Toward Decolonial Pedagogies in Science Education

• In Event: Toward Critical Public Consciousness in STEM Education: Inter/Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

Sociocultural science education frameworks seeking social and eco-justice often promote emancipatory discourses that privilege social redistribution without interrogating Eurocentrism that has contributed to centuries worth of oppression, inequality and planetary harm. This paper takes a different perspective, arguing that the ‘coloniality of power’ (after Quijano, 2007) is central to any discussion of contemporary global injustices including those that socio-cultural approaches to science education aim to challenge and ameliorate. Quijano’s (2007) coloniality of power thesis, also known as ‘modernity/coloniality,’ describes how power acts through political and economic globalisation/glocalisation, privileging Western ontologies and epistemologies, and reinscribing colonisation as they silence other ways of being and knowing. Decolonialism is a politically engaged endeavour that understands historical colonialism and the continuing implications of colonial knowledge production within contemporary political, social and cultural formations. Hence, decolonising curriculum and pedagogies aim to critically examine the geopolitics of knowledge and power structures, at the same time as they consider the material conditions of coloniality, and intellectual histories and experiences of colonised people. They seek a renewed academic/ethical vocabulary and methodologies that aim to disentangle modernity and coloniality and open spaces for different viewpoints. Such aims should be central to any public education that seeks a democracy both enabled by, and enabling, respect for diversity, justice, and human dignity.
Emotion is, self-evidentially, a crucial aspect of this decolonial political struggle that aims towards transformative democracy. Zembylas (2017) argues that decolonising pedagogy is enmeshed with educators’ and learners’ emotional investments and unavoidably engages the terrain of emotionally difficult knowledges to enable transformative possibilities. Further, Zembylas and Papamichael (2017) describe discomforting emotions that acknowledge discomfort and respond to it pedagogically, based upon Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort and Zembylas’s (2015) further formulation of an ethic of discomfort in teacher education. This paper takes from Bolar (1999) and Zembylas (2015, 2017) and describes an attempt to work with decolonising pedagogies within an initial teacher education elective course at an Australian university. The third year preservice students selected an environmental based course that employed Malkki (2010) and others’ extension of Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning as a ‘pedagogy of discomfort,’ to further decolonial and sociopolitical perspectives in science education. Essential for transformative learning as a pedagogy are ‘edge-emotions’ (Malkki, 2010), experienced as a result of challenges to learners’ assumptions. Students’ emotional outcomes or edge emotions are described consequent to several activities designed to challenge their comfort. The research reported here describes our exploration of transformative learning as ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in a science classroom, and challenges and issues that accompany its implementation as we attempt to refine our engagement with decolonial pedagogies. Such work can facilitate the dynamic self-renewal of, in this case, science education, which seeks a different form of justice as part of a decolonial agenda.

Author

• Lyn Catherine Carter, Australian Catholic University