The subculture of science has 'borders' that many find difficult to negotiate. These borders become more complex the further understandings of science are from traditional western perspectives. This paper examines the experiences of two western pre-service teachers' teaching science in a non-western context--the Cook Islands-using data gathered through interviews and learning logs. The lens of 'border crossing' has been used to make sense of these teachers' learning to teach experiences as it provides insights into the ways in which the participants negotiated such crossings over time. This research highlights the importance of recognising the positive interactions and potential for diverse experiences within a cultural context.
KeywordsBorder crossing; science education; ways of knowing; pre-service teacher education; nonwestern contexts experiences (Tytler, 2007). Science teaching is far more than simply delivering curriculum as there are a number of borders that science teachers need to negotiate including the cognitive, disciplinary and/or socio-cultural (Sumadic, 2015). There is no 'one size fits all' approach that works for every student and this makes science teaching challenging. While there is an implicit understanding that this is the case, the reality can be even more challenging when faced with a classroom of students embedded in a culture and context that at times can run counter to scientifically-accepted ways of perceiving the world (Parsons & Carlone, 2013).This paper seeks to explore this tension in the context of a Pacific island state, the Cook Islands.In further considering this notion of science as being relevant and authentic to everyday experiences, 'border crossing' is an analogy that was adopted by Aikenhead (1996) to acknowledge the act of moving between the everyday subcultures and the subculture of science. This work, while published over two decades ago, remains particularly seminal in the field of science education as a reference point for grappling with non-western (including Indigenous) ways of knowing and connecting with science and science education. In exploring this movement, it is recognised that this process is easier for some than it is for others with these border crossings characterised as smooth, manageable, hazardous and virtually impossible (Phelan, Davidson, & Cao, 1991;Cobern & Aikenhead, 1998). Unsurprisingly, the journeys between these subcultures are more usually experienced by people using western 2 perspectives of science; the belief system in which this knowledge is usually privileged and formalised (Mazzocchi, 2006). This dominance leaves the experience of the virtually impossible journey into the subculture of science to be typically 2 A lowercase w is used in western and non-western throughout this paper to acknowledge that these two perspectives bring different ways of knowing the world, but is intended to reduce the impact of cultural othering that capitalization may infer (see Bush, 2005). The language of western and non-western is acknowledged as poten...
