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Stepping into STS literature: Some implications for promoting socioecological justice through science education

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Abstract

Inspired by Torres-Olave and Bravo’s original paper, entitled ‘Facing Neoliberalism through Dialogic Spaces as Sites of Hopes in Science Education: Experiences of two Self-Organized Communities’, the present essay considers potential contexts to resist neoliberal models of science education. This paper discusses affordances of themes and notions from domains of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to inform STEPWISE-informed pedagogies (Bencze 2017) that engage with (bio)political analyses of technoscience for social and environmental justice. Notions from STS highlighted include: ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, ‘emotive actants’ and ‘anthropocentric temporalities’. We illustrate these in relation to contemporary science and technology products and practices to highlight futures and subjects that they foreground and foreclose. We end by considering how such STS notions may extend areas of interest within science education (scholarship), through: 1) situating fields of (techno)science within their social and political sphere, 2) meeting future studies that seek to problematize individual perceptions of futures, 3) considering different forms of environmental activism beyond (personal) actions and 4) contributing to an ‘affective’ science education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Canada

    Sarah El Halwany, Majd Zouda & John Lawrence Bencze

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  1. Sarah El Halwany
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  3. John Lawrence Bencze
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Correspondence to Sarah El Halwany.

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This review essay addresses issues raised in Betzabé Torres-Olave and Paulina Bravo González (2021) entitled, Facing neoliberalism through dialogic spaces as sites of hopes in science education: experiences of two self-organised communities (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10042-y)

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El Halwany, S., Zouda, M. & Bencze, J.L. Stepping into STS literature: Some implications for promoting socioecological justice through science education. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 16, 1083–1096 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10026-y

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