Science Education Towards Social and Ecological Justice

This book consists of stories of struggles in science education presented by a network of science educators working in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Britain, and the United States. The common goal of these educators is to produce more socially/ecologically just models and practices of science education. The book considers and reworks the key-terms of current social justice: agency, realism, justice, and power. Its first section explores re-inhabiting science in the quest for more just worlds including reterritorializing science within emergent theories of critical realism, engaging citizens activists with corporate science, and challenging neoliberalism and the forces that organize (structure) knowledge. The second section redefines praxis of science education itself through nuanced explorations of agency, decolonialism, and justice in ways that emphasize complexity, hybridity, ambivalence, and contradiction. The stories of this international group capture individual and collective efforts, motivated by a persistent sense that science and science education matter for questions of justice.

Matthew Weinstein is a professor of science education at the University of Washington-Tacoma. He is the author of Robot World: Education, Popular Culture, Science and of Bodies Out of Control: Rethinking Science Texts with Nidaa Makki. His work draws on anthropology, cultural studies and political economy to analyze science education in and out of schools as forms of contested public culture.

Chantal Pouliot is a Full Professor at Université Laval (Québec, Canada). She works on the teaching of environmental issues and the challenges of researchers' participation in socio-political conversations. She is co-director of the collection Learning from controversy (PUQ). She was on the Commission whose work led to the creation of Quebec's Bill 32 to protect academic freedom (June 2022).

Isabel Martins is Professor of Science and Health Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research explores relationships between citizenship, social justice and scientific literacy through discursive analyses of curriculum policy, science textbooks, popular science materials as well as of interactions in classrooms and in communities of learning.

Ralph Levinson taught science for thirteen years in secondary schools in London before moving to teach and research at University College London. His main research interests are science education and social justice, biology and chemistry education, and has worked on a number of European projects. He has written popular science books for children as well as many research articles.

Larry Bencze is an Associate Professor Emeritus in science education at OISE, University of Toronto, having worked there since 1998 after working as a secondary school science teacher and school district science consultant for 15 years. He uses action research to promote and understand sociopolitical engagement through science and technology education.