Decolonial scientific education to combat ‘science for domination’

In this article, we argue that mainstream science education is contaminated by neoliberal values and functions in the service of political domination and exploitation and that a neoliberal and exploitative science education does not contribute to the building of a sustainable and just world. The work from Paulo Freire and Enrique Dussel underpin the tenets of decolonial pedagogies. We draw on their work to analyze how decolonial pedagogies have been developed in Latin America. We carried out a literature review in Brazil and found two different ways of approaching decoloniality in science education: (a) studies that start from hybrid, interstitial spaces, as an enunciative locus that allows the construction of other logics of thought and (b) studies dedicated to denouncing the colonial power project from an anti-racist education that contests coloniality and oppression. We present examples of Freirean educational practices and proposals in science education that illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can reveal the coloniality of power/being/knowledge and potentialities of intercultural dialogues. We conclude with an explanation of how and why Freirean dialogicity and affection can counter science for domination.

1 3 on the nexus of Western Modern Science (WMS) and local knowledge in order to combat the 'science for domination', exacerbated by neoliberal mentality. We will seek to explain that countries from the Global North use WMS as an instrument for domination (Harding 2016) by erasing local knowledge and practices, and excluding ethnic minorities from scientific practices.
The authors of this article are Latin Americans who appreciate the resistance of Afro-Amerindian memories, the invisibilized people that were excluded from the Modern paradigm and its notions of citizenship, civilization and humanity. Hence, we aim to reflect on the implication of scientific knowledge in the production of contemporary society and the role of science education in its reproduction.
We will not address the long philosophical debate between relativism and universalism in science and education, as these debates have been sufficiently documented elsewhere (e.g., Ludwig and El-Hanni 2020). However, we should make clear at the outset that we do not agree that expanding the notion of WMS, and opposing its claim to a unique and universal truth, is a negationist or anti-scientific stance. Our research is theoretically grounded in the work of Paulo Freire (2003) and of Enrique Dussel (1980) and uses a critical intercultural perspective (Walsh 2010) to build our argument. We do not deny, and, like most science educators, we appreciate and value the epistemological, ontological, and philosophical characteristics of WMS. Nevertheless, it is our goal to reflect on how a constructive dialogue between WMS and other gnoses (knowledge) can be facilitated and enacted in science education.
Our goal is to establish an approximation between WMS and Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy. We assert that sociohistorical subjects (teachers, students, and scientists) can, through dialogic pedagogy, come to make sense of a polyphony of discourses and knowledge. Within such communicative dialogic contexts, teachers, students, and scientists can understand scientific knowledge as distinctive and potentially powerful, which speaks to other ways of knowing to deal with phenomena that appear in everyday life. This takes us to the idea of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and academic ecological knowledge (AEK), which are based on Freire's theoretical contributions regarding the role of the university in community work. According to Freire (2010, p. 9), technical knowledge, or AEK, can be invasive, i.e., submit local thought to its own logic of domination. As Kim et al. (2017) have pointed out, WMS assimilates cultural diversity in ways that erase cultural nuances between different peoples. Like Kim et al., we assert that the modernity project seeks to assimilate and homogenize the other-including knowledge, land, political spaces, cultures, and traditions. Freire (2003) also identified how problematizing contradictions, such as those that may occur between knowledge systems, and within the context of a concrete reality, is a key aspect of critical education. A perspective that takes into account academic scientific knowledge as well as traditional knowledge of the learner's own community is, therefore, key to critical science pedagogies.
Critical research has been trying to use Freirean perspectives in science education contexts to fight the invasive approach in scientific development. They seek to build 'bridges between School Scientific Knowledge (SSE) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)', making it possible to recognize the existence of knowledge, perspectives, and visions about the natural world originated within culturally diverse communities (Molina and Mojica 2011, p. 36). In thinking about the idea of bridges, Molina and Mojica (2013) propose that dialogic relationships between different knowledge systems are fruitful terrain for learning. As we will explain in detail later, somewhat similar to Molina and Mojica's work, in our research we aim to analyze educational projects in science education in Brazil that stand between WMS and local knowledge, thus assuming a 'border', or 'interstitial', dialogical position. The dialogic relationship between two kinds of knowledge constitutes a socio-educational project that, we argue, is both counter-hegemonic and decolonial. For this reason, we will explore the potential of alterity, or otherness, as central to community and collectivism.
In the context of neoliberal scientific and technological activities in Latin America that ignore local knowledge and seek to dominate and exploit local people, we endeavor to answer the following guiding questions: What are the drivers behind science for domination? How can Paulo Freire's and Enrique Dussel's work guide science teaching in Latin America to counter the science for domination culture? What dialogues are possible between science education and Afro-Amerindian cultures as an alternative social and political project for liberation? How have decolonial pedagogies informed by Freire's and Dussel's work been developed in Latin America?
In the first part of the article, we review the literature to show how neoliberalism is inseparable from colonialism, domination, and exploitation. We will then show that mainstream science education is contaminated by neoliberal values, which work against possibilities for a socio-critical scientific thinking community. We will present links between Enrique Dussel's philosophy of liberation and Paulo Freire's dialogic education and highlight how the intersection of these two thought projects can help transform science education for intercultural, social, and critical thinking. In the final part, we analyze projects and programs that promote intercultural dialogues in science education, which fight the domination ideology of epistemological invasion and racial exclusions.

Science as a neoliberal instrument for political domination and exploitation
What are the drivers behind science for domination? Enrique Dussel (1980) is one of the most influential thinkers in the decolonization literature. He has provided a historical account to argue that the history of human civilization is deeply shaped by humans' ubiquitous desire to conquer, dominate and control other humans. And as part of the strategy of domination, humans have painted other, strange, distant, human beings as irrational wild beasts, which paved the way to colonization, slavery and exploitation of other people-racism with 'good conscience'. As he explains, the Ancient Greeks believed European barbarians were not humans. They believed that '[p]ower, domination, and the center are identical, above the colonies with other cultures, above slaves of other skin colors. The center is; the periphery is not' (p. 6). Later, from the Renaissance and the European expansionism to the Americas in the fifteenth century, modern Europeans also questioned whether Africans and Amerindians were human beings. Both Greek and European worldviews were underlined by person-to-nature controlling ideology (irrational beings belonging to nature), as opposed to a person-to-person freedom relationship ideology (ibid). Science and technology development during that period played an important role in providing the explanatory elements for the European alleged superiority. Adas (1990) has provided extensive analysis of how Europeans' self-perception evolved since overseas expansions started in the fifteenth century as a result of the comparison between their technological and material development to that of non-Westerners. The intensified technological development from the Enlightenment and later during industrial revolution with the development of extraordinary weapons, tools and nautical transports also forged a racist mentality of superiority of Europeans as they met with other civilizations, mainly in Africa, Asia, and South America-the so-called Third World, an 'essentially' inferior world. Such a view of superiority was also grounded in religious principles as they believed Christians were the ones who could really understand transcendent truths (ibid).
The project of modernity, emerging from the sixteenth century onwards, takes a contrary position in relation to other forms of organizing knowledge (Baptista and Molina 2021). Through the Enlightenment, modernity separated science from culture and art as a heuristic capable of explaining the world in its entirety (Robles-Piñeros, Ludwig 2020). WMS was configured as a single narrative to explain natural phenomena, hierarchically superior to all other knowledge. In this way, WMS denied the rationality of other forms of knowledge on the basis that they are not supported by Eurocentric epistemological principles (Kim et al. 2017). The colonial mentality is not part of history alone; it prevails in all social-economic-scientific activities today (Santos and Meneses 2009).
Over the past two decades, the scientific enterprise has been deeply shaped by neoliberalism and colonial thought that positions the Global North as culturally and epistemologically superior to the Global South. Such a mentality excludes the Global South from the recognition of a science that takes into account local knowledge and practices (Carter 2017).
The neoliberal argument is that what distinguishes underdeveloped from developed countries is the 'definitive direction of progress' (Anderson and Buck 1980). But as Hodson (2003) and several others have already recognized, science and technology do not evolve in the direction of the 'inevitable arrow of progress', as scientific and technological development clearly serve particular interests, which are inseparable from and also further constitute the distribution of wealth and power. The scientific enterprise is protectionist and imperialist, since funding and language (material and immaterial infrastructures) are concentrated in rich countries. Scientific research is greatly influenced by 'structural path dependencies', which are impediments (such as equipment, funding, language and networks) of the research that shape knowledge production (Partelow, Homidge 2020). 'Parachute science' is only interested in the scientific knowledge and economic development of scientists' host countries. Raja, Dunne (2021) have used paleontology as an example of an area of study where 'parachute science' occurs across the globe. In parachute science, scientists from developed countries collect data from other countries with no interest or little interest in collaborating with local scientists, and with no interest in the local socioeconomic development, but pursuing asymmetric profits. In a similar vein, Roy (2018) argues that dependence and subordination is common when collaborations happen with scientists from rich and poor countries, an example of a trace of coloniality in the production of academic scientific knowledge. Science does not happen in a social and political vacuum but has long been serving a political agenda (Galamba and Matthews 2021)-an agenda that still reflects the mentality of superiority generated via European colonization over the centuries. Roy (2018) has shown how British scientists were conscious of their contribution to helping the British Empire to conquer a quarter of the world; science was used to justify colonization and depict it as a benevolent and selfless project. De Greiff and Olart (2006) have provided extensive evidence that the Big Science phenomenon has altered the way scientists interact with those in power. At least since the Cold War, industrialized countries have started to donate technology to exploit resources with no interest in developing local knowledge. Therefore, the 'development' of the Global South was little more than a project of dominance. After the Cold War, politicians and scientists from the Global North pushed forward the agenda that the Global South was not the place for developing Big Science or 'pure' science (Shinn, Spaapen and Krishna 1997), refueling the colonial culture of dependence between Global North and South. De Greiff and Olart (2006) conclude that 'scientific knowledge and technology are inseparable from the exercise of authority, control, and domination ' (p.242), and that, '[w]e need to start looking at the institutions for development as instruments of control and domination and realize that scientific programs are also political programs ' (p. 244). This is possible because the structure of funding and scientific production has always belonged to the so-called center (industrialized) countries (Mignolo 2007). Center countries disregard the debate carried out by local social actors from other regions of the globe and work to circumvent rigorous discussion or interrogation of the hegemonic developmental model (ibid). An example of this is what is happening in Argentina, in the 'Education for Sustainable Development acceleration plan in higher education' with a vertical implementation of so-called sustainable values and attitudes that promote training for the professional of the future. This compulsory policy produced by academics from the epistemological North, and without extensive debate by peers in Argentine universities, disguises the neoliberal underpinnings and colonial dependencies of the plan (Fernandes 1970).
Science can be and has been part of neocolonial projects. It belongs to a structure of power that involves leaders from rich to poor countries working for or accepting the established structure of power for exploitation. These dimensions of power are a serious aspect of the Nature of Science that has been ignored by mainstream science education. Yet a naive image of the nature of science persists in contemporary science education, one that portrays scientists as individuals who pursue their research agendas fully independent from financial and cultural pressures, and carry out 'pure research' (Aikenhead and Michell 2011). Indeed, research with actual scientists has shown that science is governed by funding agencies, political influence and power (Wong and Hodson 2010). We contend that a neoliberal science education will never question structures of domination within the sciences; neoliberal education and neoliberal economics are driven by individualism, competition and accumulation of capital, whilst downplaying sustainable, ecological and communitarian issues (Bencze and Carter 2011). Yet, neoliberalism is pervasive in schooling and therefore feeds into a vicious cycle when students become objectified as 'individuals', separate from 'collectives'. Ironically, school science often aspires to simulate the work of scientists in the nineteenth century, i.e., scientists working alone and disinterested about social-political implications of their work. Ethical discussion about social issues and emotions in science lessons rarely appear in science classrooms (Galamba and Matthews 2021). Instead of learning science to build a fairer and more equal world, the goal of science education is that students become science-related professionals, to benefit their own and their country's economic prosperity (Mansfield and Reiss 2020). Therefore, today's students who become future scientists and science-related professionals develop professional subjectivities constituted by neoliberalism and scientific knowledge as commodities (Baudrillard 1998).
To counter the development of a science education which bears neoliberal values, we argue below that we need to create interstitial spaces between WMS and local knowledge. But before proceeding, it is very important to make a point. A great number of academics internationally have taken up the 'decolonizing science and education agenda' in order to build a fairer world. This is a promising way to educate children for critical awareness as opposed to educating them for individualistic and economically selfish aims. However, regardless of its epistemic and social shortfalls, science still is our greatest instrument against pseudoscientists, charlatans, fundamentalists, cynic politicians and moralists. As Roy (2018) has put it, 'Tackling the lingering influence of colonialism in science is much needed. But there are also dangers that the more extreme attempts to do so could play into the hands of religious fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists. We must find a way to remove the inequalities promoted by modern science while making sure its huge potential benefits work for everyone, instead of letting it become a tool for oppression.' (n.p.)

Critical interculturality as an interstitial space between colonial and local culture and epistemologies
Radically different from the aims of neoliberal education which underpins a science for domination that we discussed above, we are advocating a Decolonial perspective for Science Education built on ethical principles that take into consideration local perspectives on the ontology and epistemology of science. Assuming other possibilities of knowledge production is to assume a sensitive and welcoming position in relation to the epistemic and ontological plurality that make up the reality of Latin American society, valuing elements of the ancestry and struggle of peoples who were dominated by the colonial enterprise. We propose that scientific education should find ways of how scientific knowledge can speak to local cosmovisions (in Portuguese 'cosmovisões', which means non-Western systems of knowledge), as a way of overcoming colonial power structures.
With that objective in mind, we claim that learning science in Latin America means, in the critical intercultural perspective adopted in this article, placing oneself in the 'interstitial' (Bhabha 1998) space within the fabric of colonial discourse. Interstitial space is an intermediate space between hegemonic knowledge and values, and local knowledge and values. It is a frontier space that allows observing and analyzing the colonial enterprise from a certain perspective, learning from it but without being contaminated by its projects of domination. Learning in and through dialogic sciences requires the learner to assume a 'border' position. A border position allows the learner to come to understand phenomena through cultural differences, divergence, and convergence (Mignolo 2020). Therefore, science education belongs to and should be used by the people made invisible and subordinated by the Modern enterprise, but to make them visible we are required to appreciate local gnoses.
Technical knowledge is consolidated from the circulation of knowledge between different areas (Hissa, 2010), and, in this case, when dealing with a decolonial pedagogy (Walsh, 2010), we are also placing the possibility of crossing cultural boundaries in the production of academic scientific knowledge. In other words, we are indicating that the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being are established from the scientific content and epistemology. Questioning colonial structures requires first their identification and then the overcoming of colonialities from an inter-epistemic and inter-ontological turns.
By establishing a border thinking (Mignolo, 2020), we are indicating the possibility of confluences between different knowledge and practices. As Hissa (2010) argues, border zones question limits, they are opaque and sandy zones, which therefore allow exchanges and movements between different borders, which he will call knowledge and moving borders. Given the transdisciplinary nature of scientific knowledge, as analyzed by Hissa (2010), it is known that it is constituted by limits and borders that seek its expansion (moving frontiers). The mobility of borders between scientific knowledge makes the movement of disciplinary territories: transgressive mobilities, which subvert knowledge to permanently make it seek knowledge (Hissa, 2010, p. 61). This mobility at the margins of scientific knowledge promotes a proposal that Maldonado-Torres (2016) called transdisciplinary movements. A transdisciplinarity that denies the control and dependence of disciplines, but creates other spaces-time from the contact with different cosmovisions. They are like transdisciplinary contact zones as interstitial spaces (Bhabha 1998) as hybrid spaces and decolonial possibilities.

Freire's thought and Dussel's philosophy of liberation as underpinnings of interstitial pedagogies
How can Paulo Freire's and Enrique Dussel's work guide science teaching in Latin America to counter the science for domination culture? Further from the explanation above, there are two aspects of critical interculturality that we wish to address here. The first is that we live in pluriethnic and multicultural societies, and so a scientist narrative that renders the world universal, hiding diversity, is epistemic violence. The second aspect is that societies in the Global South are marked by local socio-environmental conflicts which require other forms of knowledge production, ones that consider the different social and cultural locatedness of actors involved in such conflicts (Briggs, Trautmann, and Fournier 2018). Education in such a context, therefore, requires a Freirean view toward scientific literacy, articulated as/for the knowledge and demands of subalternized peoples. As Dussel (1977) has suggested, they are the ones who safeguard the knowledge and memories resistant to Modernity's colonial 'ego conquiro'.
WMS exists under the capitalist logic of scientific-technological power and influential networking, which reinforces the idea of Totality of the West. Scientific universalism suits the Totality project of Western domination, since it imposes its principles of universality onto the rest of the world. Mignolo (2007) offers the idea of pluriversality to counter Totality. When arguing about the impacts of a project of universal rationality from a local to the universal, Mignolo (2007) agrees with Escobar's (2018) notion of pluriversity against the idea of Totality. Considering that the pluralistic approach has at its core a Freirean dialogicity, we intend to build educational processes with a focus on pluricultural curricular practices, resources, and instruction, and on multiple perspectives in teaching and learning that are, at the same time, locally relevant. And on building multiple meanings for the teaching-learning processes located in different territories.
The transformation from the colonial model to a pluriverse design compels us to bring Dussel's philosophy of liberation (1977) in dialogue with Freire's pedagogy (1970Freire's pedagogy ( /2000, to think of ways to overcome scientism. Drawing on Latin American philosophical thought, Dussel points out the importance of a 'metaphysics of alterity', which suggests it is in the radical relationship with the other that will allow other ways of thinking to break through the barrier of Eurocentric coloniality. By developing the notion of exteriority, Dussel articulates a philosophy of peripheral people and, like Freire, points to education as a path to human liberation. By valuing the communal spirit, we understand the concept of alterity (Freire, 1987) to indicate that the self is constituted through a dialogical relationship with the other. We exist 'from' the other; that is, it is the other that awakens us from selfishness and alienation. In accordance with the teachings of Freire, we are constituted as subjects who emerge from dialogue and through the process of careful listening to the other. This dimension of alterity in Freire's work positions the other as not neutral, but that the other exists in the world as a historical and political being. In this way, otherness is constituted politically, materially, and dialogically as the oppressed, wronged, excluded, as men and women who, through the recognition of their otherness, can realize their humanity as/ through the struggle for justice and dignity. Freire (2003), in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, discusses the field of education and its relationship with peripheral peoples, those who have been subordinated in an unequal and colonial world-system, as Dussel calls it. Freire puts forth critical pedagogy as both a philosophy and an education that promote liberation and, therefore, social transformation. Freire claims that cultures forgotten and denied by WMS do not operate under a dual or ambivalent logic, but rather complementarity. Similar to Freire, Bhabha (1998) argued that the ambivalence of colonial discourse is a fundamental characteristic for the project of domination. This is because it is only possible to establish a hierarchy of knowledge if there is an oppositional binary between the modern/archaic, civilized/barbarian, urban/ rural. These dichotomies subdue and imprison the colonized subjects and, therefore, reinforce hegemony. On the other hand, the subaltern cultures, namely the Afro-Amerindian peoples, maintain their cosmovisions not dedicated to the domination and elimination of the other, nor the unrestricted exploration of nature.
The concept of interstitial spaces is found in Freire's (2010) Extension or Communication? where he distinguishes what he calls magical knowledge from rigorous knowledge. His aim is to show how knowledge from universities is usually placed in communities in a process called 'cultural invasion'. As we alluded before, this is part of a movement to eliminate local knowledge, reflecting the domination mindset that we explained in our previous sections. On the other hand, so-called magical knowledge is not subsumed by the invader who comes to dominate it, but is syncretized (i.e., they, invader and colonized, integrate elements from different backgrounds) as forms of resistance that challenge the dual-ontological foundations of colonial thought, thus inhabiting a third space in the discursive universe (Bhabha 1998). The third space, or interstitial space, is a position that rejects the binary and linear ontologies that colonial discourse seeks to establish. It is a hybrid space that prevents the imprisonment of the subalternized subject, thereby inserting epistemological and ontological tensions in the colonial logics without succumbing to the invading culture.
We emphasize the importance of understanding the concrete and sociohistorical dimensions of discourse. Therefore, we should expand the discursive universe in educational spaces and meet the demands of peripherical peoples through critical intercultural educational praxis. Such a critical intercultural praxis is a counter-hegemonic and dialogic way of thinking about popular education, consistent with a Freirean perspective, in science teaching. By articulating Dussel's meaning of Liberation within Freirean praxis as described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we put forth a Freirean scientific literacy that is at the service of territories (i.e., political spaces, cultures, traditions) and local communities. In other words, we build on Freire to articulate a scientific literacy that has as its starting and ending points the very relationship of subjects with their territories, and their vulnerability to socio-environmental conflicts that affect territories in Latin America. Academic scientific knowledge, in this sense, would be used by sociohistorical subjects to critique and transform toward the betterment of the world they inhabit, and not simply to internalize the canonical knowledge of Western Modern Science. Scientific education, focusing on the contradictions experienced by subjects in their territories, i.e., problem-posing education, is capable of awakening a communal conscience. A problem-posing science education would be dedicated to educating others in similar situations to act upon a problematized reality. This process is described in detail in the work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) by Paulo Freire.
We are also seeking to overcome injustices and socio-environmental conflicts caused by the paradigm of Modernity/Coloniality re-established through western neoliberalism. Thus, we articulate Freirean and Dusselian thoughts regarding a pedagogy of liberation. For these authors, liberation does not consist in choosing one path 'OR' another in a binary colonial and Eurocentric system of power. But rather, liberation consists in not choosing a path without first acknowledging other existing ways of understanding the problem. A liberatory mindset assumes a more fluid relationship between permanence and change in the face of oppression. A liberatory position makes it impossible to accept a fixed epistemological locus demanded by colonial discourse. Dussel and Freire's ideas about liberation converge as a dialogic perspective which questions the colonial binary and can, therefore, be understood more broadly as a Decolonial Science Education.
We will now analyze pedagogies that reflect decolonial tenets. Our analysis is based on our theoretical construct, focusing on the articulation of Freire and Dussel's ideas. We identify two different ways of approaching decoloniality in science education. In the next section, we will address studies that start from hybrid, interstitial spaces, as an enunciative locus that allows the construction of other logics of thought; practices, programs, projects that are positioned 'in between' the poles of colonial binaries (These are 'grass-root' pedagogies, as they emerged and were developed inspired by resistance movement against neoliberal practices); and in the section after, we will show examples of studies dedicated to denouncing the colonial power project from an anti-racist education that contests coloniality and oppression.

Interstitial pedagogy: the agroecology project as a decolonial project for scientific education
What dialogues are possible between science education and Afro-Amerindian cultures as an alternative social and political project for liberation? In this section, we advocate the possibility of a Decolonial Scientific Education from interstitial spaces in relation to the colonial discourse by providing three concrete examples, programs and projects that are based on the in-between places.
An example of this intercultural production is agroecology. This is because it uses scientific technical knowledge, but in dialogue with local, traditional, ancestral knowledge and knowledge for food production. It has a direct connection with social movements, with Afro-Amerindian cultural identities, and with a project of society that values food security and sovereignty.
In a thematic dossier dedicated to Paulo Freire and his contributions to Science Education, Décio Auler (2021) writes an article alluding to Freire as the 'yeast of the oppressed'-meaning here that he empowered the oppressed. However, the author reveals a limitation in Freire's theoretical constructions, namely the way in which technological appropriation was conceived with a view to social transformation in the countryside. Auler discusses the role of technology in the social metabolism of large-scale agricultural production with a view to the financial market in so-called developing countries. The so-called Green Revolution from the 1960s and 1970s provoked a very strong articulation between the role of technology and local development. But for Auler (2021) the naive appropriation of technologies, as if they did not keep within themselves the values of colonial-modern capitalism, was a mistake in the debate of this period on agrarian reform and the popular agricultural project. In other words, while Freire pointed out the importance of the working class's appropriation of technological goods derived from scientific knowledge for its development, he left aside the notion that technological devices carry ideological aspects of the neoliberal project of power.
The invisibility of traditional ecological knowledge, such as those present in the field of agroecology, plays a role in the dispute between two models of agricultural production. A hegemonic model, which transforms biodiversity into export commodities, called agribusiness or agroindustry. And the model of family farming, based on agroecology, coming from social movements linked to the struggle for land. These models are marked by very different forms of social metabolism, and in Latin America, they undergo a war that, in addition to being physical, is symbolic and epistemic. Agroecology suits another project of society. A project based on the community spirit, defense of biocultural heritage, and respect for the relationships between living beings that cohabit a locality.
In the neoliberal spirit of domination and exploitation, the model of agricultural production that predominates in Latin American societies is based on biotic and epistemic homogenizations, a monocultural format inherited from the plantations that arouses great interest from groups that hold financial capital. This production model transforms biodiversity into a product, into commodities, to be traded on the international market. Researchers have shown concerns about this model and suggested it is necessary to change the monocultures of seeds that are a by-product of the agroindustry, so that there is a connection with ecosystems in a more synchronous way (Shiva 2003). The homogenization of seeds, landscapes, and minds is also consolidated as a device for silencing ancestral agricultural knowledge. According to Toledo and Barrera Bassols (2015), because of monocultural production models of agricultural knowledge that could be called ancestral or traditional, whose main characteristic is its transmission through orality from generation to generation, is made inferior and disqualified. Thus, monoculture-based agriculture also seeks to establish itself as epistemologically hegemonic, still aiming for a 'monoculture' of thought and cultural domination, being widely and actively disseminated as the only and most advantageous form of cultivation.
Agroecology has presented itself as another project that signals a reorganization of social and production systems. For Altieri (1989), Western knowledge is not rejected by agroecology, but at the same time agroecologists incorporate the explanations of traditional peoples into their practices. We can say that the consolidation of the agroecological project occurs from the criticism of the conventional model of agriculture, as well as its negative socio-environmental impacts. Thus, agroecology asserts itself as a conceptual and methodological reference, recovering values associated with the food sovereignty and security of communities. As pointed out in previous sections, supported by the contributions of Freire and Dussel, we defend agroecology as the possibility of occupying a third space, which is not located between two defining poles of the possibility of existence. Thus, agroecology per se represents this hybrid space. A space that articulates traditional ecological and academic knowledge, but a dialogue committed to a horizon of overcoming the issues caused by the neoliberal and colonial power project, and, therefore, a possibility of liberating practice or pedagogy.
Intercultural dialogues are important elements in the articulation between knowledge of traditional communities and modern Western scientific knowledge in the composition of the agroecological project of society. A project that is not restricted to management techniques, but is expanded by a political and economic vision that requires the establishment of new strategies based on a transdisciplinary approach to change paradigms (Caporal 2013). In the educational field, studies point to the fruitful relationship between the so-called traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and academic ecological knowledge (AEK) in the construction of bridges (Molina and Mojica 2013). Even if temporary, they produce new paths for social metabolism (Kato, Sandron, Hoffmann 2021). Such dialogues in teacher education represent the form and the content, of a science education focused on listening to the other and acting against the colonial project of power.
As an illustration of a project that uses TEK and AEK, we can mention the social movements organized in the struggle for popular agrarian reform in Brazil, among them the movement of landless workers (MST), which have been demonstrating the ability to produce food without pesticides, promoting agrarian reform with a view to sovereignty and food security from agroforestry and agroecological systems. A social, economic, educational and political project that is directly opposed to the multinationals that hold patents on transgenic seeds. This antagonistic position takes place from the resumption of knowledge of the so-called criole seeds, in the construction of seed banks organized in different communities. Actions that show processes of transformation of the social metabolism and that can be treated as important elements in science classes regarding the conservation of biodiversity, for example (De'Carli 2013).
From the actions of these social movements emerged public educational policies aimed at rural people in Brazil. Just as the green revolution produced demands for technical-scientific professionals for the production of monocultures on a large scale, the policies of the Degrees in Rural Education, coming from the National Rural Education Program, were consolidated in 42 undergraduate courses in federal public universities for the training of rural teachers (Souza, Kato and Pinto 2017). This action opened academic possibilities to propose the debate of the 'Education of the Countryside' in all disciplinary areas, with a strong emphasis on agroecology, especially in the qualifications of natural sciences, as a form of curricular organization and teaching practices aimed at training of future science teachers working in rural areas.
An example of action in this direction can be identified in the work of Assis, Kato and Rédua (2020) who organized an educational activity in a school located in an agrarian reform settlement in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The authors were based on the Freirean thematic investigation (Freire 2003) process to constitute an educational collective dedicated to facing the socio-environmental conflict experienced in the territory, and the disadvantages caused by the monoculture of sugar cane and the sugar and alcohol agroindustry. As a result of the investigation, important curricular elements were identified with an elementary school class of Youth and Adult Education (EJA), all experienced farmers, from the debate and construction of a food production model based on cooperativism, on participatory governance, and in short-chain agroecological production (from producer to consumer).
Through these two examples, we would like to point out possibilities for a scientific education articulated with a project of society that considers the debates and theorizations of decolonial thought. This project is configured by the communal organization and by placing the curricular scientific contents at the service of overcoming the process of invisibility of rural peoples. The agroecological proposal is shown as a critical intercultural project, as it keeps at its core the need for dialogues between traditional knowledge and academic scientific knowledge. Cultures are not viewed from a hierarchical perspective, envisioning difference as a zone for the construction of knowledge and other viable novelties (Freire 2003). It is from the agroecological project that the possibility of a 'marginal look' opens up that deconstructs nuances of colonial thought forged from a supposed 'center' of the social fabric, with a view to assimilating the other.

Theorizing and denouncing racism and discrimination in science education
In the previous section, we defended agroecology as an interstitial space (or a third space) discursive that denies the coloniality of power. This is a space of practice, where social movements and power projects are forged. As a discursive arena in which intercultural dialogues are established based on the concreteness of the common horizon: food sovereignty and security. There is no pinning down and annulation of the subordinate's position, but a fluidity and dialogue that impedes the process of domination. This is an approach defended by Freire when he argues for the need for a dialectical position between changes and permanence in the processes of overcoming oppression. In this section, we present an analysis of other proposals of decolonial pedagogies, which approach the forms of denouncing or combating the colonial project of power through the exclusion of ethnic minorities. Our intention is not to promote a hierarchy, nor a classification, of decolonial thought. We understand that it is important to understand the nuances of decolonial science education to deepen conceptualization of this approach in the field of science education and to support future investigations.
The examples given in this section advocate changes in educational policies, curricular and training changes with a view to incorporate content and pedagogical practices that meet the diversity and plurality of subjects in the society. They favor a democratic environment, opposing the setbacks imposed by neoliberal initiatives in education, as we have explained previously. The reshape of socio-epistemological aspects proposed by the authors cited below seeks to stress that all lives matter and value the same and that we should not disqualify or exclude any knowledge or ethnic background on the basis that it is not Eurocentric. Building on Paulo Freire's ideals, we go toward the incompleteness and the incessant search for our own humanity in opposition to neoliberalism and neocolonialism.
Example 1: Anti-racist and decolonial movements in Brazil have presented theoretical and epistemological discussions about how pedagogical practices and the science teachers initial education in Brazil still reproduce structural racism (Benite 2018). Anti-racist political and educational processes have been carried out in the context of teaching Physics and Astronomy (e.g., Alves-Brito 2021). From the category 'racialized cosmologies', Alves-Brito analyzes how the concept of race and scientific racism were produced from the European scientific thought of the nineteenth century. He claims that scientific racism in Brazil contributes, for example, to the reinforcement of stereotypes and negative representations of the thinking of the black population, contributing to the 'invisibility and subalternization of the place of production of knowledge about Africa and the Afro-diasporic legacy in the Exact Sciences' (Alves-Brito 2021, p. 1). Alves-Brito, Teresinha Massoni (2020) have examined the life and scientific production of Cheikh Anta Diop, one of the greatest scientists and intellectuals of the twentieth century and demonstrate the absence of black authors in the History of Science, especially in the Exact Sciences. According to these authors, 'historiography, as well as science teaching, need to take into account invisible alterities to promote liberating and inclusive science education and dissemination in the twenty-first century' (Alves-Brito, Teresinha Massoni2020, p. 292-293). Analysis of Alves-Brito and colleagues' work reveal the emergence of a critical Brazilian pedagogy that produces a new look at science education based on the recognition of processes of subalternization of cultures. For Mignolo (2007), Modernity has coloniality as its darkest face, denouncing the structures coloniality as a project of power. Mignolo discusses the processes of racialization, the absences, and the deviations of historical narratives in the sense of diminishing, or erasing, aspects of the history of African peoples, configuring a mechanism that sets in motion the project of subalternization of the other.

Example 2
In the context of biology education, Orozco, Marín, and Cassiani (2021) highlight important aspects for a decolonial pedagogy. They focus on the issue of race as well, and consequently on the structuring basis of the colonial discourse, which, in the nineteenth century, biology itself helped to reinforce (Pinheiro 2018). The authors problematize and refute the biological concept race and its eugenic consequences, and portray genocidal policies that were based on this idea. Evidencing other ways of approaching school scientific content, such as the case of race in biology, can promote awareness of injustices in the context and nature of science. In addition, it allows for an articulation with the Freirean ideology regarding the centrality of the plurality of voices and existences in educational processes. The approach to issues related to the anti-racist struggle, feminisms, class prejudice and sexual and gender dissidence has been incurring in the teaching of science and biology not only as new subjects to be included, but also as questions about the values of biology and their ways of being taught, learned and evaluated. In this way, Orozco Marín, Nunes and Cassiani (2020) reiterate the relevance of these discussions within the scope of decolonial thinking that problematizes the relations of power, being and constituting knowledge in the colonial history and present of Latin America.
Example 3 Somewhat similar to the pedagogy that emerged from agroecology-a 'grassroot' pedagogy that was developed after movements of resistance-we have found that heritage memory about biodiversity and the environmental history of communities can serve as bridges to bring together the discussions on environmental education and the decolonial debate. Camargo (2017) mapped out the generating themes present in the daily lives of the communities with the local communities that were later used to think about solutions to problems experienced in the place, as well as it was possible to perceive possibilities to, for example, finding connections between the teaching of chemistry, physics and biology to popular knowledge about medicinal plants. The study stressed the importance of dialogue between different types of knowledge and proved the potential of an articulation between Critical Environmental Education and Popular Education to think about Community-Based Environmental Education and 'Desde El Sur'. The pedagogy emerged from elements that, at first, the academy would tend to exclude, such as folk medicine, especially ethnobotany around bottles and natural remedies. In addition, Camargo and Sánchez (2021a) analyzed the popular literature of the poet Folia de Reis Gilmar Sousa to reveal bridges for the contextualization of community-based science and environmental education, finding elements for the understanding of community-nature relationships within the context of ethnobotanical and ecological knowledge about the region's native biodiversity. Finally, Camargo and Sánchez (2021b) introduce ethnometeorology and ethnoclimatology into a meeting with popular knowledge about the droughts and rains of the countryside, making it possible to bring the prior knowledge of these communities closer to academic debates on atmospheric physics, hydrological cycles, river hydrodynamics, among other topics.
In view of the need to establish intercultural dialogues and interstitial spaces, avoiding the cultural invasion characterized by Freire, there are other works that place themselves in a position of openness with other gnoses. Garcia and Costa et al. (2016) aim to identify the ethnoastronomical knowledge of an indigenous community in the north of Rio Grande do Sul as a subsidy for the production of a teaching material to be used in the local school. Three stages were used to carry out their research: pedagogical workshop, survey of ethnoastronomy knowledge and preparation of the paradidactic booklet. The pedagogical workshop addressed traditional indigenous knowledge around topics such as the formation of the Sun and Moon, the phases of the Moon, the seasons and the stars. The didactic material produced was configured as the beginning of a process of rescuing local knowledge among community members. The experienced process constituted an initial stage of a work that must be stimulated, giving continuity to the elucidation of the ethnoastronomy of the Indians of the Guarani MBYÁ Nhu Porá village. The results achieved demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of approaching the theme in the school environment, whether in indigenous or non-indigenous settings. With this, there is the possibility of popularizing the knowledge of 'things in the sky' among students, that is, redirecting it more frequently to the lay public.
The pedagogies addressed in this section were developed in the context of oppression as perceived by people in the Global South. Together, they provide an overview for decolonial pedagogies for science education, which counter colonialist mentality in science activity and in science education.

Final considerations
We contend that teaching/learning science is not restricted to instrumentalizing citizens for the job market, but the development of an ethical, alteritarian, aesthetic and political project for the necessary transformation within the scope of modern western social organization. However, curricular documents and discourses circulating in the field of science education in the global South demonstrate the strong presence of the influence of the 'epistemological North' in educational policies (Munford 2020). Ideas, contents, and values that are insistently reproduced in major events and formulations of guidelines for science education, that place science as a single truth. In other words, they assume a conception of science from a technical perspective as the only reference to guide science education proposals, reinforcing the idea that good tools and technologies would suffice to build good science teaching practices. We stress the importance of considering other issues at stake in the educational arena that impact the quality of pedagogical actions: affectivity, social inequalities, violence, ethnic and religious pluralism, among others. We problematize what scientific literacy entails because it presents itself as a contradiction when we consider pluriethnic and multicultural territories. The horizon of science education for scientific literacy, based on a single modern western narrative, which is configured from a standardization bias, impels us to the question: which scientific literacy are we talking about?
The Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge produced by UNESCO (1999) plays an important role in advocating the need to expand access to scientific knowledge for a greater portion of society. However, by stating that 'scientific education is essential for human development (…) and for having active and informed citizens (…) p.463' the document seems to reproduce a perspective of scientific education from a center to a periphery of the world-system. In other words, the 'human' and its 'development' seem to appear from a universal subject-which contrast with Freirean and decolonial perspectives. A model that starts from the civilizational assumptions of a cultural group and overlaps, denies and eliminates all the nuances of the diversity of human beings and cultures existing in different locations. This contradiction is expressed in the logic that both the ontological and epistemological aspects of Western Modern Science are unquestionable, but can question-and often deny-other ways of thinking about the world. By looking at the intellectual power of the global South and in agreement with Escobar (2018), we start from the principle that the design of thought is central to the unsustainable structure that maintains the contemporary world, the so-called Modern. We consider that in order to transform the design of modern thinking, it is first necessary to assume the existence of other models/conceptions/design in contemporary times. Escobar will propose that a political-ontological review is necessary for such a redefinition of design for a pluriverse world and therefore pluriversal views of scientific literacy. Escobar (2018) argues that the change in the design of the world will only occur if three fundamental aspects are considered: first, it will be necessary to focus on building a model of thinking that is more attentive to the more modest aspects of everyday life, in the lifestyle modern, and in the very conception of quality of life; another important point is to consider the local social context and cultural groups involved in certain situations of socioenvironmental conflicts; and a third point of attention related to the need for relational thinking, in line with ecological and environmental aspects that involve different cultures and ways of being in the world.
At this point, we can establish an approximation with the perspective of dialogicity in Paulo Freire. If the sociohistorical subject is permeated by a polyphony of discourses that emerge from the communicative context, from this point of view, we can understand scientific knowledge as one, among others, ways of dealing with the phenomena that appear in the materiality of life. Thus, it is a way created by men and women to understand ourselves and the environment that surrounds us, but not the only one (Chassot 2008).
Taking Freire and Dussel's ideas regarding a libertarian, dialogic, democratic and selfawareness pedagogy, we were able to broadly characterize projects of decolonial pedagogies. We identified three different theoretical-practical positions in the face of the colonial power project that is placed in Scientific Education. We point out these nuances as an indicative form of future research agendas and actions that have Afro-Amerindian cosmovisions as resistances to the Modern and colonial project of domination that is imposed on subalternized peoples.
As we have observed, several researchers in science education in Brazil have been mobilized to think about other ways of doing and teaching science, based on a relationship of horizontality, dialogue, and respect for other ways of knowing, most of which, made invisible or erased by the hegemonic epistemology. In a way, the decoloniality movement in science teaching has been questioning content-oriented, fragmented and depoliticized teaching practices. This movement is constituted and dialogues with the social movements that have represented advances not only in the claims for the right to be, but also, the right to know oneself, the right to memory, the right to life, the right to full otherness. In no way, the decoloniality movement advocates the destruction of knowledge accumulated by WMS, but defends the search for a point where there are no longer different valuations of lives, nor the disqualification of non-Western experiences and knowledge. For Silva do Nascimento & Monteiro (2020, p. 287), '[i]t is, on the contrary, a process of restitution of human dignity and plurality, a utopia that remains alive because it is human to be aware of incompleteness and to seek for being more'. We believe that without the dimension of 'hope' we will lose the attribute that Paulo Freire had pointed out as the deepest attribute of our condition in life, our own humanity. This path that a critical Science Education, politicized and in tune with global life must seek.