Toward Decolonial Pedagogies in Science Education

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Crafting Science Educations for Justice: Entangled Global Tales of Teaching and Activism

Abstract

Sociocultural science education seeking social and eco-justice often promote emancipatory discourses that privilege redistribution without interrogating the Eurocentrism that has contributed to centuries worth of oppression, inequality and planetary harm. I offer a different perspective here, arguing that the ‘coloniality of power’ (after Quijano, 2007) is central to any discussion of contemporary global injustices including those that sociocultural science education aim to challenge and ameliorate. Quijano’s (2007) thesis describes how power acts through political and economic globalisation/glocalisation, privileging Western ontologies and epistemologies, and continually and capriciously reinscribing colonisation as other ways of being and knowing are silenced. Decolonialism is a politically engaged endeavour that understands historical and enduring 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 education that seeks possibilities for the public good.
Affect is, self-evidentially, a crucial aspect of this decolonial struggle, and the recent ‘affective turn’ highlights interrelationships of discourses and sociocultural forces with the human body such that affect cannot be thought outside the complexities of power, history and politics. 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 disquiet 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 my book chapter describing work with decolonising pedagogies as part of my larger project within the decolonial. Utilising Bolar (1999) and Zembylas (2015, 2017), we employed ‘pedagogies of discomfort,’ within an initial teacher education elective course at an Australian university to further decolonial and sociopolitical perspectives in science education. The research reported here describes the challenges and issues of implementating transformative learning as ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ 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