Science Teacher Education and a Sociopolitical Turn: The Implications for Democratic Citizenship, and Environmental and Social Justice

It has been over two years since the world came to a shuddering halt due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this time people have confronted the uncertainties and stresses created by the pandemic in relation to their health and well-being, educational and employment opportunities, and social, emotional, and physical isolation. Now, even as the pandemic may be moving into the endemic stage, these events continue to impact societies and individuals.

In May 2020, to document this time in history for the science education community, we authored an editorial chronicling the precariousness faced by societies, science educators, and science teacher educators (Verma et al., 2020). We documented how our privileged positions afforded us opportunities to work from home. On the other hand, frontline workers, disproportionately from minoritized populations, without the option to work from home, experienced life-threatening health and safety challenges which highlighted long-standing systemic and structural inequities. Later that summer, we witnessed events such as the murder of George Floyd and the momentum of the Black Lives Matters movement that led us to examine the historical and ongoing forms of colonialism and racism that are baked into societal systems across the globe (Melville et al., 2021).

In this editorial, we plan to build on the topics we touched upon in our previous editorials by examining more existential crises and the role science teacher educators can play in the midst of these crises. This includes the intersection of science education with public health conversations as well as socio-political positioning as it relates to science teaching and learning. Specifically, we want to make clear how science and science education are not enterprises separated from society and societal crises; nor are science and science education absolved of injustices through naive and simplistic framings of science as apolitical. We take this stance based on how the COVID-19 pandemic became a part of culture wars (one of many), first in the early stages of the pandemic through pandemic denialism (Oreskes, 2021) that later evolved into vaccine hesitancy (Bullock et al., 2022) and finally the complete rejection and politicization of vaccines and other public health measures. This reminded us of the previous science education centered culture wars that played out in the 2000ʹs, specifically focused on the teaching of evolution in K-12 settings. It is important that we re-familiarize ourselves with the Dover trial (Religion Debate, 2011). The difference between these two science focused culture wars is that the latter one intersects with public health policies that have impacted the lives of millions upon millions of people around the world. Similar contested spaces, among others, have emerged and persisted over the decades including climate change. It is becoming clearer that many societal issues, even as they are understood with humility in the context of overwhelming evidence, continue to be contested as part of culture wars at the peril of both the human and more-than-human¹ worlds.

So, why should we care about the intersection of science education, public health, and racial and environmental justice issues? Simply put, we need scholarship that is focused on these intersectional topics to create a just, equitable, sustainable, and thriving world. Our goal through this editorial is to create a space where we can all engage in critical, meaningful, and challenging conversations. More specifically, with this editorial, we continue our journey as editors focused on both documenting the societal and environmental crises in which we find ourselves, while also exploring examples of the types of societally just, liberating, and equitable responses we believe are needed in the midst of such turbulent times. While we recognize the dire nature of these contexts and crises, we also see the promise in what Ladson-Billings (Gallagher, 2020) has referred to as an opportunity for shaping a “new normal.” For this editorial, we focus on the climate crisis as an example of a pressing issue requiring a whole of society response, while also using this crisis as a case for the importance of Tolbert and Bazzul’s (2017) call for a “sociopolitical turn” in science teacher education that aligns with the aims and scope of Journal of Science Teacher Education. In this, we agree with Tolbert and Bazzul that “a sociopolitical turn in science education [and science teacher education] is not only imminent, but necessary to meet twenty-first century crises” (p. 321).

Intersection of global and local

Our commitment to documenting contemporary global events stems from a recognition that science and science teacher education are socially situated and inherently sociopolitical in nature as they are dependent upon the ontological perspectives and values held by scientists and science educators (Morrison et al., 2021). Therefore, beyond documenting these troubled times, we have also worked to identify and publish scholarship capable of addressing these pervasive problems. In particular, we have published scholarship that addresses, and reimagines, the potential for more just and sustainable futures for both societies and science teacher education. Collectively, examples of this work during the pandemic sought to reveal how data science, computer science, and multidisciplinary convergence could be leveraged as tools for engaging K-12 students in complex societal problems like the pandemic (Lee & Campbell, 2020), and how equity could be fostered in virtual science instructional modalities through project-based learning (Miller et al., 2021). In response to the insidiousness of systemic racism, we have elevated the voices of scholars of color in the special issue Volume 33 Issue 2 focused on Exposing and dismantling systemic racism in science education (Bancroft, 2022; Basile & Thomas, 2022; Louis & King, 2022; Morton et al., 2022; Rivera, 2022; Rodriguez et al., 2022), and elevate the voices of teachers engaging in sociopolitical consciousness in curriculum redesign and culturally relevant science teaching in practice (Riley & Mensah, 2022). Additionally, we have featured research that makes apparent how design-based research grounded in science content, collaborative inquiry, and critical place-based pedagogies can provoke critical consciousness among white educators as a foundation for culturally relevant teaching and learning (Crabtree & Stephan, 2022). This editorial stands fast in ensuring that science teacher education is considered and critiqued in the milieu of the sociopolitical world and the values of societies, and science educators who play a central role in how that world is constantly shaped and reshaped.

Climate crisis

While scientists have warned of the impending climate crisis for decades, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as devastating wildfires, record temperatures and heat waves, droughts, and powerful storms have made even more apparent the devastation and existential threat of the climate crisis that is upon us (Gills & Morgan, 2020). Climate crisis conversations continue to exist in contested spaces. Scientific evidence points to the damning role humans have played as the culpable actors responsible for increasing greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, among other deleterious acts that are responsible for our climate crisis endangering both humans and more-than-humans alike (Lombardi, 2022; Lynas et al., 2021). The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report revealed how greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to rise at a rate that will obviate the 1.5°C global temperature increase threshold, leading to even more catastrophic impacts (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2022). Even more troubling in the IPCC report is how those contributing most to the climate crisis (i.e., the wealthiest countries) are not those who are most vulnerable to the impacts and harms of this crisis.

Through the climate crisis, the longstanding structural inequities across societies have been brought into stark contrast, again revealing how historical and ongoing injustices are implicated, as those who are contributing most to the crisis suffer the least for their actions. Additionally, the problematic nature of exceptionalism self-bestowed on humans, and withheld from the more-than-human world, as part of a Western dualistic and enlightened ontological perspective, brings with it a stance of separation and an air of innocence. This is best captured by Liboiron (2021), who points to how the contemporary hegemonic conceptualization of science removes the “how” and “why” from the “what” of being in, and understanding of, the world. For Liboiron, scientists and science students position themselves, or are positioned, as separated from the world even as they peer at phenomena (i.e., events that happen in the world) “from a god-like, above-it-all, and looking-from-the-object-outside, scientific position” (p. 83). Instead of asking about the circumstances that have led to climate change, and what should be done about it, science and science education have historically only concerned themselves with the “objective” explanation of a changing climate (e.g., how greenhouse gases absorb heat at earth’s surface), while setting aside questions of culpability, motive, and the potential actions necessary for a hopeful, caring, and thriving future for both human and more-than-human communities.

There are a few examples of the types of societally just, liberating, and equitable responses for both the human and more-than-human world that we believe are needed in science education in these turbulent times of human induced climate change. These include the work of the Learning in Places Collaborative (2021) and McGowan and Bell (2022). In the Learning in Places Collaborative, socially just science teaching and learning involves examining and understanding the relationship of humans with the natural world. This is undertaken as teachers are supported to engage students in more critically examining, and reflecting on, choices about what questions are asked, which data is collected, and when, how, and whether to intervene in natural processes. For teachers and students, this reflexive engagement can promote a recognition of how these decisions are shaped by often tacit stances and perspectives toward the world. These stances can see humans are apart from, and superior to; or humans as part of, and equal to, the more-than-human world (Tzou et al., 2021). In McGowan and Bell’s (2022) work, they present design perspectives that engage students in complex systems thinking and modeling using causal loop-models that support students storying and restorying current and future worlds as they better understand how historic human actions are implicated in both climate change and multispecies harm. More specifically, their work led to shifts in student understanding of disease outbreaks from the technical, distant, and apart from perspectives toward socially situated perspectives of care and responsibility. This shift is accompanied by a focus on attending to the impacts of climate change on humans and the more-than-human world as students came to better understand human relations with the natural world. In sharing these examples, we hope to catalyze the conversation within science teacher education around the need to engage students in science teaching and learning that ensures the sociopolitical nature of the intersections of science and society are made apparent, while also identifying meaningful ways to position classrooms as spaces for imagining and enacting a “new normal” that includes more caring and just relations with the world.

Implications and commitments

Original to the literature around learning communities, Lave and Wenger (1996) articulated a theory of social practice with implications for learning in the following:

…a theory of social practice … emphasizes the inherently socially negotiated character of meaning and the interested, concerned character of the thought and actions of persons-in-activity. This view also claims that learning, thinking and knowing are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world. This world is socially constituted; objective forms and systems of activity, on the one hand, and agents’ subjective and intersubjective understandings of them on the other, mutually constitute both the world and its experienced forms. (p. 145)

In this, Lave and Wenger help make the case for how world-making is a socially negotiated enterprise among persons-in-activity that arises from “the socially and culturally structured world” (p. 145). In our time as editors, the crises we have witnessed and taken time to document previously (Melville et al., 2021; Verma et al., 2020) and in this current editorial, represent the most pressing and turbulent issues of our time. These crises, as we have noted, are socially constituted in how they are caused and/or experienced. Further, as we have noted in connection to the pandemic and the climate crisis, both of these pressing issues have socio political impacts, in as much as their historical and current logics of colonialism and racism, shaped by power and privilege, are resulting in disparate impacts on minoritized populations, and, in the case of the climate crisis, disparate impacts on both human and more-than-human communities. Consequently, and aligned with calls from Tolbert and Bazzul (2017), we recognize the need for, and importance of, a “sociopolitical turn” in science education that goes beyond asking seemingly objective “what” questions in science and science classrooms to also asking humanizing, interrogative, and potentially actionable “how” and “why” questions as part of laying bare and seeking to disrupt injustices (Liboiron, 2021). To this end, as we have done here and in past editorials, we are committed to continuing to not only document the turbulent issues of our time, but also encouraging, identifying, and publishing scholarship focused on the “sociopolitical turn” in science teacher education that supports teachers and students in orienting to societally just, liberating, and equitable futures. In doing so, we might honor the words of the Michael Faraday (1861):

I … express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow-men. (p. 183)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We use more-than-human here with some trepidation, especially since we want to be sure to acknowledge how this framing is rooted in Indigenous and relational ways of knowing and being and should be carefully recognized as such. In the end, we decided to use it in this context to push back on human exceptionalism in relation to “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004).