Hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses in science education scholarship from the perspective of post-critical curricular theories

Abstract

Although in-depth educational reviews can be carried out building on curricular theories, the appropriation of this knowledge by science education scholarship can still be considered timid. In this paper, our intention is to work on this interface; we first introduce basic concepts from the main curricular frameworks and bring possible corresponding curricular emphases assumed by science education. Then, we highlight the post-critical curricular perspectives to problematize discursive demands and articulations as part of processes of struggle for the fixation of particular meanings in the field of science education. With emphasis on discourse theory and categories such as discourse, articulation, hegemony and antagonism, we sought to identify hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses defended in the struggle for curricular proposals of science education and teacher-training in Brazilian scholarship and in some international examples. In our analysis, the traditional and critical conceptions of science education were discursively identified as antagonist, in a scenario of uncertainties and lack of fundamentals, without, therefore, either one being able to represent a single and definitive intervention. Traditional curricular and teacher-training projects were seen as products of discursive articulations in defense of the universalism of West Modern Science (knowledge itself) and of the technical rationality. Scientific literacy with a social function and a critical teacher-training proposal were identified as antagonist to traditional curricular discourses and approximated to educational perspectives that defend more generic and contextual educational competences (knowledge to do something). However, recent curricular discourses adequate to the new configurations of social organization that tend to blur the antagonism between these discourses in the name of social justice and democratic equality, from a post-critical point of view, create a paradox: If these demands are treated as prescription and control, they will expel all differences and uniqueness of education, rendering meaningless education, justice and democracy, which are constructs that require alterity to exist in the social.