The Broader Impacts on Science Education of Narrowly Defining "Nature of Science"

• In Event: Whose Science? Interrogating the Foundations of "Nature of Science," Uncovering Epistemic Injustices in Science Education

Abstract

We conclude with an interactive fishbowl-style panel, which comprises four scholars whose work spans formal, informal, and family settings across PK-20 in the US. Here are previews of their perspective on NOS and its impact on science education.

Panelist 1:
Similar to previous research (Walls, 2016), I argue that NOS research has not addressed issues of race across its 50-year history. With little racial and ethnic diversity among research participants, and no diversity in the instruments and research designs, there is much more to be learned and addressed. Additionally, an emphasis on NOS research in teacher education has not attended to what is taught, how it is taught in teacher education programs and courses on NOS, and to whom it is taught (Author, 2018). Therefore, we must expand whose voices are heard and included in the NOS research, particularly for Teachers of Color, and to expand what counts as science from their unique positionalities.

Panelist 2:
Despite relatively broad definitions of NOS (e.g., Lederman et al., 2002; Vhurumuku & Mokeleche, 2009), the science presented in schools often operates from narrow perspectives (Bang et al., 2012). Diverse voices have worked to broaden understandings of NOS, questioning what counts as science and how science is used to build preferred worlds. Indigenous scholars have called for engaging NOS from the standpoint of heterogeneous sciences (Author, 2018; Cajete, 2000; Kimmerer, 2013), inviting considerations of context, relationality, reciprocity, responsibility and what it means to be a good/whole human being. This framing shifts the purposes of engaging in the sciences from economic production to gift exchange. Thus, Indigenous sciences bring important perspectives to how sciences will help society meet the challenges humanity faces.

Panelist 3:
Conceptualizations of science exclusively focus on studies of academic scientists, presenting constraining exogenous lenses for educators to understand children’s everyday/classroom science engagement. This is problematic because science is represented as a narrowed set of practices, often excluding the scientists’ embodied and messy sensemaking (Keller, 1984), and consistently excluding non-Western forms of knowing (Author, 2020). Moreover, narrowed representations ensure analysis of young children’s and/or nondominant communities’ science engagement is constructed as “lesser-than” (Author, 2019) and leads to assimilating/dehumanizing instruction (Bang et al., 2012). We must construct endogenous representations of science — invoking how children wonder about phenomena — and engage in expansive/transformative approaches to instruction to counter constraining uses of NOS.

Panelist 4:
This symposium raises provoking patterns about NOS, as well as how students should encounter what science is in classrooms. NOS approaches do not fundamentally challenge the ideologies of Eurocentric science raised by a feminist critique that the NGSS still embody: abstraction, utilitarianism, technocentrism, competition. We know it requires concerted, intentional effort to design NGSS-aligned instruction that does not implicitly perpetuate injustices (Gunkel and Tolbert, 2018; Morales-Doyle, 2018). Current critical scholars have provided ample arguments for the kinds of ideologies that should guide science (education) instead. Imbuing our science instruction with those commitments may require constant checks to not be so focused on teaching science that we forget we are teaching people.

Authors

• Felicia Moore Mensah, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Ananda Maria Marin, University of California - Los Angeles

• Danielle Keifert, University of North Texas

• Christina Krist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign