Lyn Carter

Australian Catholic University | ACU · Faculty of Education

While science and science education might well be aware of their own methodological and epistemological preconditions, they are wilfully oblivious to their political, economic and social ones. Exposing the political economies shaping science education’s enactment not only explodes its mythical apolitical status but works towards re-envisioning a ho...

In this chapter I reflect upon contemporary challenges, which are posed to science educators in contexts of environmental crises, structural racism and threats to democracy. I argue that the idea of scientific literacy as informed decision making about science related issues has neglected analyses of cultural and socio-political dimensions of knowl...

This chapter reflects on the evolution of an analysis and practice of science education that makes the relational and material relations between the scientist and their object the heart of science education. The paper develops a framework for a science education grounded in resistance to the social relations of neoliberalism. The paper first explor...

Controversies come and go, but they’re not identical. Over the years, I’ve documented stories of local environmental struggles as well as stories of research protection. I’ve also looked at ways of teaching and learning about controversies. In this chapter, I look back at some of these stories and contextualize them within my trajectory as a scienc...

The chapter bookends the reflections by critical scholar-educators in the preceding chapters by positioning their lifelong struggles for change in science education as the much needed visionary work aimed at envisioning and building alternative hopeful, equitable and sustainable futures both in and out of science classrooms. Viewing policy and soci...

Humanity appears to be facing many unprecedented risks to wellbeing of individuals, societies and environments associated with fields of science and technology. Among numerous threats, arguably most concerning are those from petroleum-fueled climate disruption. Meanwhile, wealth and wellbeing seem to be concentrating into increasingly fewer hands....

Contemporary school science education is instrumental, its rationale interwoven in neoliberal discourse. Given the problems schools and science education are faced with in a diverse and uncertain world there needs to be a fundamental re-thinking of what is entailed by learning and understanding science. I argue that Vision I and Vision II approache...

There are many potential harms to individuals, societies and environments associated with powerful networks of living, nonliving and symbolic entities (actants), such as financiers, banks, think tanks, transnational trade organizations and agreements, competitiveness, scientists, engineers, universities, governments, military, advertisements, enter...

In this chapter, the authors analyze the difficulties and opportunities to broaden the purpose of science education using critical perspectives derived from ethics of care theory. Through the analysis of a science school-university collaborative project we discuss how the ethic of care theory became central to our work and how collaborative relatio...

This chapter provides the readers with what it believes to be ecojust alternatives to neoliberalism‐influenced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education projects. In doing so, it seems to have attended different ontological, epistemological, and axiological perspectives on STEM education. The chapter suggests that reformers...

This paper reviews the Australian discourse on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and STEM education apparent in selected texts including those published by the Australian Government. Like the GERM (global education reform movement) contagion that it is, STEM only really officially reached the shores of Australia when in 2012 o...

In this chapter, we explore the perspectives of three preservice teacher education students in their first year of their Bachelor of Education at a university in Australia. These 18–19 year old students were challenged to reduce their ecological footprint during a compulsory, 12–week science course that focused on applied dimensions of scientific l...

School science and fields of professional science and technology appear to be cooperatively-enmeshed in a global economic system prioritizing enrichment of few capitalists while compromising wellbeing of many individuals, societies and environments. Governments and extra-national entities like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developm...

In this paper, I have positioned myself with Kean Birch and explored some of the political-economic actors/actants of policy suites implicated in the biotechnologies and bioeconomy. In particular, I have considered Australia’s recent National Innovation and Science Agenda and allied documents and entities (that is, Innovation and Science Australia,...

The University of Ottawa Education Review is a semi-annual thematic publication online from the Faculty of Education. Articles are peer-reviewed.

There is now a plethora of writing around science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, in addition to the scholarship and practitioner domains, that includes policy and strategy statements both domestic and international, public and private. In overview, this article argues that STEM as the neologism for science education is...

This chapter provides a brief overview of issues regarding research in multilingual and culturally diverse STEM teaching and learning environments. We note how multilingualism has been addressed in some STEM education research, and we offer some diverse examples of such. But we also note some of the challenges that exist in multilingual classrooms...

This chapter focuses on actions at the heart of the STEPWISE framework. Utilising a discursive psychological perspective less usual in science education than cognitive psychology, this chapter investigates preservice teachers’ sense of responsibility for education for sustainability (EfS) or pro-environmental action. Unlike cognitive psychology, th...

The geopolitical, economic and sociocultural complexity, that is, the twenty-first century, requires globalisation to be part of the lexicon of science education scholarship and practice. In this chapter, I contribute to the discussion of political economic globalisation focusing on the dominant logic of neoliberalism and its reconstruction of scie...

The wellbeing of many individuals, societies and environments is either dire or under serious threat due to decisions involving fields of science and technology. Arguably, the most significant of these are linked to increasing global climate change“but, many of us are concerned, for example, with health problems (e.g. diabetes, cardiovascular disea...

In this paper, we utilize a discursive psychological approach to further explore agency and structure in science education research. The aim of our research is to understand how we can provide opportunities for marginalized students in preservice elementary teacher education in an Australian university to become agentic concerning environmental sus...

In this chapter we propose to contribute to research in socio-scientific issues (SSIs) by putting forward a discussion of factors that influence science teachers’ SSI teaching and of the type of teaching needed to prepare students for active participation in SSIs. Contributions from researchers in four different European countries, Canada and Austr...

In this chapter, I examine the place of political discourse in science education, which Erminia Pedretti and Joanne Nazir (Sci Educ 95(4):601–626, 2011) acknowledge has been accorded very “limited” study (p. 618). Specifically, I review the pervasive metadiscourse of neoliberalism, which is now the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, an...

This theoretical paper is aimed at provoking more research by proposing a new teaching model that will meet the needs of both monolingual but in particular bilingual students. A teacher 'language use model' commonly employed is first critiqued. It suggests teachers should encourage students to first use everyday English when learning new mathematic...

With chapters from Alejandro Gallard Martínez, Bhaskar Upadhyay and Sonya Martin and her colleagues in this volume, we welcome three worthy contributions to the nascent field of globalisation and science education. The geopolitical, economic and sociocultural complexity that is the twenty-first century has demanded globalisation to become part of t...

Processes of globalization have played a major role in economic and cultural change worldwide. More recently, there is a growing literature on rethinking science education research and development from the perspective of globalization. This paper provides a critical overview of the state and future development of science education research from the...

Science education has been slow to respond to the challenges of the new global age evident from the few references to globalisation within its literatures. I have already argued elsewhere that, despite science education’s preference for the traditional categories of analysis, globalisation is clearly at work in the conceptual language science educa...

In many educational contexts throughout the world, increasing focus has been placed on socio-scientific issues; that is, disagreements about potential personal, social and/or environmental problems associated with fields of science and technology. Some suggest (as do we) that many of these potential problems, such as those associated with climate c...

It is apparent that many of us live in a hyper-economized world, in which personal identities and routine practices are significantly oriented towards production and consumption of for-profit goods and services. Extreme consumerism resulting from this orientation often is associated with many personal, social, and environmental problems. Implicated...

Recent times have seen a growing preoccupation with diversity as a consequence of the newly intercivilisational encounters of our rapidly globalising world. Globalisation has meant that at the local level, the world’s peoples rub more closely together not only ensuring that diversity, plurality and hybridity have become the leitmotifs of the global...

The term globalization has come to depict the recent global, largely neoliberal, economic, political, and social restructuring and modes by which we now interpret our world (Featherstone, 199612. Featherstone , M. 1996. “Localism, globalism, and cultural identity”. In Global/local: Cultural production and the transnational imaginary, Edited by: W...

It is impossible to consider contemporary science education in isolation from globalisation as the dominant logic, rethinking and reconfiguring social and cultural life in which it is located. Carter (J Res Sci Teach 42, 561–580, 2005) calls for a close reading of policy documents, curriculum projects, research studies and a range of other science...

Inspiring students to be self-motivated and engaged is a challenge for all school-based curriculum reformers. A cluster of schools in the Melbourne Bayside area took up this challenge during the Australian Schools Innovations in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM)-funded initiative entitled Sustainable Living by the Bay. In this chapter, w...

This paper aims to further articulate multicultural science education scholarship. In particular, it explores the notions of borders and border epistemologies as intellectual resources to think again about the challenges of science education in the global world that demand more sophisticated concepts to unravel some of its complexities. It responds...

Responses Please consider writing a response to this paper in the WePaste forum for JASTE 1.1 (www.wepaste.org). The term globalisation has come to depict the recent global economic, political and social restructuring, and modes by which we now interpret our world (Featherstone, 1996). Jameson (1998 p.56) is one of many theorists who group the vari...

Science has seen considerable change in recent decades with the emergence of a new economic and sociopolitical contract between science, the nation, state, and private commercial interests. Generally regarded as having been precipitated by globalization, these changes in the sciences are beginning to be documented by a range of commentators. Clearl...

This paper reviews the significant sociocultural literatures on science studies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science to develop theoretical perspectives for science education more suitable to the challenges of contemporaneity. While the influences of science studies and cultural diversity are not uncommon within the science education lit...

This chapter argues for science education’s engagement with contemporaneity, and for a repositioning of its research directions to better address the theoretical and methodological challenges raised. To this end, this chapter utilises the more usual discourses of globalisation (for example, Delanty, 2000; Harvey, 2000; Jameson, 1998), as well as La...

In this paper, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education's scholarship on cultural diversity in order to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help...

Like Lemke (J Res Sci Teach 38:296–316, 2001), I believe that science education has not looked enough at the impact of the changing theoretical and global landscape by which it is produced and shaped. Lemke makes a sound argument for science education to look beyond its own discourses toward those like cultural studies and politics, and to which I...

This paper makes use of postcolonial theory to think differently about aspects of cultural diversity within science education. It briefly reviews some of the increasing scholarship on cultural diversity, and then describes the genealogy and selected key themes of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory as oppositional or deconstructive reading pra...

It is heartening to note that while science education remains predominately conceptualised from normative positions, there is a small but important literature adopting more critical perspectives. Drawn from the opposi- tional discourses including science studies and ecofeminism, such critiques aim to reformulate science education with far-reaching...