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This article provides a guided tour through three diverse cultural ways of understanding nature: an Indigenous way (with a focus on Indigenous nations in North America), a neo-indigenous way (a concept proposed to recognize many Asian nations' unique ways of knowing nature; in this case, Japan), and a Euro-American scientific way. An exploration of these three ways of knowing unfolds in a developmental way such that some key terms change to become more authentic terms that better represent each culture's collective, yet heterogeneous, worldview, metaphysics, epistemology, and values. For example, the three ways of understanding nature are eventually described as Indigenous ways of living in nature, a Japanese way of knowing seigyo-shizen, and Eurocentric sciences (plural). Characteristics of a postcolonial or anti-hegemonic discourse are suggested for science education, but some inherent difficulties with this discourse are also noted.

The North American confusion of science with technology can cloud epistemic views. This should be kept in mind as one reads the following analysis of students' views on the epistemology of science. Chances are great that when students talk about science, they are probably talking about technology, specifically medical and environmental technological investigations.

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Recent developments in concept learning and in science-for-all curricula have stimulated our interest in two fields of study: how students move between their everyday life-world and the world of school science, and how students deal with cognitive conflicts between those two worlds. In the first field of study, Aikenhead conceptualized the transition between a student's life-world and school science as a cultural border crossing. In the second field, Jegede explained cognitive conflicts arising from cultural differences between students' life-world and school science in terms of collateral learning. This article (a) synthesizes cultural border crossing with its cognitive explanation (collateral learning) and (b) demonstrates by its example the efficacy of reanalyzing interpretive data published in other articles. The synthesis provides new intellectual tools with which to understand science for all in 21st-century science classrooms in developing and industrialized countries.