This response to Blue Mahy and Maria Wallace’s article, The science-ethics nexus: a speculative posthumanist examination of secondary school science, was generated from a series of conversations between the two authors of the response, Rishi Krishnamoorthy and Sara Tolbert, over video conferencing (Zoom), emails, and informal chats. We have prepared our response in the form of a metalogue. The metalogue is an ideal format for a ‘conversation about some problematic subject’ (Bateson 1972, p. 12). Amber Yared and Heather Davis (2014) highlight the potential of a metalogic method as one which.

emerges through and with the content, a virtual space that always contains the possibility to respond, to step back. But we are often so caught up in goals, objectives, in the desire to communicate an idea – this idea – that this opportunity remains virtual….[A metalogue] is the art of picking up the feeling of a room, finding a vehicle to express both the actual content and the intuitive dimension – excitement, boredom, frustration – amplifying these intangible qualities of education and knowledge in a way that brings them to the fore and begins to question the methods and procedures of how, even in our most radical interview or conversation-based pedagogical experiments, there is something missing – something in the way ideas are felt, embodied, emerge from the gut….What the metalogue displays is the way in which knowledge production is inherently a relational process, a process of testing and sending out feelers to see what might catch hold, be picked up, or be played with….The metalogue is the deliberate and self-conscious experiment with the relational aspect of learning. This recursive circularity, like breath moving in and out of the body, is a kind of dance. (n.p.)

In responding to Blue and Maria’s call to think together about what it means to really attend, with care, to ethics in the science curriculum, we found ourselves engaging in exactly this type of self-conscious relational experiment as a ‘kind of dance,’ exposing vulnerabilities and unknowns, exploring opportunities (often through ‘failure’) for other possible worlds-in-relation. We ground our discussion in experiences of simultaneous disappointment and possibility that are always part of ethical engagements. The centerpiece of our metalogue emerged not from particular goals or objectives or from the ‘desire to communicate an idea’ (Yared and Davis 2014, n.p.), but rather from Sara’s ongoing ‘troubles’ related to teaching ethics and science in preservice teacher education classrooms. These experiences, we think, reveal the many necessary and unfinished complexities of teaching about ethics in science.

Sara: I guess what you (Rishi) and I have been grappling with is, what does it mean to address or incorporate ‘ethics’ in the science curriculum, when ethics (in feminist, anticolonial, or critical posthumanist worldviews) are already always a part of ‘doing’ science? How does the idea of ‘addressing ethics’ represent–or bring to the forefront–a tension in and of itself?

It makes me think a little bit about the tensions I experience along the same lines of trying to embed ethics in my preservice science teacher education courses. It's not always explicit. It's part of the fabric of everything that we do, but sometimes lingers below the surface. In thinking about how to ‘teach’ about ethical entanglements, I’m aware that I’m also always already making (often uneasy) ethical decisions, and also always implicated in the production of something (or someone/s) as Other or not. So I’m constantly asking myself why am I doing what I’m doing, and how did I come to make those ethical decisions (agential cuts) in particular ways (Barad 2007). Because as someone with positional/institutional power, how I communicate to students about what is the nature of an ‘object’ or ‘being’ involves making a powered cut, and always entails ethical decisions.

For example, even when we talk about ‘Western’ science as ‘Western,’ or as we come across that phrasing in our readings, it is inevitably a powered cut that, on the one hand seeks to delineate the cultural and social situatedness of ‘Science,’ on the other hand doesn’t in and of itself acknowledge ‘Science’s’ entangled colonial histories of knowledge appropriation and exploitation—such that what gets counted as ‘Western’ science includes knowledge that has originated among ‘non-Western’ and Indigenous peoples and place. Also, as Liboiron (2021) points out, the ‘Western’ vs. ‘non-Western’ science dichotomy doesn’t account for the marginalization of other ‘Western’ knowledge systems (e.g., midwifery). This Western–non-Western framing reinforces colonial logics, while it simultaneously acts to disrupt those logics by acknowledging that, globally, communities other than Euro-Western nations also have/do science. The terminology represents an ongoing tension. In another example, when we do stream studies, in which the primary water quality assessment tool is macroinvertebrate sampling, we calculate the pollution tolerance index based on the number of ‘pollution tolerant’ vs. ‘pollution intolerant organisms.’ We are engaging with colonial/powered forms of science and analysis because the mere idea of ‘pollution tolerance’ is colonialism in science (for more on this discussion, see Liboiron 2021).

And so, there are a lot of different things that are going on here, in my mind, that sometimes do and sometimes don't get translated in the sort of half hour to hour that I have for a class with my students.

Part one: a dissection cuts like a Knife

Over the past couple of years, I’ve created and refined a series of modules on ethics as part of the science methods/curriculum course for preservice teachers, to bring these issues to the forefront. But then I don't want to just tell them like, you know, this is what ethics are in science, this is how you should think about ethics. I mean, the idea is that we need to teach students what we mean by ethics in science, and there needs to be a section on ethics in the curriculum, yet in reality, as we’ve often discussed, everything in sciences is an ethical entanglement. So meanwhile, we're making these decisions all the time or these cuts or whatever it is around like, ‘this is ethics in science,’ but yet all of it has to do with ethics. And the very idea of creating modules on ethics sort of works against the notion that ethics are always already a part of what we do. But I stay with this pedagogical trouble (Harway 2016) because for me it feels important to make time and space in our modules to really dig into this.

So in creating these modules on ethics I was like okay, how do we talk about this, how do I make it more explicit without reducing the complexities, and so what I did for one module was I had preservice teachers read a transcript from a 20-min section of a recorded focus group with three high school students talking about dissection. In the focus group discussion, these three students are reflecting on and discussing the complexity of their experiences after participating in a dissection activity in their high school science class. The ethico-political dimensions of dissection in school science, as communicated by the youth in this focus group, is something I’ve written about before (Tolbert 2019) and yet it's something that I'm still grappling with. But in this case for the modules with preservice teachers, I didn’t want them to read the chapter I had written. I wanted them instead to analyze how the high school students were ‘thinking-feeling’ around this complicated issue of classroom dissection.

What I thought was so interesting about the focus group conversation and what the students were doing in that case was really trying to kind of identify the ways in which they experienced ethical conflicts around doing science. And they were drawing from their own visceral responses to the classroom event as ‘resources’ for working through the ethics of it–which actually provides a tangible contrast to what Blue and Maria highlight as a traditional masculinist approach to ethical reasoning solely grounded in ‘reason’ that currently guides the Australian science curriculum.

The episode that the preservice teachers analyzed wasn't, you know, how we traditionally understand or think about ethics in dissection, where some students refuse to do it because for them it’s unethical and some students do it because they don’t experience it as an ethical conflict. In the case of the high school students in the focus group, who were students in their first and second years of high school, that's actually not what was happening at all, they weren't even saying like, ‘oh, the whole thing is unethical,’ they were actually saying, ‘I get that our teacher wanted to help us have this experience which is something not usually available to us,’ and they commented that she worked really hard to get cats for them to dissect in groups [through a crowdfunding campaign], and they expressed appreciation for her efforts multiple times throughout the discussion. [Note: all names in the transcript excerpts except for my name are pseudonyms]:

Nicole: [The dissection] definitely gave us a …

Snoopy: Nice experience. ‘Cuz, what Ms. Bell was saying, is we usually, we don’t get to dissect as freshmen [first year] in high school.

Nicole: I don’t know how, she told us we weren’t going to dissect at the beginning of the year. Then we … It definitely got us ready for the real world. Some of us are going to have jobs like that. It’s the first real thing I’ve seen in high school. I’ve seen real things but the first … eye opening kind of a thing. Like people do this for a living. This is how you do it. They have to do this kind of stuff every day.

Snoopy: Kind of got people thinking about maybe … it was kind of a hands on thing. If you want to do this, this is how it’s going to be. You got to experience if you want to do this when you get older.

(Tolbert 2019)

But, yet, they still didn't feel okay about it. One of them, Nicole, was rageful about the way it was done and the fact that the remains [of the cats] were just thrown away at the end, and it didn't feel sacred. She didn't use that word, but that's what she was saying. There was no ritual. It didn't feel sacred to her. She anguished that she ‘wanted to bury the heart, at least.’ And then there was Marcos (pseudonym), who was just like, ‘that was cool, I thought it was great, I loved it.’

Nicole: Well, I didn’t do any dissecting. I was watching. It’s so sad.

Sara: What about it made you feel sad?

Nicole: I wanted to bury its heart at least. Ms. Bell cut open its heart and I was sad, like that’s sad. It’s really horrible. …She [Ms. Bell] was ‘no, we’re going to just throw it all away.’

…

Nicole: But I did definitely notice kids were much more open to the opportunity once they saw other kids [do it]… Like some of the leaders, like Marcos, wanted to do cat. So all the basketball guys – I’m sorry, but they did – they were like, ‘ok, fine we’ll go help you do it.’

Sara: Was that because they didn’t really want to necessarily do it themselves?

Nicole: I don’t think anybody really wanted to do it at first, except for four kids.

Marcos: I wanted to do it.

Snoopy: He’s one of the four that wanted to do it.

(Tolbert 2019).

Rishi: And Marcos didn't seem to have much else to say (or vocalize) at all about it…?

Sara: Yeah. He didn’t say much at all. But Nicole, who was so conflicted about it—she was really going through a whole process. During the focus group discussion she seemed surprised by how angry she was about it, and she was cursing and then she was sort of like, ‘I'm sorry I’m cursing,’ and I was like ‘no it's okay,’ you know. She just felt really deeply about this and then brought in some of her own experiences about going to Mexico to see family and talking about having seen pigs roasted for traditional celebrations and meals, and contrasting those experiences as ones that didn’t bother her at all. So the issue for her wasn’t about the animal being killed. For her the dissection was much different. It didn't feel right to her. The way that some kids—and even the teacher—were handling the cats felt like exploitation. Again, she didn't say that word, exploitation, but that's what she was describing:

Nicole: [Ms. Bell’s] like ‘cut it open’ and then she’s like, ‘this how you do it’ – Oh, god it was horrible. I’ve never been so upset, I don’t think. Watching. I’ve seen pigs. I think that having a pig … I wasn’t that upset…Just like it happens, like in Mexico. They get pigs, cut them open, cut off its head.

Snoopy: How is that different though?

Nicole: It’s different. It’s for like eating it. I understand because you’re going to eat it. If you’re going to kill it, you should eat it. It [the dissection] was just sad. I was sad.

…

Nicole: My grandfather, back in the day, he lived in Mexico. They used to hang the pigs from a tree and they would do it [slaughter the pig] there. But I don’t think I was born [then]. I’ve heard stories…But a couple of years ago when I was eleven, I was in Mexico because we went down there for a party. I think it was for a quinceañera [celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday]. They bought a pig from the butcher and then they slaughtered it themselves. They cut off the head and the whole thing. I was ok with that because they’re going to eat it.

Sara: So for you the issue was mostly not just being able to do anything with the parts afterwards, of not being able to bury it? And just having to have it thrown away…

Nicole: I also put myself in the way like cats have a purpose to educate us, I guess. And give us the new experience. But that was the mindset that I had to put myself in while doing the dissection. I was pretty sad though.

(Tolbert 2019)

Snoopy (pseudonym), another student, also kind of felt conflicted, like a little somewhere in the middle. She didn't say very much, but it seemed like her kind of grappling was around like what does it mean to be a good student, and those are the kinds of things that came up for her. In her mind, people who didn't participate at all in the dissection just weren't being good students. So, in a way, she was working through her own ethical dilemmas around the performativity of ‘good student-ing’ in science. Because while she (Snoopy) also felt conflicted about wanting to be a good student, the dissection actually made her feel uncomfortable. And then, Nicole also felt some of that, wanting to be a good student, trying to see the educational value of the activity, and not wanting to be one of those who wasn't participating at all, while still feeling deeply sad about it.

Part two: failure as praxis

Sara: In the module, I had preservice teachers read the transcript and talk about it in groups and analyze what's going on here. What kind of ethical dilemmas are these students experiencing? I had told them, ‘I don't want you to weigh in on whether it’s right or wrong but rather to try and understand how the students are experiencing the ethics of this activity. The issue of dissection here—whether it’s inherently right or wrong—that's not what I want you to focus on. I want you to try and understand and feel the ethical conflicts they’re experiencing.’ So when they (preservice teachers) came back to the whole group discussion, they had seemed to interpret the task as one of, is it morally right or wrong to dissect. This wasn’t the task I gave them. But they came back with these two ethical positionings, on the one hand, ‘I think it's okay that they did dissection because…’ or on the other, ‘I don't think it's okay that they that they did it because there are other ways to do it that don’t involve killing animals.’ And I felt like, I just failed you (preservice teachers).

I went to a colleague afterward I was like I was so stoked about this lesson I just did, and it completely bombed. I failed, and they didn't get it, and she was like maybe, but maybe some of them did and just like it won't kind of make sense until—maybe it'll sit with them for a while. And who knows, but at that moment, for me, it felt like a failure. And this feeling of failure, I think, is important, too, in terms of teaching practice—or feelings about teaching as (ethics of) teaching practice. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like something we, or preservice teachers, are supposed to admit….but I think it’s so important that we do.

But anyway, we'd been talking about ethical decision making and we'd been using these resources on ethical decision making from the New Zealand Curriculum, most of which are more deontological, to help them understand different approaches to ethics. So in a way the curriculum tools are designed to help simplify these complex concepts. For example, one New Zealand curriculum resource outlines four common ethical frameworks: rights and responsibilities, consequentialism, autonomy, virtue ethics, and pluralism (Science Learning Hub 2007)—the majority of which are very much grounded in Western notions of logic and reason. But what I wanted to do with this dissection case, by contrast, is show how in practice, ethics in science (or anything else) can actually be really messy, and never simple-–just listen to these youth. And they’re showing how messy it is, and they're not saying it's definitively either right or wrong.

Rishi: I want to echo that thought on the important of failure. I think some of what I appreciate in our moves towards valuing ethics in teaching and learning is a recognition that failure is, well, inevitable. And so our focus on moments of success—whether in our own practice or what we choose to write about—in a way (re)produces the idea that there is a right and/or a wrong as two distinct ethical positionalities. Building on that then, the move to go to a place of right or wrong, for me, signals just how deeply masculinist Euro-Western logics are entrenched into what we think of when we think of ethics. The notion of ethics as a decision around what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is grounded in a binary framing with a desirable ‘other’—the right—and a non-desirable ‘other’—the wrong. And as Blue and Maria point out, the powered cuts that produce these ‘others’ are shaped through Euro-Western logics that require we divorce our bodies and emotions to reason from an objective perspective, which limits ‘addressing ethics’ to the production of, and examination within, this binary. And so our task then, as deciders of what is right or wrong, is to create those powered cuts as objective outsiders. And this is very drastically different from your prompt, for the preservice teachers to engage with reasoning around ethics by ‘feeling’ ethical conflicts, right?

Sara: Yes exactly. Yet it somehow quickly became, is it Right, or is it Wrong.

Rishi: Focusing on how the Other is produced, I think, affords for a way to see how and where those masculinist and Euro-Western influences emerge. So in that same exercise [with the preservice teachers], what would it have meant to ask, ‘what was the cat to each of these high school students?’ In a sense, scaffolding the conversation by specifically focusing on the relations between and within the different entities (humans and animals in this case). We might even ask, ‘was the cat an object? Was it a sacred thing? Was it a thing that was cool?’ to whom? And ‘how did the production of the cat as a particular kind of thing come to be for each student?’ In the production of the cat as a specimen to be dissected (possibly by the teacher having worked so hard to find them, etc.), what are the responsibilities, then, of each human in those relations? Because ultimately our responsibility emerges through the production of the Other.

So if the cat is just an object—that's ‘cool’—but to be discarded once the knowledge the youth needed to gain was extracted from its material form, then its relations with the other entities are irrelevant (i.e., if the role of nature is to be dominated by and for human life, then it is irrelevant what nature means to and with each of the humans in the interaction). If the preservice teachers [and really, many of us] are grounded in an understanding of ethics informed by Euro-Western influences, then we don't have a responsibility to the cat in the same way that the youth for whom the cat emerged as sacred do. But that's why that relationality piece is so important; understanding how the Other is produced, I think, makes our responsibility and accountability visible. If in this interaction the cat gets shaped into a neutral object given by their teacher to cut apart, then I could say ‘I have no responsibility to this object other than extracting knowledge, since this is just a neutral object given to me by my teacher.’ And following that, a discussion around ethics would follow—I think—in ways similar to the preservice teachers’ conversation. That is, ethics would consider whether the decision to dissect is morally right or wrong because of the taken-for-granted assumption—informed by Euro-Western logics—that the cat is a neutral and passive knowledge resource. And I think to ‘address ethics’ is to question that framing of the activity and ask, ‘what are the power dynamics or relations that shaped this framing so that it makes sense to conceive of the cat and the activity in that way? What are the histories and powered relations that are entangled with and emergent in this moment that make it sensible in this way?’ If asking questions like that brings us into a more relational understanding of ethics then it can't be about being right or wrong. It can only be mucky. It isn’t a binary, but much more complex and so it must be mucky.

Sara: It must, it has to be mucky but because it's mucky doesn't mean we can't interrogate, like you said, histories and the power and kind of have a conversation within the muckiness about, well is this okay and if it's okay, how are we making it okay. And if it’s not okay for us, what do we do about it?

Rishi: Right, I might still continue to dissect the cat and say well I am in this muckiness and I will hold the weight of those relations that I am being in right now, orienting (Ahmed 2006) in this world in a way that disrupts the binary between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. And I kind of have to continue to struggle through it, and that's okay. But I do think that the moment that we become aware of the relations—and choose to consciously acknowledge the entangled histories in and with how we understand our interactions—that becomes the space for change or possibility. If I'm a medical student and I'm wanting to learn things so that I can become a doctor who will go back to my communities and make change because maybe I live somewhere few doctors will move to…then yeah I am going to sit in that muckiness and I'm going to know that I'm holding that, and that was part of producing the change that I can create in my community.

Sara: Right, right, but again it's with a different kind of knowing, and feeling, around it.

Rishi: If we thought about ethics this way, then firstly, it really is moving away from that limited binary framing. But it also troubles who is responsible in the production of the Other. There is no one person or one framing of the interaction that is right or wrong, when you're sitting in a mucky relationality sort of approach to ethics. There is no ‘one’ entity—because you and I are not separate individuals, so there's no separate you or me. The teacher who gave me the cat and the ‘me’ who took it, we're in this together and we're producing this moment. So the ‘ethical issues’ emerge through our interaction and through the way that the powered boundary-making cuts get made.

Sara: This reminds me of Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw’s (2017) article on ‘Staying with the trouble in child-insect-educator common worlds’. They write about the Vietnamese walking stick insects that have been classroom pets in the early childhood education center that serves as the context for their study, a multispecies ethnographic analysis of a child-insect-educator entanglement. They similarly ‘resist a move to view stick-insect-classroom stories as universally bad’ (p. 1416) in ways that I think resonate with the stories of the youth working through the ethical complexities of their dissection experiences. And in the study, the stick insects, originally purchased from a pet store, are kept in a terrarium in this early childhood center. The children are concerned as they notice that some of the stick insects have lost limbs. So with support from researchers (Fikile and Veronica) and the early childhood educators, they take up the children’s concerns as an opportunity to grapple with the ethics of enclosure, and ‘life-as-property.’ They take care to avoid grand narratives of animal rights while at the same time staying with the trouble of what it means to ‘have’ and ‘care for’ classroom pets. They consult with local biologists and find out that stick insects don’t do well in overcrowded environments, where they basically attack each other’s limbs. But they reproduce at much higher rates in captivity without predators.

So the children ask if they can release some of the insects into the ‘wild.’ Or if they can take them back to where they came from. And this leads to a series of ethical dilemmas around how the stick insects came to be introduced in Canada, and also what/where is ‘wild,’ and how did the concept of ‘wildness’even come to be. Together, they're in this ethical dilemma of the fact that it's an introduced species and actually they can't just release the stick insects without potentially causing damage to local ecological places, and so then, how do they—do they kill them and then, if they do, how do they do it? That is exactly about staying with the trouble. It’s about moving away from this kind of, in a sense, this sort of moralistic perspective on how we raise children to be in relation to nature that actually in the Anthropocene there's not a clearly defined moralistic kind of relationship with nature, especially from that sense of ‘do no harm…’, but that we do have important ethical responsibilities within these complex matters of care (de la Bellacasa 2017). But that the whole ‘do no harm’ is almost an impossibility in this world…of course we want to minimize and repair harm but the ‘do no harm’ trope can actually foreclose possibilities for complex ethico-political decision-making in the Anthropocene.

Rishi: Also, like, what is harm?

Sara: Yeah exactly, again, it’s mucky, right? Fikile and Veronica write that:

Some form of preferential decision-making regarding killing is often unavoidable within spaces of conflicting ethics. However, it is also important to resist simplistic decision-making that does not consider carefully how certain animals come to be seen as deserving of care while others become easily and violently killable (in the name of conservation, for example) (van Dooren 2015). On the contrary, we take up the challenge of remaining attentive to the ethical obligations of the life and death contexts that we inhabit. (1422)

It’s a great article. I assign it as part of the ethics module. It just captures so much, and the fact that it takes place with young children—so preservice teachers can see that this kind of ethical decision-making and contemplation is also quite possible with younger students.

Rishi: I’m particularly moved by considering who is deserving of care and who is seen as ‘violently killable,’ as Fikile and Veronica say. Those are powered decisions we’re making in that dissection activity too, as you indicated earlier about the powered cuts you make as a teacher to define the nature of an object. How do we communicate the nature of the cat—whether it is deserving of care? And if so, what kind of care? When you’re also about to cut it open as part of a school science lesson. It’s a very realistic conundrum that we all might have, and it also impresses how deep, slow, and long term this work actually has to be. Because as a teacher, you can’t (or least I wouldn’t be able to) do that in 40 min, especially if we are not all already grounded in a relational understanding of how we are in this world. Then there is the curriculum, standards, etc., that we as teachers need to address and as Maria and Blue point out, there is little consideration and support for this kind of approach in school curricula. These logics are just so deeply rooted in the way that interactions are structured to unfold in schools.

Also, I mean, then, what person can't relate with being like, ‘I have this amazing idea for this class!’ And then you get there and you're like ‘right, right, cool, thank you. Yes, I just got humbled. I have no idea what to do.’

Sara: [laughing] It was awful. But I think you are making an important (ethical) point here as well about the challenge of putting all of this responsibility on teachers, who are also highly constrained. That’s something I’m always thinking about as well. And it’s clear in my own practice how complex this work is.

Rishi: It’s also really important that you recognized feeling like a failure who hadn't done what you were supposed to do. I think that’s what experiencing the muckiness of doing this work feels like. It’s not easy or simple when you’re in the classroom, in relation to your students, curricular expectations, and the Academy (amongst so many other relations). The powered dynamics emergent through those relations shape this mucky experience in many ways—one of which might imply that the class was a ‘failure’ because the teachers didn’t engage in ways you may have hoped. So what does it mean to consider this process as mucky and not limited to the space–time of the classroom, but across the unit, or the course? Or even beyond that, to the many space-times you and I are moving through while thinking/writing/being this piece?

Sara: I mean like yeah, that's the thing, I guess. It's coming to terms with it, like you said, just being mucky, it doesn't settle.

Rishi: Yeah, muckiness doesn’t necessarily allow for closure in that sense, ‘cause how do you get closure when you're always in with the world in its muckiness?

Sara: Exactly. I mean, also that chapter that I wrote about the dissection actually took me a while to write. So there are ethics in dissemination as well that aren’t just captured by or even intelligible to university ethics committees, for example. Because I felt conflicted, on the one hand, I felt like I needed to tell the students’ story. After all, they had shared it with the understanding that their story would be told. And I also had a really close relationship with the teacher. And she’d consented to the research. But I didn't want her own practices of care and commitment to be exploited or misrepresented. Meanwhile, I'm the researcher and I get to write this paper about it and look all enlightened. And that’s not good feminist praxis. But I think how I sort of resolved that was—well it wasn't a resolution—but how I worked my way through—was just to start out with my own stories, so I started the chapter with a story about the ethics of my own experiences with dissection.

When I was a science teacher, I facilitated dissections with my students, even though as a high school student I refused to do it myself. I even wrote a front page editorial for the high school newspaper about my refusal, and how I wasn’t allowed to enroll in anatomy and physiology because I refused to dissect. So I took zoology instead but yeah so I wrote this front page article about it, and then four or five years later I did dissection as a junior high school science teacher with my students in the South Bronx. We had some preserved frogs that had been in the science supply closet for ages. And we had few material resources, no lab rooms, barely enough text books, and so I decided to do a demo using one frog per class with the doc cam. And students took turns coming up to make incisions. But then I had a student who was really angry with me about it. And he was like this kid that everybody thought was such a troublemaker; he wouldn’t come to class, he acted out when he was there, but he was awesome in science. We had a really good relationship. And he liked science until I did that dissection and he was super angry with me. And so I lied and said, all the frogs died of natural causes. And I’m sure he didn’t believe me. To him the whole thing was a sort of violence; that's what science became for him, and he didn't like it. I was never able to bring him back around. I broke his trust.

Rishi: I'm so sorry for both of you.

Sara: It was horrible, you think you’re doing something good for your students but you haven’t maybe gone through all the… and you’re young and…

Rishi: Yes. And. I wonder—that moment of, maybe disjuncture, and possibly an experience of violence in that youths’ life—is emergent in and exists across space and time (for example right now as we become entangled with it). I wonder how we might consider a more mucky understanding of the competing and possibly conflicting powered dynamics that informed how that engagement with ethics unfolded. Again here I’m thinking about the structural inequities that result in some schools not having resources in school labs, the opportunities for youth to engage with Eurocentric scientific practices, and your responsibility as an educator, to invite youth to engage with school science practices while also recognizing the histories and current unfolding of violence embedded in all of that. The ethical considerations in that short class are really mucky! I can imagine it was incredibly difficult to both be in that moment (for the youth and you)…

Sara: That's…yeah…but it's still haunted me…but in writing the chapter, I thought, okay, I’ll start with that, my own experience. I can write from there because it shows how I am also vulnerable, and I can participate alongside the teacher in the chapter in a shared experience of vulnerability.

Rishi: I'm sorry for both of you, though. That sounds like a really hard time. I’m just feeling it, oof!

Sara: No, I know, this was over 20 years ago. And I remember this kid so well, I remember his name, yeah…it sticks with me….My friend [Yunnie Tsao Snyder] used to describe these kinds of teaching–learning encounters-that-don’t-fade as hauntings, these ongoing hauntings…

Rishi: Yes! Ongoing hauntings that don’t fade and have a socioemotional dimension whereby the hurt (and/or joy!) never goes away. If we’re thinking about ethics as a mucky doing/being across space and time, then those ongoing hauntings are an integral to doing this work, right? That moment in the classroom was not simple or neutral. How the interaction unfolded, your sense of failure and the ways in which the ongoing hauntings you are entangled with emerge in and shape your own understanding of ethics; they all emerged through your entanglement with multiple powered relations across space, time and scale. If we are to really consider doing/being ethics then I can’t imagine anything but a critical muckiness that doesn’t ever resolve or provide closure.

Part three: on specificity and difference

Sara: Thinking again about these complex matters of care, one of the overarching principles of the science course for preservice teachers is the idea of kaitiakitanga (loosely translated as care, guardianship, and/or protection of the environment) (Kawharu 2000). A key ongoing tension that we discuss is that ‘care’ or ‘protection’ is highly context dependent as well–and inseparable from politics, and colonial histories. In this module on ethics, after the preservice teachers read and respond to the dissection focus group, I share a 5-min video case study (Science Learning Hub 2018) highlighting how children at a kura kaupapa Māori (Māori language and cultural immersion school) struggled with the ethics of killing moths to create a moth reference collection as required by their participation in a national citizen science project, Ahi Pepe MothNet, for school children. The majority of the children who attend the school are Māori, and as their principal states in the video case study, ‘students want to be the scientists, use this equipment and gain these skills, but they want to minimize the impact on their cultural beliefs as much as possible’ (Science Learning Hub 2018). The whole issue was brought to the group’s attention, initially, by a five-year-old student who didn’t feel right about killing the moths. The students work together with their teachers, whānau (families), and the Ahi Pepe MothNet to come up with a way to move through their ethical dilemma, which is to develop tikanga (cultural protocols), including karakia (spiritual incantations) and waiata (traditional songs), to ‘honour the moths’ contribution to the project’ (Science Learning Hub 2018).

A couple of preservice teachers in the course, however, have debated about the ethics of—particularly for non-Māori—using karakia in ways that try to make everything ‘okay.’ While we discuss this case and the diverse ways in which Indigenous and other communities grapple with and work through ethical dilemmas, another ethical dilemma presents itself as well in terms of the danger of thinking that ethical tensions can be easily resolved through cultural appropriation of Indigenous practice (e.g., karakia). I think that while there’s an institutional programmatic emphasis on students becoming culturally responsive, I also recognize the importance of the dissenting voices such as those couple of preservice teachers who try to problematize the nature of what they’re learning about what it means to be culturally responsive. Like Liboiron (2021) has written, an ongoing issue for their anti-colonial and feminist science lab group (CLEAR), which includes settlers, locals who are and are not settlers, Indigenous people, international students, and others, is ‘how to take up science that enacts good Land relations without appropriating Indigenous Land relations if they aren’t yours (including when they belong to different Indigenous group)’ (p. 22). Max writes about this as an issue of ‘specificity as a methodology of nuanced connection and humility, rather than as a way to substantiate uniqueness’ (p. 22–23, 2021). So while the case of the Ahi Pepe MothNet dilemma was a beautiful illustration of how students in that particular context worked through their ethical responsibilities, their approach is relational and contextualized and might or might not be appropriate for another context. And/or especially if it were taken up in an oversimplified or superficial manner.

Rishi: Firstly, I haven’t come across this series of videos before and so I’m really just reacting to what little I’m learning about here—they’re doing really great, and important work! I think it’s a great example that we can learn from, particularly showing that we can learn science grounded in thinking-feeling the ethical tensions, recognizing the histories of relations entangled in this moment through community knowledge building and creating cultural protocols. I can also hear what your preservice teachers might be concerned about, in terms of making everything ‘okay’, but in this case I understand their decisions around what form scientific practices would take, as really locally emergent through their own histories and relations both in the past and futures. I think therein lies our need to be really grounded in our own positionalities and histories.

This is sort of making me think about what that process might feel like, in a different geographical context. For example, I’ve been working with a school in South India and the population of youth who attend the school is really mixed—so from very different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. I imagine thinking-feeling ethics from a non-Euro-Western perspective would get complicated really quickly because of the numerous pre-colonial powered relations that shape and position different folks in the space—be it through religion or caste. The education board that the school followed explicitly took a masculinist and Euro-Western approach to science (and other disciplines as well) initially developed post-independence, because of the ways in which these powered relations are very complex and woven into the sociocultural–material landscape (Hegde 2018). Briefly, Hindu beliefs around purity delegate some communities as more ‘pure’ and others as ‘impure’ just by virtue of what family (i.e., caste) you are born into. This assigned level of purity is also reflected in the kinds of spaces people are allowed to inhabit and the occupations they are/were traditionally allowed to engage in. So for example, Hindu beliefs around purity not only denounce the killing of animals but also position anyone who does so as spiritually inferior. So not only is killing animals associated with impurity, but people who do so—be it for food (for themselves and others), shelter, etc.—are considered inferior both by virtue of their actions and by birth. Further complicating this issue, the current right-wing Hindu government is pushing the idea that only Hindu Indians are the ‘true’ Indigenous people of the land (Subramaniam 2019) where non-Hindu Indians (i.e., Muslim, Christian, Jain, Parsi communities, etc.) are positioned as the foreign ‘other’ in an Indigenously Hindu land. This is very inaccurate and is continuing to cause so much violence against non-Hindu Indians. Because these various spiritual beliefs are based on an ideology developed and imposed by those in power (the more ‘pure’ Hindus), Euro-Western rationalism was and continues to prove a useful tool to fight against this kind of oppression both in and through education and otherwise (Nanda 2003). And so when you have a class of youth from different backgrounds it gets tricky to think-feel ethics around say, something like killing animals to study them—especially if we are wanting to do so without privileging Euro-Western ways of knowing—because then negotiating this conversation would not only require challenging oppressive Hindu-based understandings of purity but also fighting the intentionally reproduced lie, that only Hindu ways of knowing are ‘Indigenous’ to India. So in this case, drawing on Euro-Western ideas of right and wrong or rationalist arguments have actually been really useful to fight the oppressive Hindu regime (Nanda 2003). I want to be clear, I don’t think this is the only approach we can take to fighting the oppression caused through Hindu-supremacy. And, I cite this example to highlight that these negotiations become quite tricky in different geographical contexts where our histories really do shape how we are oriented and how we might think-feel ethics in science knowledge creation.

Sara: That is such an important and complicated example. It makes me think of all the ethico-political tensions I’ve been contemplating as a Tangata Tiriti (In Aotearoa New Zealand, people of the treaty, vs. Tangata Whenua, people of the land) white academic from North America, both in teaching these modules on ethics and science, but also in my own teaching more broadly, is what (and how) to include in terms of Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and kaupapa Māori (Māori practices, norms), particularly with regard to both treaty obligations and ethical practice—and in the context of my own positionality. How do we foreground a de-settling (Bang et al. 2012) and place-conscious (Macfarlane et al. 2019) approach to education, in ways that attend to our different respons-abilities within approaches, and those relations, in the name of ‘solidarity without a We’ (Liboiron 2021, p. 24)?

Part four: concluding thoughts

Through this piece, we have offered moments in our contending with the many necessary and ‘unfinished’ complexities of teaching about ethics in science. We view our metalogue as an intervention in and of itself. The deliberately ‘unfinished’ nature of our metalogue is a method of/for ethical feelingthinkingdoing in our scholarly work, such as writing this piece together. Grounded in Sara’s lingering feelings of unsettledness and failure in teaching science and ethics with preservice teachers, we found ourselves questioning what it would mean to teach about ethics in science when intentionally attempting to shift away from the colonial and masculinist binaries that produce particular orientations as ‘Wrong’ or ‘Right’.

That is, what does it mean to attempt to teach-think-feel with ethics as mucky? How do we explicitly attend to relations of power embedded within the muckiness? How might we engage in those conversations through locally informed ways of being that recognize the complexity of relations students are entangled with, while also challenging the (sub) conscious ways in which masculinist Euro-western frameworks structure and shape our understandings of the world? Furthermore, what are the expectations we place on teachers to be able to engage in these ways in classrooms when—as Maria and Blue point out—there is little room within our existing school systems to do so?

In thinking through these questions, we have proposed that:

  1. (1)

    Thinking with muckiness is ethical praxis, even a form of conscientization. Muck is dirty, viscous, unclear, not solidified. Preservice teachers (and teacher educators and academics and students) need more opportunities to engage with the muckiness of ethical feelingthinkingdoing. So much of preservice teacher education is about the performance of getting it right, having the right pedagogy, the right disposition, the right answer–especially when driven by accountability measures (such as edTPA in the USA) that assess the extent to which preservice teachers get it right, and at a stage when they are really just ‘becoming’ teachers. We desperately need to disrupt this socialization and resist the pressures of ‘producing’ fully prepared teachers who know, who have all the right answers. We need teachers who think, feel, contemplate, reflect, about what they do and do not know, and how to move through the muck of it all with care.

  2. (2)

    Drawing from our own embodied ‘resources’ for ethical feelingthinkingdoing is central to ethical praxis–and feminist praxis. This aspect of feminist praxis is, we feel, uncommon in science teacher education. As the youth in the focus group have illustrated, becoming aware of ethical intentions often starts with a ‘gut feeling.’ Our own metalogue–and the reflective conversations with each other that informed the metalogue–was motivated by feelings of sadness, elation, excitement, dismay, regret, contemplation, and optimism.

  3. (3)

    Facilitating conversations about ethics in classrooms must include making explicit and contemplating those ‘gut feelings,’ but also the (powered) relations we enact, or experience, within classroom activities. We wonder, could there be opportunities to ask questions differently, to engage in ethics, i.e., ‘Who is the cat to each of these students and how did those relations come to be?’ ‘How are we shaped and how do we come to be?’ Relational ontologies matter and are deeply contextualized.

  4. (4)

    We can (learn to) engage and hold these tensions, the muckiness of ethical decision-making, without reinforcing masculinist-colonial logics. Science has a long history of gendered and racialized exploitation (McKittrick 2020). Science is also power-ful knowledge and as such can be simultaneously oppressive and liberating–or liberating in one context and oppressive in another. For example, Euro-Western masculinist evidence-based notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ grounded in rationalist frameworks have powerful anti-oppressive implications for fighting Hindu supremacy, albeit while reinforcing ‘Western’ paradigms of thought and relation. Specificity matters in ethical feelingthinkingdoing [and in doing anti-colonial/feminist science, Liboiron 2021].

  5. (5)

    Finally, our metalogue concluded with a care-ful consideration of how we might negotiate the many powered dynamics that emerge in braiding together (Kimmerer 2013) different ways of knowing within learning spaces—particularly within schools and other education institutions that have entrenched colonial legacies. To this end, we offer a call to ground ourselves in place-conscious interrogations, including of our many positionalities, and historical as well as emergent relations, as one way to move with(in) the muckiness that is teaching about ethics in science.