) and use of anti-science rhetoric by fascist movements (Galamba & Matthews, 2021), Moura et al. (2021, p. 506) remind us of the risks linked to reducing science only to its socio-political dimension:

With growth of studies on global warming and indication of scientists about the need to curb some economic activities (…) the arguments developed by critical thinkers and science studies, in general, came to be used to discredit science in relation to conclusions that would harm big capital. (…) in the words of Latour himself, it is necessary to rescue the authority of science. Nonetheless, this should not be achieved naively, as it would pave the way back to a positivist notion of neutral and depoliticized science. Indeed, it is necessary to recognize the social, cultural, and political dimensions of science. However, it is also necessary to emphasize that scientific practice cannot be reduced to its political and social dimensions, but, yes, there are times when science offers answers that must be heard and considered by society. For this, science needs to be portrayed more closely to its official practice.

In the next section, I then propose an approach to NOS teaching and learning grounded on a critical-decolonial perspective, which can be used to support the learning of school students and science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s social justice and socio-political entanglements.

4 NOS for Socio-scientific Challenges and Injustices: A Critical-Decolonial Proposal to NOS

As I have explored across this paper so far and, in particular, in the previous section, NOS has been recognised by many in the field of science education as an important element in supporting science learners’ and teachers’ understanding of socio-scientific challenges facing communities worldwide, from local to global scales. However, only recently NOS-related empirical studies and proposals have started to engage more explicitly and centrally with both science’s socio-political and social (in)justice entanglements as part of such learning about NOS, such as in Hansson & Yacoubian’s (2020) recent book. In particular, initiatives around NOS teaching and learning that are meaningfully inclusive and critical of science’s connections with issues of historical and contemporary socio-cultural and political injustices facing marginalised, minoritised, and non-mainstream communities—such as Global South and BIPOC communities, women, LGBTQIA + communities, etc. living anywhere in the world—are few across most Global North and English language-centric scholarship, a field still dominated by a small number of diverse voices (see Park et al., 2024; Walls, 2016).

To contribute to the expansion of NOS proposals into more explicit and central engagement with these socio-political and social (in)justices entanglements from a more diverse set of perspectives, in this section, I present a proposal for NOS teaching and learning grounded on Freirean Critical Pedagogy and on Decolonial Studies, both areas of academic thought and educational practice with roots outside mainstream Global North educational, philosophical and political traditions. Very few takes on NOS have engaged more concretely with these particular areas of scholarship, at least in the literature available in the English language, with some exceptions such as Bencze and Carter’s (2020) chapter—drawing on the Freirean notion of conscientização—and Moura’s (2020) chapter—drawing on a decolonial lens around the field of Cultural History of Science (CHS)—in Hansson & Yacoubian’s (2020) recent book on NOS. My proposal here is particularly inspired and informed by my ongoing experiences as a science teacher educator working directly and constantly with science schoolteachers in the Global North, but who also comes from a background first as a student and then as a science schoolteacher in the Global South. Such experiences informing this section are then both of informal nature—especially through discussions, examples, and informal lesson planning activities I have been developing alongside my different cohorts of student teachers and with experienced science teachers across the past years—and of academic ones, as collated across different teaching and learning initiatives around NOS at school and teacher education levels with which I have engaged in the past decade (e.g. Gandolfi, 2016, 2021; Park et al., 2024).

Freirean Critical Pedagogy is grounded on the seminal works of Paulo Freire (1921–1997), a Brazilian educator who dedicated his career (both as a literacy teacher and as a scholar) to issues of oppression, humanisation and emancipation in, through and around education across the Global South. Central concepts and ideas to his critique of mainstream educational practices—such as the banking model of education—and to his proposals for emancipatory, social justice-grounded education—such as critical consciousness, conscientização, and problem-posing—were outlined in his seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) and expanded on across his subsequent works, grounded on an understanding of education itself as a socio-political endeavour:

The teacher has to ask: what kind of politics am I doing in the classroom? That is, in favor of whom am I being a teacher? The teacher must also ask against whom I am educating; of course, the teacher must also be teaching in favor or something and against something. This ‘something’ is just the political project, the political profile of society, the political ‘dream’ (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 46).

Through grounding his perspective about issues such as oppression, humanisation and emancipation on this understanding of education and its communities (teachers, students, families, policymakers, etc.) as socio-political arenas and subjects, Freire then calls our attention to the very socio-political dimension embedded in science education (and in science more generally) that I have been arguing across this article. While unpacking all the potential contributions of Freirean pedagogy to science education is beyond the scope of this article,⁸ here I would like to foreground Freire’s particular engagement with the notion of ‘knowledge’—or his ‘theory of knowledge’—as crucial to my aim in this paper of (re)considering approaches to NOS from the standpoint of science’s socio-political and social (in)justice entanglements.

In Freirean Critical Pedagogy, knowledge is understood from the perspective of developing a critical reading of reality; that is, knowledge in science, for instance, is not simply a set of factual information about a certain phenomenon, but it also involves understanding the processes through which such information is generated, consolidated and disseminated, including the norms, values and interests underlying that information and the ability of distinguishing between, in Freire’s words, ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ across sets of information. According to Freire, only through a critical reading of reality—that is, understanding where, how and by whom different sets of knowledge come about—is that one can develop knowledge about something: “thus it becomes necessary, not precisely to deny the fact, but to ‘see it differently’”. (Freire, 1972, p. 52–53). This notion of ‘see[ing] it differently’ has important implications to those advocating the role that learning about NOS should play in the context of science education and, in particular, in the context of challenges of socio-scientific and social (in)justices nature. When considering, for instance, the contemporary challenges of misinformation, anti-science rhetoric, and also of mis-uses of and oppressions grounded on science across different parts of the world, in-depth understanding of NOS can be a vehicle for supporting people’s critical readings of these complex realities of science, engaging with scientific knowledges not as sets of facts, but ‘seeing them differently’, more critically, through the lens of knowledge generation, consolidation and dissemination, the norms, values and interests involved in such processes (and where, how and by whom they are driven).

Such development of a critical reading of reality is linked by Freire to another important concept in his Critical Pedagogy: critical consciousness, which can be generally understood as an in-depth understanding of how the world works in order to overcome social, economic and political contradictions of complex, unequal and oppressive realities. According to Freire, ‘the more the people unveil this challenging reality which is to be the object of their transforming action, the more critically they enter that reality. In this way they are consciously activating the subsequent development of their experience’ (Freire, 1972, p. 53). Such critical consciousness would be developed through a process of conscientização around a couple of central educational aims, such as power awareness (knowing that society can be made and remade by collective human action); critical literacy (analytic habits of thinking, reading, discussing, etc.); desocialisation (critically examination of widespread given social values, e.g. racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.); and self-education (overcoming anti-intellectualism).

Thus, one point that emerges from this Freirean perspective for those concerned with challenges of socio-scientific and social (in)justices nature within science education revolves around the roles that knowledge about NOS might play in, for instance, supporting students’ and science teachers’ development of power awareness and desocialisation in relation to science’s own socio-political and social justice entanglements. According to Morales-Doyle (2017) and Santos (2009), due to their inherent intertwined nature with socio-political and social (in)justice issues, SSIs and SJSIs are very good generative themes, in Freirean terms, to support NOS work. That is, SSIs and SJSIs are

Issues of social injustice that are important to students and their communities. Problem-posing educators use generative themes to organize curricula that ‘re-present’ these themes as problems for students and teachers to address together. Thus, Dos Santos suggests that science curriculum development may begin from key social issues in students’ lives as they intersect with natural, scientific, or technological phenomena (Morales-Doyle, 2017, p. 1036).

As such, problem-posing around generative themes (of SSIs and SJSIs) could be employed by science teachers and science teacher educators in NOS teaching and learning initiatives to support their students’ exploration of science’s socio-political and social (in)justice entanglements. However, a challenge that might still emerge from such notion is one of scale and connection in the face of our mainly globalised world: if Freirean generative themes are to be grounded on issues that are important to students and their local communities:

• 1. How can such locality be also connected to issues of global scale and nature with the aim of establishing a deeper understanding—or critical reading—of the layered nature of the scale (of time, place, actors, powers, etc.) behind many SSIs and SJSIs (e.g. climate degradation, scientific racism, etc.); and

• 2. What happens when certain SSIs and SJSIs are not visibly connected to and/or apparently not seen as being of relevance to certain students and their communities?

The second question, in particular, can be of great importance for science educators working in educational communities of relative privilege in relation to many SSIs and SJSIs: if, for instance, scientific racism does not directly affect the lives of a school community in England mainly composed of white middle/upper-class students, would this mean that this should not be a generative theme to be explored in such context with the help of a critical approach to NOS? Another example, to which I will return in the next section, can be that of electronic devices: if a school community based in the global North has very little contact with and/or local concerns about where the resources for powering their mobile phones, videogames, etc. come from, would this then dismiss the possibility of engaging with the implications to global South communities of such kind of technological consumption by these global North communities? To help with this reflection around ‘scale and connection’ at the intersection between NOS and SSIs/SJSIs, here I then wish to recall the important link between Freirean Critical Pedagogy and decolonial praxis (e.g. Gandolfi, 2023; Kato et al., 2023), particularly given the origins of the former in the global South and the intertwined nature of the socio-political and social justice dimensions that ground Freire’s work with (neo)colonial /imperialist endeavours across the world.

As a general overview, decolonial perspectives seek to make visible and then challenge the socio-political and social injustice legacies of historical and contemporary (neo)colonial/imperialist endeavours. As noted by several decolonial thinkers (e.g. Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Le Grange, 2023), such endeavours have played an important role in shaping, for instance, educational experiences and priorities, such as pedagogies and curricula, across the world for centuries. Hall (2008, p. 774), for instance, notes the importance of education to the British colonial endeavours across the world:

[In the British Empire] Africans, Indians and other indigenous populations had to be encouraged to be different kinds of people – people who would labour, people with wants and the desires of consumers – since for enlightenment thinkers the potential to live above the level of subsistence marked the distinction between ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’. They also needed to become people with particular kinds of selves, disciplined to be subject to others. One site for the making of those selves was in the formal processes of education: the bringing into being of new subjects and new subjectivities.

The legacies of such processes, often named ‘colonialities’, are ‘maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). In the case of education, philosophies, practices and structures that were central to colonial education have been shown to still shape how we approach, for instance, knowledge and curricular practices across many parts of the world through perspectives still grounded on:

• Colonial diffusionism: narratives around western Europe, the USA and other global North groups being the centre of enlightened ideas and universal knowledges and experiences, with the rest of the world being framed as backwards and stagnant in terms of knowledge; this also includes symbolic control over the origins, values and relevance of ‘correct’ knowledge and practices (Fanon, 1963; Hall, 2008; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

• Reinforcement of dichotomies: narratives that create opposition, grounded on rationality discourses, between the culture of colonised communities (local, indigenous, subjective, irrational) and the knowledge of the colonial powers (global, universal, homogenous, rational and neutral) (Fanon, 1963; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

• Epistemic injustices and epistemicides: the erasing of non-European/non-western/non-global North knowledges and practices from global and local histories and contemporaries narratives about knowledge and practice development on the grounds of them being backwards and wrong (Fricker, 2007).

In the field of science education, reflections on the legacies of such colonial diffusionism, reinforcement of dichotomies, epistemic injustices and epistemicides, among others, to how we approach knowledge and curriculum development have started to emerge in recent years (Author, 2021; Carter, 2017; Kato et al., 2023; Moura et al., 2020; Rezende & Ostermann, 2020). Such work has been mainly grounded on the recognition that science itself has also played a significant role in (neo)colonial endeavours, being often linked to how colonised communities (especially in the global South), their knowledges and their lands were exploited sources for the advancement of the so-called Western Modern Science (WMS), as noted by Roy (2018, n.p.), a historian of science:

Science was itself built upon a global repertoire of wisdom, information, and living and material specimens collected from various corners of the colonial world. Extracting raw materials from colonial mines and plantations went hand in hand with extracting scientific information and specimens from colonised people.

As such, science’s diverse entanglements with past and ongoing (neo)colonial processes are themselves crucial to understanding NOS, even if still largely under-explored by NOS scholarship, with a few exceptions, such as the NOS framework proposed by Erduran and Dagher (2014), which has colonialisms as one of its elements. However, what Decolonial Studies call our attention to is that such entanglements are not simply yet another element in a very long list of NOS aspects, but they have instead strong and longstanding connections to many of the socio-scientific challenges and injustices facing communities worldwide. Let us go back to the two brief examples I raised above on scientific racism and on electronic devices and over-consumption: what connects, for instance, a relatively privileged mainly white school community in England to the socio-scientific challenges and injustices facing, for instance, Black communities also in England or communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are exactly the socio-cultural, onto-pistemolical, and economic legacies of the diverse colonial projects that have shaped the relationships between such communities across the centuries. Going back to Freirean Critical Pedagogy, students’ and teachers’ conscientização around science and its nature (NOS) would need to be inevitably intertwined with understanding its historical and contemporary socio-political connections with (neo)colonial /imperialist endeavours across the world.

So, what would an approach to teaching and learning about NOS grounded on this critical-decolonial position about science look like? Here, I do not seek to propose a completely new framework to NOS teaching and learning, as many have already been developed across the last decades by other colleagues (e.g. Allchin, 2012; Lederman et al., 2002; Erduran & Dagher, 2014), with their different purposes, degrees of specificity and target audiences (teachers, curriculum makers, etc.). Instead, I seek to call attention to the relevance to SSIs and SJSIs of some crucial understandings of NOS that are often absent or underrepresented in most initiatives around NOS teaching and learning, but which can be made more visible through a critical-decolonial lens.

In the items that follow, I then outline my proposal for what this critical-decolonial lens can look like—or make visible—in NOS teaching and learning, especially in relation to issues socio-scientific challenges and injustices.

• 1. Understanding science as intertwined with social, political and moral legacies and obligations

  Here, a critical-decolonial perspective on NOS would ask of us to explicitly engage with the intertwined nature of science’s epistemological, socio-political and axiological dimensions, in close connection to Moura et al.’s (2021) argument around the importance of the concept of political epistemology to our understanding of the hybridized relationship between science and society within SinC. Such perspective also has the potential to support science educators exposing the myth of science’s neutrality—as also seen in Waight et al.’s (2022) proposal for an anti-racist approach to Nature of Technology (NOT)—which was largely built across the European Enlightenment period in close connection with the strategy of reinforcement of dichotomies, especially through discourses grounded on naïve rationality (Quijano, 2007).

• 2. Recognising that complex socio-historical processes impact the production of knowledge in science, who benefits (and who does not) from such knowledge and who is supported to be part of these knowledge communities

  In this case, a critical-decolonial perspective on NOS would prompt us to critically explore socio-historical processes around scientific development (often done with the help of History of Science in contexts of science education) and their legacies to the intertwined nature between science and society, as noted in the previous item. In particular, we can further unpack how current socio-scientific challenges and injustices have not only geographical, political, and cultural dimensions, but also historical ones. As recently noted by Moura et al. (2023, p. 673–674), while exploring notions of injustices and crisis often calls for a socio-political dimension, they also have a historical dimension, which is sometimes overlooked by certain SinC initiatives: 

  The political context of these works and the proposals of sociopolitical action are contemporaries, which thereby overlooks key historical features of present injustices and inequalities since the historical politics of Global North and South are not present in these analyses. We sustain that if we understand science as a set of practices instead of a reified knowledge, it is fundamental to understand how these practices changed throughout time to act consciously and critically (and thus, politically) in the world.

  In this scenario, we then understand contemporary challenges such as environmental crisis and degradation not only as something that has implications to our contemporary times and to our futurity, but also as something that has been happening and impacting the lives and natural worlds across, for instance, global South communities for centuries now.

• 3. Addressing the insularity of narratives about science, scientific development and voices as emanating only from the Global North

  Following from the previous item, a critical-decolonial exploration of the socio-historical processes that have been grounding the development of scientific knowledges, practices and communities across different places, times, etc. allows us to more meaningfully engage with the diversity of knowledges, practices and ontologies about the world that have been central to scientific (and technological) development, both historically and nowadays, but which often do not receive equal attention from our mainstream narratives about how science and NOS. Linked to Waight et al.’s (2022, p. 1507) proposal around ‘amplifying asset-based counterstories’, what we have here is the potential to delve deeper into how different communities, peoples and their knowledges and practices have been playing important roles in increasing our collective understanding about the world (Gandolfi, 2021), and into how they can play an important part in addressing current and future socio-scientific challenges and injustices: for instance, in the case of indigenous and land-based knowledges (e.g. agroecology in Brazil, as explored by Kato et al., 2023) and their well-known relevance to tackling environmental crisis and degradation.⁹

• 4. Recognising oppressive aspects within historical and contemporary scientific (and technological) developments

  Drawing on Freire’s notion of critical reading of reality—in particular, the notions of power awareness and desocialisation—and on a decolonial lens around the oppressive, unjust and/or inequality-affirming roles that scientific knowledge and the scientific community itself have played and can still be found playing within certain SSIs and SJSIs (e.g. scientific racism, over-exploitation of natural resources, parachute research, etc.), we can explore NOS with the aim of both unveiling these roles and reflecting on how science, its practices and voices can be reconsidered to challenge such roles. As recently noted by Bencze and Carter (2020, p. 74–75):

  Educating students about potentially problematic power relations, as seems applicable to pro-capitalist dispositifs described here, may, therefore, represent a kind of conscientization - a critical consciousness about a (and/or one’s own) social milieu (…) Accordingly, as Paulo Freire (1970) recommended, to be free of potential oppressors (including science education scholars), citizens need to be given full control over ‘praxis’; that is, critical, reflective, practice.

  That is, we can expand our exploration of NOS by considering how different it could look like when we acknowledge the complexities, limitations and socially unjust practices and systems that emerge from science’s current entanglement with, for instance:

  • Corporate power, neoliberal systems of funding and unequal geopolitical presences and powers within scientific and technological development, which have been persistently shaping the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, ‘cans’ and ‘cannots’ of science, as recently made very visible by unequal participation and access across the world to the outcomes of the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccines.

  • Issues of rights, copyright, intellectual property and regulation within scientific and technological development, as exemplified by practices of access to, regulation of and privatisation/monetisation of biodiversity across the global South—see, for instance, the case of biodiversity prospecting across Mexican communities (Shebitz & Oviedo, 2018).

  Such critical reading of this reality of scientific practices and development (i.e. of NOS) can then support the reconstruction work I mentioned earlier in this paper: as prompted by Waight et al. (2022), considering what NOS currently is and then what NOS could/needs to be to dismantle existing injustices built into its histories, practices, systems, etc. might be an important way forward for those of us concerned about such complexities around people’s engagement with and in science across the world.

• 5. Engaging more actively and in solidarity with the cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been most impacted by socio-scientific challenges and injustice

  To support the (re)consideration of what NOS is and what it needs to be in relation to socio-scientific challenges and injustices, as proposed in the previous item, engaging with cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been not only made invisible through the history of science (see item #3), but also positioned in the periphery of current scientific development, knowledge, practices and outcomes (e.g. formerly colonised communities in the global South, and BIPOC communities, women, LGBTQIA + people, etc. living anywhere in the world), also becomes central. What might science—and, as a result, its ‘nature’—look like if such cases, voices, and examples were to be heard and considered when we think (and teach) about scientific development? As recently asked for by Bazzul (2020), might we learn something new, plural, and/or transdisciplinary about NOS—what it is and/or what it could be—if we were to consider, for instance, the role played by the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) activist group in the US during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in 1980s that was affecting primarily gay men, as further explored by Tilsen (2023)? Or how the Landless Workers Movement (MST) engages with knowledge and practice development around agroecology in the context of lands rights, food production and biodiversity in Brazil (Kato et al., 2023)? Exploring how such cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been at the centre of many socio-scientific challenges and injustices might then support an approach to NOS teaching and learning that goes beyond traditional, one-size-fits NOS frameworks, potentially offering us more meaningful insights into how science can work from more socially just perspectives.

5 Bringing a Critical-Decolonial Approach to NOS to Science Teaching: Some Brief Examples

In the previous section, I presented a critical-decolonial proposal for NOS which I hope can support the learning of school students and/or science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s social justice and socio-political entanglements, in particular, at the intersection between NOS and socio-scientific challenges and injustices. However, it is worth noting here that most teaching and learning initiatives related to both SSIs and more socio-political and social justice informed approaches to NOS have been happening in the specific disciplinary field of Biology, as seen in Khishfe’s (2023) recent review of this area. That is, other scientific disciplines such as Chemistry, Physics and Geosciences seem to be still lagging in this area, despite their historical and contemporary links to socio-scientific challenges and injustices (Author, 2021; Morales-Doyle, 2017). Nevertheless, if we aim for NOS to be more central in how socio-scientific challenges and injustices are explored in science teaching and learning, my view is that work beyond topics normally associated with Biology needs to be further supported. Therefore, in this section, I seek to illustrate how such work, when grounded on a critical-decolonial approach, can (and should) be done across diverse science disciplinary areas. In order to do so, I first present an example that could be linked to Chemistry and, potentially, Physics lessons: metals, mining and quest for resources.

As noted in the previous section, an important element of both historical and contemporary scientific developments has been related to the notion of ‘resources’, particularly raw materials extracted from the natural world (e.g. minerals, plants and other living specimens) or developed through advancements in the fields of Inorganic Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, and Materials Sciences. Several communities across the world and across a wide range of periods have engaged with knowledge, technical and technological developments related, for instance, to mineral resources, such as the gold mining techniques developed in ancient Egypt and Nubia (current area of Sudan) (Klemm & Klemm, 2013); the metallurgical processes around the Wootz steel developed across what is now known as southern India (Srinivasan & Ranganath, 2004); the cooper, gold and silver mining undertaken by indigenous peoples from across what we know call South America (Alvim & Figueiroa, 2007; Author, 2016; Silva, 2004);¹⁰ and the mining of mercury from cinnabar ore for medicinal and ornamental purposes across China (Liu, 2005). Drawing on item no. 3 from my proposed critical-decolonial lens, such examples can then be starting points for addressing the insularity of narratives about science, scientific development and voices as emanating only from the global North through an asset-based perspective (Waight, 2022) that not only recognises these groups’ historical contributions to this area, but which can also prompt explicit NOS-related discussions around, for instance, how and why different communities might have developed different knowledges, techniques and practices around metal extraction, manufacturing and usages, questions which also have strongly links to the often called epistemological aspects of NOS (Erduran & Dagher, 2014).

Moving forward within this topic, in their quote first presented in the previous section, Roy (2018) also reminds us of how such long-standing quest for resources has been an important element of colonial projects, where ‘extracting raw materials from colonial mines and plantations went hand in hand with extracting scientific information and specimens from colonised people’ (n.p.). Other historians and sociologists of science (and environmental studies) have also similarly argued about the intrinsic, complex and longstanding connections between the area of mineral exploitation and the occupation, extraction and exploitation of lands, materials and indigenous peoples (among other communities) in the quest for access to knowledge about and domination over mineral resources (e.g. Castree et al., 2018; Silva, 2004, Smith, 2011). That is the case, for instance, of research into the colonisation of the Americas and their link to metal prospection and metallurgy between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g. Alvim & Figueiroa, 2007; Author, 2016; Silva, 2004). So, when we explore topics related to metals, minerals, mining and extraction—as so often found across chemistry curricula across the world—is this particular side of history [item no. 2 from my proposed critical-decolonial lens] and its legacies to our contemporary reliance on overexploitation of lands and peoples for continuous access to such kinds of resources [item no. 4 from my proposed critical-decolonial lens] visible in how we talk about and explore NOS?

Let us take here, for instance, another more contemporary example that could be brough into chemistry and/or physics lessons: the lithium-ion batteries, which are key for most portable electronic devices widely used across modern societies, such as laptops, mobile phones and electric cars, and whose development has been recently recognised by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.¹¹ Whilst these batteries have been hailed by many in the area of science and technology, including by the Nobel Prize committee, for their potential to help addressing a crucial global SSI—i.e. the energy transition from fossil fuels (as these batteries can store energy from solar and wind power, for instance)—less attention has been paid, including in science and environmental education across the global North, to where the usual metallic electrode elements in these batteries (mainly lithium and cobalt) come from and how they are exploited; that is, its ‘context of production’, as noted by Levinson (2018).

When we look at such context of production from a critical-decolonial lens, we find an overwhelming reliance on global South contexts as sources of these elements (USGS, 2012),¹² which can be tied to the legacy of historical material and labour networks built during colonial periods that placed lands and peoples in those contexts as sources for scientific and technological development of the colonial powers [items no. 2 and 4 from my proposed critical-decolonial lens]. In particular, the cobalt needed for these batteries comes mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—where around 50% of the world’s cobalt reserves can be currently found—whilst the lithium comes mainly from the South America’s ‘Lithium Triangle’ (across Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, with around 58% of the world’s reserve) (USGS, 2012), both areas with deep and complex histories of colonial exploitation, indigenous oppression for access to land and resources, and challenges to the emancipation of local communities around their engagement with both potential benefits and negative impacts of scientific and technological development, as recently explored by the Amnesty International (2023) in the case of the DRC and by Ahmad (2020) in the case of the Lithium Triangle.

Following from the example above, we cannot forget the similar case of Coltan, also in the DRC, a mineral which is the key source of tantalum and niobium for microchip production worldwide, and a context of production that has been implicated in several issues of social injustices for decades now (Ojewale, 2022). As further noted by Levinson (2018, p. 531–532) in relation to this case:

What makes the collection and flow of huge amounts of data, crucial for the development of scientific knowledge, is gained at the expense of those who are excluded from the possibility of using, and gaining from such knowledge. The event encapsulated in the production of digital technologies is underpinned by mechanisms, real to those who suffer oppression at their actualisation, which incorporate physicochemical, social and economic mechanisms entangled with each other.

As such, a critical-decolonial approach to NOS around these examples could prompt further engagement with items no. 2 and 4, as noted above, making visible in the context of science education the that complex socio-historical processes impact the production of knowledge in science, who benefits (and who does not) from such knowledge, and who is supported to be part of these knowledge communities [item no. 2] and the oppressive aspects within historical and contemporary scientific (and technological) development [item no. 4].

Examples like these ones of metals with important links to the production of electronic devices and with energy transition could support even further work on the two remaining items from the critical-decolonial lens: no. 1 and 5. In the former case, considering the intertwined nature between the lithium-ion batteries and energy transition around environmental crisis and climate change, what would be the potential approach to the much-needed scientific and technological development in this area when we also consider science’s social, political and moral legacies and obligations [item no. 1] to the global South communities involved in this arena? What might science’s work in this area—i.e. NOS—needs to look like to account for issues of deep social injustices associated with it? Here, one way of supporting engagement with such reflections in science lessons would be to also engage more actively and in solidarity with the cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been most impacted by socio-scientific challenges and injustices [item no. 5] by learning from these communities and how they might already be responding to such contexts of production. As noted by the Amnesty International (2023) in the case of the DRC and by Ahmad (2020) in the case of the Lithium Triangle, local responses and initiatives led by the communities in these areas have already started to attempt to counter such scenarios of unjust scientific and technological developments, particularly in relation how lands rights, copyright, intellectual property and regulation happen in such cases. So, what can teachers and students of science learn—including about NOS—from further exploring how these encounters between scientific endeavours and global South communities have been happening in concrete, real-life cases?

The ideas presented here through the example of metals, mining and the quest for resources are only illustrative suggestions for how a critical-decolonial lens brought into NOS teaching and learning might help science educators and their students delve deeper into understanding and reflecting on challenges and injustices of socio-scientific nature. As I alluded to across this article, many other topics across different science subjects could be explored under this perspective. One could, for instance, consider how this approach could help expanding discussions around the role of natural resources in the fields of Botany and Zoology: in the mapping, studying and extraction of natural resources and of local indigenous knowledges on behalf of colonial projects [items no. 1 and 3], as exemplified by well-known natural history expeditions across the Americas, Africa and Asia (Ashby & Machin, 2021; Das & Lowe, 2018); and in issues of lands rights copyright and intellectual property in the case of biodiversity research and conservation across the Global South [items no. 2, 4 and 5], as exemplified by cases of biodiversity prospection (e.g. Shebitz & Oviedo, 2018).

Or one could delve deeper into the points raised above about the lithium-ion batteries in relation to energy generation and transition in physics lessons. In this case, we could explore the potential implications of research and technological development in the so-called Green Energy sector driven by the global North (often privatised and for-profit endeavours) to unequal distribution of the benefits and the impacts of such transition across the global South [item no. 4], as seen in energy colonialism through occupation of space across indigenous lands and communities in South America, such as in the case of renewable energy endeavours such as hydroelectric power plants (Sánchez Contreras et al., 2023). From here, we could then explore how these communities across the global South have themselves been addressing thinking, research and practices around energy transition and divestment from fossil fuels outside energy colonialism endeavours [item no. 5].

Going back to the curricular area of Biology, such lens could also be helpful in exploring not only historical contributions from diverse communities to medical knowledge and development [item no. 3], but also the misuses of biomedical knowledge and research to legitimatise particular projects of classification, othering, hierarchisation and dehumanisation of certain communities both historically and contemporarily [items no. 1 and 4] (Gandolfi, 2024). For instance, as extensively discussed by Saini (2019), eugenics occupied an important space in Biology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, even though now discredited, it still resonates with and has been used to ground the return of scientific racism discourses and morally ambiguous approaches to DNA data extraction and use (Chan et al., 2022), such as in the recent case of studies based on Uyghur’s genetic data.¹³ Still on this biomedical area, recognising the legacies of such histories and more contemporary cases to how marginalised communities engage with biomedical research and knowledge nowadays (Allchin, 2020) [item no. 2] and engaging more actively and in solidarity with their voices, concerns and experiences [item no. 5] might be one helpful strategy to (re)consider what kind of changes science might need to go through in how it engages with such communities in order to address the ongoing concerns that scientists and science educators have around mistrust and anti-science discourses (Gandolfi, 2024).

6 Closing Remarks

Across this article, I sought to argue about the role that NOS can have in science education in the context of growing challenges of socio-scientific and social injustice nature, following on the footsteps of important contributions to this area made by other colleagues (e.g. Carter, 2017; Levinson, 2018; Bencze et al., 2020). In particular, I hoped to contribute to the expansion of existing proposals around NOS teaching and learning into more in-depth and explicit engagement with science’s socio-political and social justice entanglements (Santos, 2009; Bazzul, 2020; Hansson & Yacoubian, 2020; Moura et al., 2021; Valladares, 2021). In doing so, I was also seeking to contribute to recent questions posed at the intersection of NOS and social justice by Hansson and Yacoubian (2020, p. 14): ‘What NOS concepts should be given priority in science teaching with the aim of empowering students in relation to societal issues? and What could such teaching look like?’

To this purpose, I proposed in this article a perspective for NOS teaching and learning grounded on Freirean Critical Pedagogy and Decolonial thinking and praxis—or a critical-decolonial perspective around NOS—that can be used to support the learning of school students and/or science teachers’ own professional learning around science’s social justice and socio-political entanglements when reflecting about the ongoing challenges and injustices posed by several socio-scientific issues facing our local and global communities. However, my aim here was not to offer an ‘one-size-fits-all’ new framework for NOS, but instead to propose some guiding ideas that could be centred in NOS teaching and learning to foreground such socio-political and social justice entanglements, namely:

• 1. Understanding science as intertwined with social, political and moral legacies and obligations.

• 2. Recognising that complex socio-historical processes impact the production of knowledge in science, who benefits (and who does not) from such knowledge and who is supported to be part of these knowledge communities.

• 3. Addressing the insularity of narratives about science, scientific development and voices as emanating only from the global North.

• 4. Recognising oppressive aspects within historical and contemporary scientific (and technological) developments.

• 5. Engaging more actively and in solidarity with the cases, examples, voices and experiences of communities that have been most impacted by socio-scientific challenges and injustices.

This article is not a fully empirical one (e.g. a classroom-based study) and, as such, this proposed critical-decolonial approach to NOS would benefit from further empirical insights into its relevance to different educational levels (school, teacher education, etc.), socio-cultural contexts (e.g. global North, global South) and curricula across the world. However, here, I have drawn on my ongoing experiences as a science teacher educator in the global North in all the illustrative examples I introduced in the previous section, which are all informed by my own lessons in initial and continuous science teacher education programmes and by lesson planning activities (for school science) I have been facilitating amongst my different cohorts of student teachers in England across the past years. My aim in this article was then to offer some theoretical and practical inspirations to other science educators who, like me, have been seeking to ground their teaching practices around NOS on more socio-politically and social justice-informed perspectives that contribute to our students’ in-depth and critical understanding of the ongoing challenges and injustices of socio-scientific nature facing our local and global communities.