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Paper short abstract:

Moved by discussions on science education's relevance we ask: how can science education be reinvented to be less relevant yet relevant towards justice? What does this mean for science identities? We present public science pedagogies to cultivate critical scientific imagination in higher education

Paper long abstract:

Responding to inequalities reproduced in science education and the need to reimagine it, Tolbert and Bazzul (2023) provocatively argued that for science education to be more relevant, it must be “less relevant.” (p.1). In its positioning as supremely important, science education has left aside social aspects that shape our ways of living. Issues that have been perpetuated through science, such as colonialism, sexism, racism and classism. Literature shows that both science students and faculty see social issues as less relevant to their work, detaching science from social dynamics in the name of objectivity. This has positioned science not only as disconnected from the social world but also as an authority that must be blindly trusted. Blind trust in the authority of science risks falling into pseudoscience and extremism.

To problematise such a reality we ask: How can science education be reinvented so that it is both less relevant while relevant towards justice goals? What does this mean for science identities?

We argue that the relevance of science will come by troubling discipline boundaries while exploring its socio-cultural and political interests. We present the case of different science pedagogies as public pedagogy of science in which we communicate imaginaries about how science disciplines society and those who do science. Questioning the position and boundaries of science rather than taking its relevance as a given opens space for a critical scientific imagination needed to work towards justice. We provide examples of this imagination’s characteristics and implications for higher education pedagogies and identities.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation investigates how creativity began to be associated with science in memoirs by physicists and chemists from the 1960s onward, transforming concepts of knowledge making and scientific ability both within science education and in scientific popular outreach.

Paper long abstract:

Today, we take "creativity" for granted: that anyone can create new and useful things, and that we always need more of it. But this concept has a history, intimately related to American postwar concerns about technoscientific conformity, boredom and destructiveness.

This presentation focuses on how the concepts of “science” and “creativity” were deployed in memoirs by chemists and physicists 1960–1990. It aims to explain a shift in meta-stories about science: why did many scientists’ life narratives change from trying to evoke awe to depicting creativity in the 1960s? Because creativity provided a means to defuse much countercultural critique against science in the 1960s, presenting it as fun, playful and mildly rebellious.

This is the story of the concept's fluidity, its ability to stretch and dismantle binaries. The presentation will also reveal "creativity"'s hidden roots in organizational theory and management discourse. While historians agree that ”creativity” has transformed ideas about knowledge making, we still know little about how, why and with what effects it came to assume its prominent place in our current epistemic culture.

Memoirs by scientists are often quoted in science outreach, such as at museums and websites, and within science education. Analyzing these self-presentations by scientists thus provides a fresh angle on how science education, technoscience and society are mutually constituted.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores how characteristics of the practice of physics are articulated by higher education physics students, with a particular emphasize on how these characteristics can be understood as gendered.

Paper long abstract:

Physics is considered a ‘hard’ science; hard both as in difficult and as in providing hard, objective knowledge claims. It is strongly aligned with cleverness, and also with masculinity. But what other stories can be told about this discipline? This presentation explores how characteristics of the practice of physics are articulated by higher education physics students, with a particular emphasize on how these characteristics can be understood as gendered. The intention is to distinguish both hegemonic and unexpected articulations of physics. The empirical data consists of 21 life-history interviews with first- and second-year university students in physics. The analysis is inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis and looks for signs that physics is articulated together with (such as, difficult, dazzling, beautiful, prestigious). In a second stage of analysis the signs these first level of signs are articulated with are identified, to establish how chains of equivalence are thereby produced. In doing so, it is possible to identify how different meanings of physics are produced, by how signs are articulated in relation to other signs (for example, that ‘difficult’ is articulated with ‘challenging’, ‘absorbing’ and ‘mental well-being’, and ‘beauty’ is articulated with fascination).

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what is communicated about technology and society, the ideal engineering student, and the engineering profession, when students are recruited to participate in challenge-based learning, a new pedagogy which promises both technical knowledge and societal relevance.

Paper long abstract:

Engineers are expected to simultaneously drive economic growth through technological innovation and offer solutions to important societal problems of sustainability. However, engineers often fail to fulfill this paradoxical potential, in part because a combination of “depoliticization” and strong meritocratic values frame social concerns as separated from technology and engineering (Cech 2014). In this context, challenge-based learning (CBL) is one framework showing how a new kind of engineer can be trained (Kohn Rådberg et al., 2020). CBL is positioned as a contemporary and innovative pedagogy that can equip students with highly demanded professional skills, and prepare them for working on the frontline of sustainability and social relevance. In this paper we scrutinize what is communicated about technology and society, the ideal engineering student, and the engineering profession, when students are recruited to a CBL initiative.

We find that the recruitment material frames solutions to “societal challenges'' as technical or industrial in nature, melding the concerns of society with the concerns of industry. Students’ passion to contribute is redirected into providing industry with skilled workers, and acquiring professional skills. As such, we argue that CBL as a reform discourse risks communicating a technocratic and post-political picture of “what needs to be done”, in line with the capitalist realist assumption that the current liberal democratic marriage of private capital and public good is the culmination of development (Fisher, 2009) and that solutions to challenges must happen through and be contained within this system.

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Paper short abstract:

In this talk, we reflect on the challenges of embedding ethical and social responsibility within a computer science core programme and ask how to chart new paths towards reflexive socio-technical knowledge production in engineering education.

Paper long abstract:

Despite growing public awareness around the social, political, and ethical implications of data and algorithms, the role that education plays in building just and responsible computing cultures is often overlooked within critical scholarship. As many have noted, mainstream approaches to ethics and responsible innovation within computer science training tend to treat ethics as a siloed discipline that practitioners apply to their own practice, often without deeper conceptual engagement with different skills and epistemologies. Technical training—with its emphasis on abstraction and formalism— further contributes to this sense of exceptionalism by building ideological barriers between computer science practice and social responsibility.

In this talk, we reflect on our experiences as respectively an STS scholar and a computer scientist in collaboratively designing and teaching two complementary courses within a large undergraduate Computer Science programme: an Ethics and Responsibility course and, in the term following, a group-based Project course. In 2021, we re-designed the curriculum and delivery of the Ethics and Responsibility course (which historically focused on professionalism, leadership, and individual ethics) to include a wider variety of critical perspectives on technology and society. We then used the Project course as a testbed to assess the impact of our pedagogical intervention and observe students’ understanding of social and ethical responsibility in practice. Drawing on our experience, this talk offers an in-depth reflection on the challenges of embedding socio-technical knowledge in computer science education, including the wider institutional and political arrangements that tend to disincentivize cross-boundary collaborations while maintaining demarcations between technical and social knowledge.

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Paper short abstract:

We explore epistemic brokering, navigating the interplay of diverse knowledges and emerging tech in postdigital science education, advocating for inclusivity and culturally appropriate protocols in knowledge co-construction.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation, we explore how postdigital and technoscientific contexts reshape the contours of knowledge in science education. We draw from the concept of “epistemic brokering” (Kim, 2023) to consider how knowledges are brokered among educators, students, more-than-human, and other-than-human in science education. Specifically, we engage postcolonial, feminist, and postdigital scholarship to discuss how non-local knowledges, traditional local knowledges, and contemporary local knowledges interface in science education, particularly within settler colonial societies, such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. We then turn to how, in current postdigital contexts, i.e., where digital and analogue dimensions of education and knowledge are inextricable, digital elements (including those present and not present in the physical learning environment) are agents that introduce new possibilities and tensions for knowledge co-construction. For example, we discuss the power of new and emerging technologies as tools for the re-establishment of knowledge transmission practices disrupted through colonisation. We also explore the brokering potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for its ‘far-reaching’ abilities to introduce knowledge from diverse storehouses. We simultaneously critique the harms of these same technologies, such as the ways in which AI privileges dominant knowledges and reproduces human social bias. We then turn to the importance of thoughtful attention to culturally appropriate protocols for brokering knowledge in postdigital science education, in which teachers, curriculum developers, students, and communities must play a key role.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how physical properties of spatial arrangements and processes of tacit knowledge affect the possibilities for students’ participation and argues that inclusive teaching requires attention to the ways socio-material arrangements influence opportunities for participation.

Paper long abstract:

Scientific knowledge production in the natural sciences has historically depended on direct observations of nature and controlled laboratory experiments. The practice of field- and laboratory work still constitutes a central teaching method and entry point to the cultural norms of science. Moreover, practical work is often associated with research-based teaching and highlighted for its potentials for high quality learning. While critics have pointed to the lack of clarity about the conceptions and aims of practical work, the mechanisms of in- and exclusion involved in this teaching format have received less attention.

This paper focuses on the spatial dimension of the mechanisms of in- and exclusion in practical work in higher science education. It compares ethnographic studies of fieldwork in Earth science and lab-based teaching in the experimental sciences, drawing on recent theorizing of space and exclusion in education. Departing from the naturalised understanding of space often assumed in inclusive education approaches, we approach space as a physical arrangement, which interrelates with fluid micro-spaces and interlink with larger structural dynamics. The paper discusses how physical properties of spatial arrangements and processes of tacit knowledge affect the possibilities for students’ participation and shape their learning opportunities.

The paper argues that inclusive teaching requires attention to the ways socio-material arrangements influence opportunities for participation. It shows the need for considering the implications of such mundane aspects as the physical teaching space and access to interaction, and question who benefits from practical work.

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Paper short abstract:

This Making & Doing session invites participants to model ways that pedagogical practices in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Math) education might reinforce normative models of science education or might allow us to revision and construct new and liberatory practices for the future.

Paper long abstract:

This Making and Doing activity will explore how STEAM education can create possibilities for boundary work that transgresses normative ideas of the epistemic superiority of science and expands our understandings of science learning and science learners. This session is inspired by a collaboration between elementary-aged youth and university students in an after-school STEAM program who worked together to integrate practices of science and art, with the goal of broadening the boundaries of science learning beyond to include youths’ ideas and interests. We will share the story of how a group of 10- and 11-year-old girls led a project with volunteers from undergraduate education and science programs that re-defined their own roles as learners and doers of science by building collaborative and caring relations among their group. Together, the group co-created a physical representation of the university campus using slime and modeling clay, and in so doing re-defined what counted as science to include playful experimentation with slime recipes and engineering of clay structures. However, despite these critical shifts in their participation in STEAM education towards relational practices and a pedagogy of care, the youths’ model reified the university institution as a place where scientific practices are held up as epistemically superior and typically segregated from artistic experimentation or relational learning. In this session, we will encourage attendees to experiment with ideas of what STEAM education might look like, and to then to use modeling clay to co-construct a model that represents science education that is more informal, playful, or collaborative.