SE4C (Science and Technology Education Promoting Well-Being for Individuals, Societies, and Environments) in the Era of Global Education Reform Movements

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

Abstract

This paper reflects on the ways that the SE4C model of linking science education to activism challenges and collaborates in the grammar of traditional education. The paper suggests a series of socioscientific issues that may challenge the scope of SE4C when it is put into practice. This challenge occurs because these problematic SSIs are not necessarily experience-near to the students and thus, while enormously impactful on the health of the world and its people, are easily missed.
More critically, the paper goes on to explore how the grammar of schooling works to curtail authentic engagements like SE4C. This appears to be a particular problem, for instance, in the USA - in which post-financial crisis, where neoliberalism has taken a particular form of austerity logic, playing on nationalist tropes of independence, self-sufficiency, and racial privilege. More broadly, the entire momentum of the so-called Global Education Reform Movement (‘GERM’) (Strauss & Sahlberg, 2012) works to exclude such socio-political engagements in which science and its political economy might be problematized, in which consumption is critiqued, and in which student activism is defined as other than entrepreneurial engineering solutions. Thus the space in which SE4C might serve as anything other than a sort of ideal of instruction is endangered. To interrogate these spaces, I use Haraway’s (1997) concept of ‘figures’; that is, socio-technical metaphors for society — such as oncomice and other forms of bio-technologies. Also in this vein may be forms of surveillance, like drones, highly militarized police and high-tech equipment for petroleum extraction.
In response to these institutional challenges, the paper suggests that SE4C needs to be extended to include modeling of activism itself on the part of teachers. This activism I argue should probably be over the nature of schooling itself as schools are ‘reformed’ to meet neoliberal capitalist ends. Like the students in SE4C who are expected to identify social movements to join, this means teachers must unite with others through progressive unions, like the Badassed Teacher Association (BATs) or other counter GERM organizations. The paper argues that struggles over schools are extensions of struggles over the meaning and operation of science itself, and thus teacher activism is a natural extension of the socioscientific issues that SE4C highlights and addresses.

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma