Sociocultural Perspectives and Gender

Synonyms

Culture; Science education

A sociocultural perspective of science education infers that there is a dialectical relationship between cultural production and creation. Cultural production involves an actor’s agency and engagement with schema. When cultural creation is passive, that is, an actor is not actively engaged with culture. When culture is enacted, actors are dialectically involved at both individual and collective levels with cultural enactment in social fields (Tobin 2012). Within a social field, an actor’s identity is a combination of one’s own construction of self along with how one is constructed by others. Thus, identity is simultaneously fixed and changing.

Gender is a social category and as such structures any social interactions, including those that constitute schooling and science education. As a social category, gender is constituted on the structural, the symbolic, and the individual levels in society. The structural levelexamines how gender influences the...