Traveling with and through your backpack: a personal reflection on the infrastructure of science education |
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| Authors: | Alison Sammel |
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| Institution: | (1) Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia |
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| Abstract: | In this paper I respond to Ajay Sharma’s Portrait of a Science Teacher as a Bricoleur: A case study from India, by speaking to two aspects of the bricoleur: the subject and the discursive in relation to pedagogic perspective. I highlight
that our subjectivities are negotiated based on the desires of the similar and competing discourses we are exposed to, and
the political powers they hold in society. As (science) teachers we modify our practices based upon our own internal arbitrations
with discourses. I agree with Sharma that as teachers we are discursively produced, however, I suggest that what is missing
in the discussion of his paper is the historically socially constructed nature of science or science education itself. I advocate
that science education is not neutral, objective or unproblematic. Building on Gill and Levidow’s (Anti-racist science teaching,
1987) critique, it is precisely because we are socially constructed by the dominant hegemonic science education discourse
that we rarely articulate the underlying political or economic priorities of science; science’s appropriation of other cultural
ways of knowing; the way science theory has been, or is used to justify the oppression of peoples for political gain; the
central role science and technology play in the defensive, economic and political agendas of nations and multinational corporations
who fund science; the historical, and contemporary role science plays in rationalizing an exploitative ideological perspective
towards the more-than-human world and the natural environment; and finally, the alienating effect science has on students
when used as a ranking and sorting mechanism by educational systems. Therefore, we need to do what Mr. Raghuvanshi could not
imagine: we need to destabilize the foundations of science education by questioning inherent structural and ideological inequities.
Alison Sammel
received her doctorate in 2005 for a study that used critical theory and feminist poststructuralism to analyse how five science
teachers believed they incorporated critical forms of pedagogy in their high school science classrooms. Intrigued by the social
construction of the ‘Western science teacher’ she continues to explore the teaching and learning of Science through the lens
of feminist poststructuralism. Alison currently teaches at the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University
on the Gold Coast and researches in the fields of Science and Anti-oppressive pedagogies. Prior to her employment at Griffith
University, Alison was employed as the Chair of Science Education at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It was
here she began working with local Indigenous communities to authentically incorporate Indigenous Ways of Knowing into Science
Education. |
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| Keywords: | Poststructuralism Feminism Equity Discourse Identity |
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