In Which Ways Can (Science) Education Promote the Well-Being of Individuals, Societies and Environments?

Abstract

‘STEPWISE’ is a curricular and pedagogical framework that ties together various teaching/learning domains in ways that prioritize socio-political actions by students to address socioscientific problems of concern to them. Despite its centrality, the concept of well-being has not been extensively problematised in the original STEPWISE framework. In this chapter, I seek to address this issue by focussing on a singular aspect of STEPWISE, namely, the possibility of education promoting well-being. I start by presenting some aspects related to the polysemy of the concept of well-being and then move on to discuss its impact for STEPWISE research and practice agendas. I conclude with a suggestion that, in the context of the STEPWISE framework, well-being is best understood as a dialectical generative process rather a stage to be reached once certain conditions are met. I speak from the perspective of someone who is interested in STEPWISE in terms of its potential to frame both epistemological and political challenges faced by teachers and refer to my experiences as a South-American science education researcher and teacher educator so as to provide a reflection that, although specifically addressed to STEPWISE, aims at contributing to the wider debate around the aims of science education.