Discursive Perspectives and Science Education: Agency in Contemporary Educational Contexts

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

Abstract

In this paper I present a retrospective account of my engagement with sociocultural perspectives in science education. When I started research in Science Education, back in the early 1980s, I felt ambivalent towards Cognitivism and History of Science being the field’s major theoretical frameworks. Although I acknowledged that the emphasis on learning content knowledge could be relevant to critical pedagogy, I was uneasy about the absence of perspectives that took social aspects more explicitly into account. After my PhD, when I investigated aspects of students’ understandings of media reports about the Goiânia radiological accident (Martins 1992), I became convinced that science education research simply did not make any sense if conducted in a sociopolitical vacuum. If not, how could I account for the context of my research, which included a radiotherapy device that had been left unattended in an abandoned hospital (not returned to the manufacturers as the law dictates) and circumstances in which breaking into private property, stealing an object to sell it to somebody who does not bother about its provenance were not regarded as problematic as radioactive contamination? How are science matters with public concerns constructed by media reports? How does school science deal with moral and conceptual aspects in the debate? How is risk conveyed? Or expertise? How does one make decisions when experts disagree? In hindsight, I realise I was confronted with a socio-scientific issue - a denomination that would not appear in the research literature until the following decade -, and this perception led me to explore relationships between science and knowledge, with a focus on cultural, social and political dimensions more systematically. I found in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999) the bases to understand and explore aspects of science related discourses, both in education and in the media, as semiotic representations of social problems involving issues of trustworthiness, legitimation and power relations between science knowledge in society. Analyses focussed on relevant links between textual features (e.g. permanence, obliteration, repetition, erasure) of discourses about science and \science education and conjuntural features involving historical, social, cultural and political processes around them.
In this presentation, I analyse specific examples concerning how science knowledge is mobilized in contemporary educational contexts. Using CDA, I explore productive tensions, hybridisms and ambivalences in discourses that treat science education, on the one hand, as preparation for the labor market and for conscious consumption, and, on the other hand, as key to education for citizenship and participation in processes of transformation towards social justice. I explore conjunctural aspects of contemporaneity, such as efficiency, performativity and meritocracy, and ways through which they are assimilated and resignified in developing countries’ educational policies. Furthermore I discuss ways through which both Freirian and decolonial perspectives may offer alternatives that emphasize resistance, so as to transcend feelings of immobility and powerlessness in relation to practices that control subjectivity and constrain the agency of educators and students.

Author

• Isabel Martins, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro