International Response for Part II: Globalisation and Science Education: A View from the Periphery

Abstract

With chapters from Alejandro Gallard Martínez, Bhaskar Upadhyay and Sonya Martin and her colleagues in this volume, we welcome three worthy contributions to the nascent field of globalisation and science education. The geopolitical, economic and sociocultural complexity that is the twenty-first century has demanded globalisation to become part of the lexicon of science education scholarship and practice. Yet globalisation itself is a complex, contested and highly unstable notion whose conceptual terrain and content are far from determined. Rohan Kaylan (2010, p. 546) reminds us that globalisation ‘signifies nothing other than itself… (and as an) impossibly wide term, includ(es) everything… (and) is as flexible as it is pervasive’. For him, the global has become a placeholder that ‘designates a kind of newness, a potentiality, (and) one that is impossible to separate from its virtuality: (that is) its distribution of images, discourses, and signs’ (p. 546). Virtual or real, as we all know, its effects are felt everywhere these days! Since education (read science education) is a constituent of both the virtual and the real, education and globalisation are necessarily mutually entwined categories where globalisation has become the macro-level sets of forces shaping the conditions for and being expressed within science education, and science education circulates and indigenises globalisation. Mapping these effects real or virtual, let alone proactively addressing their outcomes, is certainly science education’s major challenge for the twenty-first century.

In Australia, globalisation is spelt with an ‘s’ rather than a ‘z’ as in globalization. This simple letter change encompasses the very complexity of globalisation itself in that it is indigenised in all its possible settings.