Staying with the Trouble in Science Education: Towards Thinking with Nature—A Manifesto

Abstract

Despite the centrality of Nature (space, time, matter) within science education, there is a telling and troubling paucity in the ways science education is (not) taking up questions generated by the ontological turn. Thought in science education, we argue, is often premised upon Othering, and (fore)closed to, Nature. Within this manifesto, we respond to this problematic possibility by taking a critical and complicit stance: it is a call for disrupting and displacing the very logics through which we become science educators without succumbing to the fantasy of transcending them. Science education needs to think and do so otherwise while recognizing the ways in which thought is already in the groove of becoming-scientist. Towards this end, we first outline three onto-epistemological moves that often occur within science education that (fore)close both possibility and response-ability: (a) commonplace thoughtlessness; (b) stupidity; and (c), circular reasoning. Secondly, we offer three orientations for troubling thought which do not engage in the hubris of waving away the trouble. They are thinking as: (a) slow science; (b) minor inquiry; and (c) disruption. Call it staying with the trouble in science education: a science education which does not dismiss the urgent work of building and sustaining social and ecological relations through the temporality of emergency.