Reclaiming Justice 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

‘What has the chemistry of Zyklon B got to do with the morality of Auschwitz?’ was the question put to me by a history teacher as we gathered evidence for a report into the teaching of controversial socio-scientific issues (Authors 2, 2001). The question was a striking one because it encapsulated a tension within science education. At one end is post-Enlightenment separation of the descriptive from the normative. At the other, are the many policy frameworks which encourage the ‘socialisation’ of science (e.g. Responsible Research and Innovation)
What is meant by socio-scientific issues has largely, been appropriated by a progressive neo-liberal formulation directed towards the corporate good (Gough, 2015). Here the assumed meaning of science-in-society is primarily economic, capital growth supposedly benefiting ‘society’ as a whole. Science plays an instrumental role, either to service neoliberal economics or to expose to the lay public the science behind contemporary issues such as nuclear power, genetic technologies, communication systems, without taking into account the power relations which foreground their research and development. However, this still poses a problem for curriculum policy and for teaching approaches. If science is solely descriptive and cannot speak to social values, teaching socio-scientific issues can only a somewhat obtrusive add-on to a supposed neutral, “real” science.
Drawing on the concept of ‘dissensus’ Ranciere uses the term ‘politics’ to suggest a disturbance of order, the exposure of a wrong which releases unspoken inequalities, a disruption of what polices acceptable injustices. In other words, politics is not the norm, it is the abnormal, the disturbance and overthrow of consensus. The problem is that such an affront demands a change in language, a foregrounding of ideas which threaten the body politic and are therefore submerged or repressed.
I suggest that the policing of the science curriculum effectively excludes a science curriculum built on the exposure of such injustice because science itself is deemed neutral. This presupposes an ontology and epistemology in keeping with the status quo, i.e. empiricist or positivist methodologies with a neutral science epistemology. I maintain that not only is science social but that it cannot be practised in a socially unjust milieu. Drawing on the meta-theory of critical realism, its realist ontology, relativist epistemology and judgmental rationality I argue that the interacting ‘layers’ of this ontology demand a science predicated on social justice, i.e. the doing of science depends not only on the norms of peer review and intersubjective criticality but also on human emancipation (Bhaskar, 2011).
I started teaching science in school in the late 70s. Then there were prominent discussions over Marxist Science through such outlets as the journal Radical Science. There was a battle of ideas which drew on the problem of ‘dark’ technologies, science as an oppressive force and what it would mean to have a liberationary science. Those movements were eventually swamped by a reactionary educational movement. I argue that Critical Realism offers the way forward to a theoretically justified formulation for an emancipatory science in schools.

Author

• Ralph Levinson, Institute of Education University of London