Postmodernism and Science Education: An Appraisal

Teaching What Is “Real” About Science

“…The US National Research Council (1992) published a summary on their perception of science education standards that claimed a postmodern view of the nature of science. This same orientation can be seen in much of the research and curriculum development scholarship since that time (Mackenzie et al, 2014;Mansour, 2009). Science education was refocused on the interests of students and local populations, while still engaging in the broader understandings of science content and inquiry processes.…”

“…Even if one individual making a claim is a scientist with developed expertise in the topic, and the other is a student in high school developing their foundational knowledge of the topic, postmodernism does not give allowance for hierarchies of expertise or the existence of clearly right and wrong answers, which are essential for developing trust in and understanding of science. If we argue that modern science education practice has moved too far away from a grounding in scientifically supported evidence in the shift towards postmodernism, what follows can therefore provide a framework for the science denial and mistrust we see increasingly in public perceptions of science and scientists (Mackenzie et al, 2014). Connecting an epistemology of science to that of science education is not a direct line, as science education operates as its own field with unique characteristics different from science as a field (Gil-Pérez et al, 2002).…”

“…Collins and Evans (2002) are using the metaphor of waves instead of revolutions to discuss paradigm shifts in science study, and Collins (2015) then applies this metaphor and conception of paradigm shift to science education. From a broad epistemology standpoint, the first two waves in Collins and Evans (2002) and Collins (2015) are positioned as the shift from positivism to postmodernism, and this same shift has been discussed and argued repeatedly in many fields of study (e.g., Good, 1993;Houghton, 2008;Mackenzie et al, 2014). However, this dichotomy becomes something of a false argument, as our tendency to look for the "right" answer in these approaches to science and philosophy often gets in the way of searching for a balancing point, in which both of these positions could be held in productive tension.…”

Reflections on 25 Years of Journal Editorship

“…This is exactly the same problem with educators' utilisation of philosophical (or sociological, historical or political) theory: such theory is frequently taken on board in a superficial, ill-informed and uncritical manner. The discipline's embrace of Thomas Kuhn amply illustrates this point (Matthews 2004a), 3 as does the more worrying recent embrace of various postmodernisms (Mackenzie et al 2014) and cultural theorists (McCarthy 2014). Having practising philosophers, historians and cognitive scientists regularly contributing to the journal has done something to mitigate this problem.…”

English secondary students’ thinking about the status of scientific theories: consistent, comprehensive, coherent and extensively evidenced explanations of aspects of the natural world – or just ‘an idea someone has’

“…This context of intellectual debate about NOS supported the development of a sociology of scientific knowledge (Bloor, 1991), and explicit questioning of the extent to which science could be said to have 'a', or indeed any, characteristic method (Feyerabend, 1988(Feyerabend, /1975. The Popper-Kuhn debate has been widely discussed (Kadvany, 2001;Mackenzie, Good, & Brown, 2014;Matthews, 2004), and an account of how the ideas of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos can be framed as thesis, antithesis and synthesis -that is, Lakatos putting science on a rational footing that accommodates points raised by Kuhn's description of how science has proceeded which can be considered to undermine Popper's prescription for how science should proceed -is offered in Taber (2009). Osborne (2014) considers aspects of this debate in relation to teaching about NOS in school science.…”