Abstract
This chapter reflects on the ways that the ‘STEPWISE’ model of linking science education to activism challenges and collaborates in the grammar of traditional education. The chapter suggests a series of socioscientific issues that may challenge the scope of STEPWISE when it is put into practice. This challenge occurs because these SSIs are not necessarily experience-near to the students. The chapter goes on to explore how the grammar of schooling works to curtail authentic engagements like STEPWISE. In response to these institutional challenges, the paper suggests that the model needs to be extended to include a kind of modeling of activism itself on the part of teachers. This activism I argue should probably be over the nature of schooling itself as schools are ‘reformed’ to meet neoliberal capitalist ends. The chapter argues that struggles over schools are extensions of struggles over the meaning and operation of science itself, and thus teacher activism is a natural extension of the socioscientific issues that STEPWISE highlights.
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Notes
- 1.
‘STEPWISE’ is the acronym for Science & Technology Education Promoting Wellbeing for Individuals, Societies & Environments. It is a theoretical and practical curriculum/teaching framework encourages and enables students to engage in self-directed research and social actions to address personal, social and environmental problems linked to fields of science and technology. To learn more about this framework, refer to Chap. 2 in this book and visit: www.stepwiser.ca
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Weinstein, M. (2017). Understanding Opportunities and Contradictions in the Grammars of Activism and Schooling. In: Bencze, L. (eds) Science and Technology Education Promoting Wellbeing for Individuals, Societies and Environments. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55505-8_28
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