This edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection encompasses the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education, the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories, is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is not where educators should be investing their energy. For example, the forces and flows of science education render the Anthropocene an epistemological object to be learnt about rather than with or through such that it might implicate the learner (Gilbert, 2016). Science education does not (and cannot not in its current forms) meet the needs of the post/human moment(s) in which we find ourselves.

This work continues the transdisciplinary project of transforming the ways communities inherit science education. Specifically, authors were invited not to fit questions of the Anthropocene into science (or) education but rather attend to their cross product(ion). In other words, authors attended to the proliferation of possibilities and (re)orientations made possible through reading these dialogically rather than dialectically. Not unlike de Freitas et al. (2017), “we hope this cross product... amplifies the philosophical insights from each, stretching scholarship in new directions and across disciplines” (p. 551). Throughout the book, authors nurture productive relationships between science education and fields such as science studies, environmental studies, philosophy, political science, the natural sciences, Indigenous studies, feminist studies, critical race studies, and critical theory in order to provoke a science education that actively seeks to remake our shared ecological and social spaces in the coming decades and centuries. After Stengers (2018), we exclaim that “another science [education] is possible!”—but also necessary in rethinking and regenerating our world yet-to-come.

Our understanding of the Anthropocene is necessarily open and pluralistic, as different beings on our planet experience this time of crisis in different ways. Notably, the Anthropocene threatens large swaths of the Global South, animal and plant species, Indigenous peoples, and marginalized communities of color (both rural and urban), in ways that affluent, privileged/colonizing communities of the Global North have purposefully ignored (see Davis & Todd, 2016; Whyte, 2018; Yussof, 2018). These inequalities and differential effects of the Anthropocene are inextricable from the scourge of late capitalism and its consumption of the natural/social commons (Tsing, 2015; Moore, 2015). Further, the pluralistic orientations offered within this book also challenge the notion that the Anthropocene is singular to this time, when considering the figure of Man (i.e., the masculine subject of Western modernity): that this end of the world is premised on the end of multiple “worlds whose disappearance was assumed at the outset of the Anthropocene” (de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018, p. 2). Authors also consider how the naming of this shared catastrophe in a way that holds the “anthropos” responsible (e.g., vs. unfettered capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy) perhaps masks more than it reveals (Moore, 2015; Kirby, 2018), while also masking the efforts of new and old human and more-than-human communities and collectives that are working toward hopeful, regenerative present futures (Haraway, 2016; Hayward & Tolbert, this volume).

Working with authors situated across several different continents since 2018, the publication of this text has never seemed so timely. From landscapes and communities (of all kinds) ablaze, the COVID-19 pandemic, and pervasive racial and environmental injustice, it has become quite apparent that science education sits at the nexus of reconfiguring our human and more-than-human relationships. Centering (for just a moment), the COVID-19 pandemic (among several simultaneous pandemics), we invite readers to witness the power of a non-human agent, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), to completely reconfigure our more-than-human relationships with each other. SARS-CoV-2, alongside the social, political, and cultural systems in which it is implicated, demands that we do several things: (a) recognize the multifaceted challenge of teaching (i.e., intellectual, emotional, skillful, physical, and, and, and across all contexts and roles); (b) witness and act on the grave material and immaterial inequities that persist across time and space; (c) reconfigure our more-than-human social relationships with land, water, and other non-human living organisms; and (d) center care, empathy, and patience over productivity, efficiency, and haste. Like SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, we invite readers to pay attention to our shared non-human teachers. Might we think-with the Anthropocene in such a way that renders us response-able (Haraway, 2016)? Might attuning to the Anthropocene (re)open our ability to respond, and in turn, produce forms of actionable responsibility toward ourselves, other(ed) humans, more-than-human kin, the planet, and institutions?

What the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear is that the time to argue for a more socially, politically, and ecologically rich science education is effectively over. Education, perhaps especially science education, must play a role in nurturing the kinds of new relationships and modes of living that will carry life through the Anthropocene. This realization is less of an ethical stance than it is a necessity. The COVID-19 pandemic affirms the role of science education in bringing about well-being, health, and community vibrance. More specifically, science educator fields find themselves caught up in battles against right-wing populism and political attacks that seek to delegitimize all collective institutions (including the sciences). In these divisive times, we need collectivity more than ever. The sciences, and their related fields, owe their life-beyond-the-laboratory to science connoisseurs, those who are neither expert nor amateur, who “appreciate the originality or the relevance of an idea but also pay attention to questions or possibilities that were not taken into account in its production, but that might become important in other circumstances” (Stengers, 2018, p. 9).

These are people such as activists, citizen scientists, and community members who support things like action on climate change, environmental protection, access to STEM education, and ethical research in the natural sciences. Part of science and science education’s legitimacy in the early-mid twenty-first century is the result of those who have expanded science participation, cultivating a “science” that thrives outside of its intended environments. Coalitions of activists, educators, community members, etc., have played key roles in seeding and growing public resistance to climate and pandemic denial positions, some invoking slogans such as “Believe science.” Yet, it is important to highlight that the very logics through which science is defined can also work against possible coalitions. While these logics can help delegitimize dangerous pseudoscientific claims, they can also marginalize and work against the important coalition work we have just described. For example, as Bang and colleagues (2018) poignantly ask, “if Indigenous peoples stand with the sciences—as we will—will scientists also stand with us?” (p. 151). Lastly, and in turn, the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear that life, with all its activity and production, exists in a web of relations that requires the utmost sensitivity and care.

The chapters herein, while written largely before (and revised during) the COVID-19 pandemic, recognize the contexts of political urgency and the need for care and sensitivity in education. One thing educators can be sure of is that education in the Anthropocene will need to engage the grand disturbances that will come to define the trajectory of community life. From relations with fire/water and magical realisms to political manifestos and Anthropocenic detonators, this volume takes loving, but bold, steps into different worlds—and the pedagogical relations that might widen these worlds. Of course, it does so cautiously, knowing full well that the trappings of things like colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy still operate at the edges of these texts. While science education in the Anthropocene works at the margins to dismantle these forms of oppression, we are dismayed at how so many of our institutions, and more broadly, our field(s), still continue to give only cursory attention to entrenched and often unexamined systemic inequities. Yet, we are inspired by the creative and transformative work of the authors in this collection, and remain optimistic that indeed, another science education is possible (it is already happening!).

Part I: Kinship, Magic, and the Unthinkable

The first section of Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene doesn’t necessarily ease the reader into this “changed space” for science education. As we (the editors) have said above, the time for arguing for a socio-politically engaged and transdisciplinary science education for multispecies survival is effectively over. The book therefore proceeds under assumption that different pedagogical and ethical pathways and openings are needed. There is now less of a need to justify these pathways within the institutional norms and policy statements of the recent past, as it is abundantly clear that different kinds of thinking and institutional arrangements are needed today. The COVID-19 pandemic is a prime example of how modern institutions and community investment, as they currently exist, are inadequate to the tasks at hand. The chapters in this section bend toward futurity, strange possibility, and new conceptions of kinship. Here’s a little preview of what’s to come, given in the order that the chapters appear.

In Chapter 2 (“‘Trees Don’t Sing!... Eagle Feather Has No Power!’ Be Wary of the Potential Numbing Effects of School”), Xia Ji begins with intimate conversations about science education with her own children. These conversations, like all important dialogues, contain ruptures of possibility and meaning. Among these ruptures, is the idea that science education could be so much more meaningful for students if only it opened itself to other ways of thinking and experiencing the world. The first chapter reminds educators that those moments of possibility and rupture will inevitably occur in daily life. In a time where scientific ways of knowing the world seek ethical, spiritual, and ecological guidance from Indigenous ways of living and knowing, is it still possible to say that “trees don’t sing,” or that “feathers have no power”? What do educators stand to lose by taking a narrow stance on such questions with their students?

With the tone for different kinds of encounters and relations set, Jessie Beier introduces the idea of unthinkability into our pedagogical lexicon (at least for this volume) in Chapter 3 (“Tracing a Black Hole: Probing Cosmic Darkness in Anthropocenic Times”). Using black holes as an image of our current existential predicament, as opposed to the iconic image of earth from space, Beier suggests that our time of the Anthropocene demands we embrace uncertainty and unknowability as important aspects of existence. In this way, Beier introduces a dimension of obfuscation into our view of science education. That is, the idea that there are things in our world that cannot be known here and now, and this should give educators pause as they go about portraying the world as knowable and thinkable.

In Chapter 4 (“The Waring Worlds of H. G. Wells: The Entangled Histories of Education, Sociobiology, Post-Genomics, and Science Fiction”), Chessa Adsit-Morris demonstrates that science fiction is a powerful tool for orienting science education toward the future. Adsit-Morris’s chapter goes back and forth between writings of H. G. Wells and the new sociobiologies and market-driven genomic research of our current time. Adsit-Morris not only points to new racisms on the horizon, but how possibilities for a “new science education” were missed a hundred years ago. One lesson being that science educators and students might turn to the work of writers and artists to expand the boundaries of what’s possible and thinkable.

Like the other sections of this book, section one has a very strong affective dimension running through it. Nicole Bowers takes us on journey into the productive space of magical realism in Chapter 5 (“Creating Magical Research: Writing for a Felt Reality in a More-Than-Human World”). What if the existence of extra-worlds, virtual possibilities, and a suspension of “natural” laws only served to make our shared actual worlds more vibrant and comprehensible? Does opening our world to strange possibilities provide a new space for pedagogical experimentation in science education? This question is not only relevant for Bowers’ chapter directly, but all the chapters in section one.

Lastly, in Chapter 6 (“Fire as Unruly Kin: Curriculum Silences and Human Responses”), Annette Gough, Brony Towers, and Blanch Verlie open the question of non-human or more-than-human kinship by positioning elemental fire as teacher, healer, and unruly relation. This repositioning of kin, and what counts as kin, shifts education toward new relations that are absolutely necessary to avoid climate disaster and ecological collapse. The multiplicitous relations that fire-as-kin creates allow educators to recast the historical, geologic, and spiritual relations essential for recreating the world today.

Part II: Decolonizing Anthropocene(s)

Just as the first section does not ease the reader into the central question of how we might respond to this contemporary moment in science education, this second section begins by troubling the notion that the Anthropocene is singular. As de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) state, what distinguishes the contemporary moment is that “the colonizers are threatened as the worlds they displaced and destroyed when they took over what they called terra nullius” are at risk (p. 3, emphasis in original). In turn, this section endeavors to set and expand the ethical context for the book by recognizing the ways in which the Anthropocene is predicated on and preceded by a multiplicity of Black, brown, Indigenous, and other-than-human Anthropocenes that are marked by genocides and mass extinction, as well as the ongoing and lasting effects of colonization.

More than strictly a (re)thinking of science education, this section takes seriously the notion that perhaps “modern academic literacies and technologies can make what has been made invisible by colonialism visibly absent, but they cannot make it present” (Ahenakew, 2017, p. 89): the Anthropocene(s) need new ways to be felt.

In Chapter 7 (“Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene(s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity through Thinking with Kim Tallbear”), Priyanka Dutt, Anastasya Fateyeva, Michelle Gabereau, and Marc Higgins trouble the ways in which the naming of the Anthropocene is at once an admission of guilt that simultaneously also works to mask some of the culpability. Particularly, thinking with Dakota scholar Kim Tallbear’s work on Indigenous genetics, parallels are drawn to explore the ways in which the production of an identity meeting a shared crisis defers and diminishes responsibility for ongoing colonialism: dispossession of Indigenous lands, disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples, and the genocide of Indigenous ecologies. Rather than prescribe a response (as a meaning, such as an identity, singular, can be problematic), Dutt and colleagues invites science educators to consider why science education cannot or has not been able to respond to these uneven inheritances and effects through a series of artful provocations. As Plains Cree scholar Cash Ahenakew (2017) states, “the work of decolonization is not about what we do not imagine, but what we cannot imagine from our Western ways of knowing” (p. 88): we need new ways to (re)open what we can even imagine within science education as we respond to the Anthropocene(s).

In Chapter 9 (“Still Joy: A Call for Wonder(ing) in Science Education as Anti-Racist Vibrant Life-Living”), Christie C. Byers continues the trend of making the Anthropocene(s) felt otherwise by poetically disrupting sense-making. This is done as a means of interrupting already received and embodied notions of wonder and the ways in which they are leveraged toward re-asserting science education as usual either through quelling curiosity or re-directing it towards an already knowable “nature.” By theorizing and attending to wonder as a more-than-individual affective flow, Byers focuses specifically on anti-blackness as a significant way in which the life-giving proliferation of possibilities that is wonderment is rendered inert within and beyond science education. Creatively juxtaposing her own work as science teacher educator with that of Black poets and critical theorists, Byers invites consideration of the ways in which science education disciplines Black bodies (and, by extension, the ways in which Black bodies are literally policed) through the (re)construction of a scientific subjectivity which is premised on the othering of nature, but also those “closer” to nature (through their other(ed) construction). But this is nothing new: as Haraway (1988) states, for science “Nature is only the raw material of culture, appropriated, preserved, enslaved, exalted, or otherwise made flexible for disposal by culture in the logic of capitalist colonialism” (p. 592).

In Chapter 8 (“Decolonizing Healing through Indigenous Ways of Knowing”), Miranda Field takes seriously the notion that, after Mi’kmaq scholar Marie Battiste (2018), “we all must become critical learners and healers within a wounded space.” Presenting psychology as pharmakon—as both poison and panacea—Field disrupts and displaces the ways in which the field is entangled within longstanding and ongoing colonial violence toward Indigenous lifeways, while attending to the healing possibilities to come by extending already present openings within medicine and psychology. In the affirmative, she suggests that psychology can and should move beyond the pathologizing of Indigenous peoples toward strength-based approaches that are rooted in Indigenous land-based practices and work to regenerate other significant relationships (e.g., community, more-than-humans) fragmented by colonial logics and practices. Importantly, the chapter functions as more than an ethical injunction to do no (colonial) harm as it also proposes other-ways-of-being-in-relation. Of note, Field highlights the ways in which healing, like learning (in wounded spaces), can and must be a journey whose pathway cannot be wholly prescribed or predicted: for Nature to be teacher or healer, one must learn to slow down and attune differently.

In Chapter 10 (“The Salt of the Earth: Inspired by Cherokee Creation Story”), Darrin Collins recasts a Cherokee origins story in order to make Black and Indigenous Anthropocene(s) felt otherwise. Jumping right into the doing rather than the theorizing about (re)storying how we might engage at and with the Anthropocene(s), Collins’ adaptation of the traditional story engages with Blackness and Indigeneity in ways that take seriously the colonial harm done by the figure of “Man” (i.e., Western, modern, white, settler, “rationalist”) through erasure and othering without making the harm the story. Rather, given the ways in which settler colonialism pits those othered by it against each other, this is not only a tale of resilience, strength, and survivance, but also of allyship. Further, the storying blurs the lines between Indigenous storywork and traditional storytelling, as well as historical and science fiction, becoming a rich way of speculating pasts and futures to-come, as well as a story in which Indigenous science is enacted (rather than spoken about). This has the effect of not only making it unclear as to whether the story told is occurring prior to our contemporary moment or after, but also, in honoring Indigenous temporalities, disrupting linear notions of time such that there is a spiral quality to time, in which it is a creation story whose (re)occurrence signals that time has circled back. Lastly, the notable absence of particular dominant figures speaks to the ways in which there is no future for “Man” given the ways in which the damage to the Earth is not evenly spread, and the need for some to learn, in humility, from ways-of-knowing-in-being that have been practiced in place since time immemorial.

Part III: Politics and Political Reverberations

An engagement with politics, eco-politics, and new/old forms of solidarity and collectivity are essential to science education in the Anthropocene. This third section includes contributions that interrogate and illustrate historicity in science education, critical pedagogical interventions, and dynamics of power in STEM fields. The four chapters in the section help us envision different political and pedagogical visions/theories/forces for future worlds.

In Chapter 11 (“The Science of Data, Data Science: Perversions and Possibilities in the Anthropocene through a Spatial Justice Lens”), Travis Weiland presents us with dualities of data science, illustrating how data (and data science) are not inherently objective and have been used as tools for oppression—but also have significant and necessary potential as tools for social and ecological justice. He turns his attention as well to how mapping can also have oppressive as well as justice-oriented goals and outcomes. Using North Carolina gerrymandering as a case study of racial and spatial injustice, he outlines possibilities for a critical data curriculum that supports students’ development of data literacy (and critical data literacy) while engaging them in socially transformative learning. He concludes with a very personal and important reflection—and a call to action for all of us—about how we read, who we read, and who we cite as we continue to engage in justice-oriented scholarship.

In Chapter 12 (“Science and Environment Education in the Times of the Anthropocene: Some Reflections from India”), Aswathy Raveendran and Himanshu Srivastava reflect through metalogue on how Anthropocenic discourses that privilege growth as “sustainable development” are identifiable in Indian policy, curriculum and education standards, textbooks, and students’ subjectivities. They explore through their reflective dialogue how they came to question their own training as scientists (Aswathy) and engineers (Himanshu) and found their place in critical science education. They delve into the ways that textbooks and national political movements in India have come to include environment-related themes but in ways that privilege technoscientific “innovation” and marginalize issues of political inequality. Finally, they highlight the need for coalition building, solidarity, political emotion, and political love as key to a more justice-oriented educational, ecological, and political future. As Aswathy concludes, “The challenge for educators working with marginalized communities is to find ways to inculcate political emotions that have the power to alter their living conditions.”

In Chapter 13 (“Rethinking Historical Approaches for Science Education in the Anthropocene”), Cristiano B. Moura and Andreia Guerra challenge the “single story” often communicated about Western modern science in the history of science fields. Using botany as a case study, they critically analyze how European scientists and capitalists extracted, appropriated, and/or erased knowledge they “collected” as “data” from the Americas. Moura and Guerra then reflect on how science educators and historians of science must challenge this single story and seek to tell new histories, ones that honor and attribute marginalized knowledges and their place in the “becoming” of Western modern science, or what we now often refer to as “science.” By doing so, we can (re)generate new possibilities for living well together in the Anthropocene.

In Chapter 14 (“Reflections on Teaching and Learning Chemistry through Youth Participatory Science”), Daniel Morales-Doyle, Alejandra Frausto Aceves, Karen Canales Salas, Mindy J. Chappell, Tomasz Rajski, Adilene Aguilera, Giani Clay, and Delani Lopez provide a window into work they presented at a town hall meeting session of the Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS; http://seedsweb.org) conference in Norfolk, Virginia, 2019. From the perspective of university researchers, teachers, teacher educators, high school students, and community organizers on Chicago’s Southside, they grapple with what it means to really do science for social justice in formal school settings. Their work in engaging youth in analyzing heavy metal contamination in the soils of their communities reveals that chemistry education can be a powerful vehicle for transformative learning. They also comment on the ongoing tensions of their endeavors. They share, for example, their thoughts on the politics of regimes of evidence—what it means to have to “prove” that your soils are contaminated or to find evidence to support why you do not want a polluter to be located in your community. As Daniel points out, “Why is the burden on the largely Mexican, working class community to have to find evidence of harm? Why doesn’t the multinational corporation that owns this plant have to provide evidence to the surrounding community that what they’re doing is safe and sustainable?”.

Part IV: A Science Education for a World-Yet-to-Come

The fourth section includes chapters that offer alternative entry points into science education as it has come to be known. Several of the chapters in this section clarify and critique interpretations of “the Anthropocene” head-on as it pertains to curating alternative futures for the field of science education. From curriculum studies to reorientating relationships with the more-than-human, the authors in this section invite readers to engage new ways of attuning to the multifaceted experience of science education.

In Chapter 15 (“Learning from Flint: How Matter Imposes Itself in the Anthropocene and What that Means for Education”), Catherine Milne, Colin Hennessy Elliot, Adam Devitt, and Kathryn Scantlebury invite readers to take a deeper dive into the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, an ontological disturbance worthy of deeper attention within science education. Using new materialist analyses, the authors present a compelling case for re-examining the “ontological underpinnings of the Earth as an outcome of bio, geo, chemo intra-actions” and thus also foundational ideas around “hands-on science.”

In Chapter 16 (“Resurrecting Science Education by Re-inserting Women, Nature, and Complexity”), Jane Gilbert offers a feminist critique of science in and of the Anthropocene to suggest that science-as-we-know-it cannot provide solutions to the issues it (i.e., science), education, and our collective mo(ve)ments are confronted. Gilbert maps a pedagogical approach for deconstructing science and science education for our new geologic epoch.

In Chapter 17 (“Watchmen, Scientific Imaginaries, and the Capitalocene: The Media and Their Messages for Science Educators”), Noel and Simon Gough, a father-and-son duo, take inspiration from their own cross-generational experiences with the popular graphic novel and recent film remake, Watchmen. Upon troubling the Anthropocene and deconstructing the science of Watchmen, the Goughs illuminate a fourth dimension, simultaneity, visible for rethinking the spacetime configuration(s) of science education.

In Chapter 18 (“Curricular Experiments for Peace in Columbia: Re-imagining Science Education in Post-Conflict Societies”), Carolina Castano-Rodriguez, Steve Alsop, and Molly Quinn invite readers to wonder: How could science education contribute to empower marginalized societies and, particularly, how could it contribute to create lasting peace in Colombia? Using a short personal narrative set in 2050 Columbia, feminist standpoint theory, and Escher’s Relativity (1953), the authors explore how science education might be central element of critical reconciliation. Thinking peace, as an enduring verb, a way of being and becoming together, a science education for and of peace is made thinkable.

Part V: Complicated Conversations

One of the early features we adopted for this book were interviews with scholars that have inspired transdisciplinary work across a variety of fields, such as ecology, environmental studies, education, science studies, political science, and social theory. As a writing form, the interview introduces an element of interlocution, and there is a small sense that we (the readers) are the ones asking the questions. How will the interviewee answer the pressing questions put to them? Will there be some kind of answer that we (the readers) can hold on to? The interviews contain a small amount of pleasure, either in their investment (in the process or conversation), or the capture of a definite moment in time where a comprehensive exchange took place. In the spring of 2019, the editors met via video conferencing to discuss who might be able to expand the confines of our edited collection and allow us to think differently. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have been able to speak directly with Anna L. Tsing, Fikile Nxumalo, Vicki Kirby, and Bronwyn Hayward. Here is a preview of what’s to come in section five.

In Jesse’s interview with Anna L. Tsing, the Anthropocene is discussed through conceptual lenses like “Empire,” Capital, and Acceleration. Feral Atlas, Anna L. Tsing’s latest project, is discussed as a transdisciplinary approach to talking about the feral effects of human infrastructures. How do we think about livability and environment in the ruins of capitalism? Next is Maria’s in-depth conversation with Fikile Nxumalo, which explores a refiguration of the universalizing discourses around Anthropocene that might account for the inequalities hidden by such concepts. Early on, Maria asks Fikile to talk about the kinds of things educators “inherit” and how these figure into what is possible and doable—with the hope of doing and thinking otherwise. Marc’s conversation with Vicky Kirby is a fast-paced discussion about the long-established boundaries between science and other disciplines (to name just one thing). How are we as (post)critical scholars to mediate these boundaries, and how might we be mindful of how our questions are bound-up and produced alongside a plethora of aporias, exclusions, and strange relations? Lastly, Sara’s conversation with professor of political science and IPCC member/writer Bronwyn Hayward explores possibilities for critical hope and new solidarities across local communities, nations, and disciplinary boundaries. Bronwyn also shares encouraging perspectives from her research with youth, including climate change activists and students in New Zealand and around the world, about what we can learn from their hopes and visions for the future. What does it mean to educate in a changing climate and ongoing ecological and political uncertainty? We hope your interest is piqued by these questions and topics, and if so, please feel free to begin reading this book at the interviews (or any section that speaks to you).