Abstract
How should we think about the body in science education? What ought it mean to be alive and live within epistemologies and pedagogies? What does it mean to be human in science education? In response to Auli Arvola Orlander and Per-Olof Wickram’s article, this essay explores some of the possibilities and questions that the body evokes in science education research and practice. Drawing on selected theorizing in science education, environmental education and science and technology studies, the author suggests that we should strive to be more in tune with the seemingly mundane corporeal aspects of our performances and representations. This shift in attention has the potential to open up research, policy and practice agendas associated with relationships between pedagogies and embodied and disembodied knowledge and knowing. Such agendas might start by considering situated and embodied emotions in science education.
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Notes
Often the metaphor of the body-as-meat is used during these discussions. Although it bears only tangential relevance to these discussions, as a vegetarian I am reminded of Homer Simpson’s comment—that if God hadn’t intended us to eat animals why did he make them out of meat? This becomes even more alarming from a Cartesian perspective, which reduces all human bodies to meat as well!
I think this Mind and body metaphor is thought provoking—conceptually to grasp out, and grasp out conceptually.
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Forum response to Orlander and Wickman (2011). Bodily experiences in secondary school biology.
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Alsop, S. The body bites back!. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 6, 611–623 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-011-9328-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-011-9328-4