Science Education and the Nature of Nature: Bruno Latour's Ontological Politics

• In Event: The Nature and History of Science in Science Education: Philosophies, Spirituality, Controversies, and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper explores recent developments in the field of science and technology, and the work of Bruno Latour in particular, to problematize the nature of Nature in science education. While science and technology studies and the scholarship on science education alike have become increasingly attentive to the anti-democratic habits of science as a way of knowing, less attention has been directed towards science’s ontological commitments, and the politics that follow from a theory of Nature that is uniform, homogenous, and unchanging. This paper suggests that Latour’s ontological politics provides important resources for problematizing the nature of nature in science education, and that his theory of multinaturalism provides an important opportunity for reimagining the relationship between science education, justice, and democracy.

Author

• Tristan Gleason, Moravian College