A Decolonial Moment in Science Education: Using a Socioscientific Issue to Explore the Coloniality of Power

Abstract

Decolonialism as a politically engaged endeavour interrogating enduring colonial knowledge production is essential to any discussion of global injustices including those that sociocultural approaches to science education seek to challenge and ameliorate. This paper describes a decolonial moment in my own science teaching to undergraduate primary (elementary) preservice teachers around a socioscientific issue of Ethical Clothing/Fashion. The decolonial moment consists of a semiotically guided reading of some of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood’s promotional photographs for The Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), a development project in Kenya. Through this reading, differing social and power relations emerge than probably intended, aimed at unsettling the Eurocentric colonial discourses that many students carry with them into the classroom. The paper concludes with a review of both my own, and the pre-service teachers’ reflections on our learning.

Decolonising the science curriculum in England: Bringing decolonial science and technology studies to secondary education

“…As recently argued in the field (Gasparatou, 2017; Zeidler et al, 2019), the rise of alternative facts and of complex SSIs makes a critical school science greatly relevant. Some of those advocating the integration of SSIs in science lessons, for instance, talk about the pressing need for them to become more in tune with the level of holistic thinking necessary for a meaningful understanding of these scenarios (Bencze, 2017; Carter, 2017; Levinson, 2018; Zeidler et al, 2019). The decolonial approach to STS adopted here is then aligned with these calls for a more critical and holistic engagement with the ‘socio’ aspects of SSIs, including an explicit exploration of the geopolitical and financial aspects behind scientific/technological developments.…”

“…Furthermore, most ‘decolonise the curriculum’ endeavours in England, the context of this paper, have been linked to Humanities/Social Sciences subjects (e.g. History and English)—as seen in a recent special issue of ‘BERA Research Intelligence’ (Moncrieffe et al, 2020)—with school science often occupying a peripheral place (see Boisselle, 2016 for an example in the Caribbean; and Carter, 2017 for an example in Kenya). Nevertheless, the postmodern turn has a fundamental connection with the STS field and with the knowledges/practices found in science curricula.…”

“…Thus, my argument here is that the recognition and deconstruction of the shared historical processes, interchanges and collaborative and exploitative systems behind the development of scientific/technological knowledges and practices are central to making the holistic, dynamic and complex nature of the ‘science’ we teach in schools explicit to students (Carter, 2004; Levinson, 2018), fostering a wider understanding of these developments, including aspects of social justice, oppression and cross‐cultural interactions and exposing ‘the many often ignored “faces of science”’ (Erduran, 2014, p. 106). This type of approach to school science is crucial to promoting a more informed and less naïve understanding of what processes of scientific and technological developments entail and of what these fields can and cannot do for different communities (Gasparatou, 2017), a pressing concern in times of complex socio‐scientific issues (SSIs) and realities, fake news and mistrust in science (Bencze, 2017; Carter, 2017; Levinson, 2018; Zeidler et al, 2019). This perspective can also be relevant to those concerned with the notions of ‘recognition’ and ‘redistributive justice’ in (science) education since it challenges the dichotomy between ‘Western modern Science’ and ‘others’ knowledges’ commonly promoted by mainstream school science through an exploration of the ‘hidden’ trajectories of scientific knowledges/practices (Carter, 2004; Ideland, 2018).…”

Reimagining Science and Technology Education in the COVID-19 Portal

“…Having characterised at length the mise-en-scène in which the pandemic is situated, in the brief space remaining, I sketch three implications for science education. Each is suffused with my personal sociopolitical vision of distribution and recognition privileging social and ecological justice (see Carter, 2010Carter, , 2017). They are necessarily speculative given the pandemic's fluid, rapid and multiversal nature, requiring sustained consideration over time, for as Nancy Fraser believes, "you can't fall back on the same old bromides that are so patently useless" (Chang, 2020).…”

What’s in a Name

“…Having characterised at length the mise-en-scène in which the pandemic is situated, in the brief space remaining, I sketch three implications for science education. Each is suffused with my personal sociopolitical vision of distribution and recognition privileging social and ecological justice (see Carter, 2010Carter, , 2014Carter, , 2017. They are necessarily speculative given the pandemic's fluid, rapid and multiversal nature, requiring sustained consideration over time, for as Nancy Fraser believes, "you can't fall back on the same old bromides that are so patently useless" (Chang, 2020).…”