Reimagining Science Education in Neoliberal Global Contexts: Sociocultural Accounts of Science Learning in Underserved Communities


Article de revue

Contributeurs:

État de publication: publié

Nom de la revue: Mind, culture, and activity

Volume: 23

Numéro: 3

Intervalle de pages: 183-187

URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2016.1201514

Résumé: This special issue brings together researchers grappling with the production of sociocultural and anthropological accounts of science education in an era marked by complex and contradictory policy frameworks for science education and the divergent ways these policies are informed by neoliberalism. The special issue engages with and aims to “desettle” the current focus on canonical science grounded in a market-driven educational system with high academic standards, predetermined outcomes, and continuous high-stakes assessments. This issue also questions state control of science education, driven by a convenient uniformity that narrowly defines science for a successful few while legitimizing the exclusion of difference (Ambrosio, 2013; Bencze & Carter, 2011; Calabrese Barton, 2001; Smith, 2011; Tan & Calabrese-Barton, 2012). The market-driven education system, grounded in global economies, has led to the misrepresentation of professional science—as a science that contributes to markets, but not to the well-being of individuals, societies, and the environment—and a discourse that centers on the individualization of learning in ways that limit students’ sense of contribution (Bencze & Carter, 2011). This market-driven science is “shaped by” the invisible hand of neoliberal ideology, which is complex and uncertain; it sneaks up on us, and education as a whole, in ways hard to pin down and name. Yet seriously engaging in, moving away from, and resisting the market-driven privatization of education, the disposability of youth, and the “near-pathological disdain for community, public values, and the public good” (Giroux, 2012, p. 46; see also Ambrosio, 2013; Harvey, 2005; McGregor, 2009) is crucial to reforming science education.