An Activist Science Teacher "Teaching Against the Grain": Tensions and Possibilities

• In Event: 29.078 - A Framework for Sociopolitical Actions on Socioscientific Problems: International Perspectives

Abstract

Humans are facing numerous serious personal, social and environmental challenges associated with fields of science and technology. Arguably of most concern is climate change (Klein, 2014), but others include health problems linked to manufactured foods, pharmaceuticals and nuclear energy. Many of these problems seem attributable to capitalists’ excessive, seemingly hegemonic, influences on citizens (including knowledge producers and managers) for the sake of profit-generation (McMurtry, 2013; Mirowski, 2011). Indeed, although educational scholars, policy makers and others have begun to encourage teachers to help students to learn more about such potential problems and to possibly take actions to address them, it seems that capitalists’ societal controls have limited implementation of such activist science education (Hodson, 2011). As Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) suggested several years ago, however, much can be learned about school reform from teachers who exercise resilience in developing ways to ‘teach against the grain.’ Through their counter-hegemonic educational practices, they may provide insights into inhibitory variables that could serve as foci for dramatic school reform. In the study reported here, we describe and analyze efforts by the second author of this paper to encourage and enable secondary school students of science to design and conduct research-informed and negotiated actions to address socioscientific problems concerning them. Students have, for instance, taken their posters and pamphlets (based on their correlational studies and internet research) to local stores to discuss social and environmental problems associated with electronics (e.g., cell phones and televisions) with customers and workers. They also have written various letters to members of government and company leaders and educated peers, family members and others about their findings and recommendations — using various forms of social media (e.g., YouTube™, Twitter™ & Facebook™). Factors enabling such research-informed and negotiated actions seem diverse and complex, perhaps at least involving interactions among the nature of the local jurisdiction’s curriculum, the teacher’s colleagues and various pedagogical strategies. Uses of actor network theory and mapping (Latour, 2005; Pierce, 2013) appear to have been particularly helpful, perhaps most notably in terms of parallel use of Callon’s (1991) concept of (de-)punctualization — such as in terms of use of the Trojan horse metaphor in understanding marketing of potentially-problematic for-profit commodities (Bencze & Carter, 2015). At the same time, it seems that the teacher involved in this case was an essential actant — adhering to perspectives and having facility with a range of practices enabling him to teach against the grain of mainstream school science. Our narrative case study aligns with Cochran-Smith’s (1991) claim that critical dissonance and collaborative resonance must be combined to understand such counter-hegemonic teaching. At the same time, various contradictions, dilemmas and paradoxes emerged — including that, although Michael values collaboration and the social good, he also prioritizes inimitability; a somewhat individualistic educational entrepreneurship, through which he can increase his self-esteem. Implications of such findings for teacher professional development are explored.

Authors

• John Lawrence Bencze, OISE/University of Toronto

• Mirjan Krstovic, Peel District School Board