School Science Ruling Relations and Resistance to Activism in Early Secondary School Science

Abstract

‘STEPWISE,’ a curriculum and pedagogical framework, provides a pragmatic schema for development and enactment of school science that can challenge and resist powerful social relation s through socio-political activism to address socioscientific issues. Reproductive social relations, termed ruling relations by Dorothy Smith, are characteristic of institutions, such as schools, that work toward constitution of subjectivities and practices of science teachers and students. These ruling relations may be inscribed in daily activities of teachers and students through taken-for-granted institutional practices, making these difficult to perceive. Disrupting these social relations within institutions that have become defined by them, therefore, becomes a central challenge for school teachers attempting to develop STEPWISE educational experiences. This chapter reports on one teacher’s experiences implementing activities based on STEPWISE in a grade 10 ‘Applied’ science class, which is meant to prepare students for college or the workplace. Institutional ethnographic perspectives and methodologies, which aim to identify and describe institutional ruling relations, were used to collect data on school-based factors that enabled STEPWISE experiences, as well as those that resisted its implementation. A teacher, who is the subject of this chapter, was able to develop activist lessons based on STEPWISE; however, school/institutional factors appear to have imposed a non-ideal linear progression of lesson delivery, which restructured the way the teacher could implement activist-based science activities. Students demonstrated a relatively weak commitment to socio-political activism. We discuss these findings in the context of reproductive school science practices that appear to marginalise, rather than support, teacher and student practices toward socio-political activism.