Table Of ContentScience: Philosophy, History and Education
Hagop A. Yacoubian
Lena Hansson Editors
Nature of Science
for Social Justice
Science: Philosophy, History and Education
Series Editors
Kostas Kampourakis, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Editorial Board
Michael P. Clough, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, USA
María Pilar Jiménez Aleixandre, University of Santiago de Compostela,
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Theodore Arabatzis, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Sibel Erduran, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Martin Kusch, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Norman G. Lederman, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, USA
Alan C. Love, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Minneapolis, USA
Michael Matthews, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Andreas Müller, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Ross Nehm, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Stony Brook, USA
Stathis Psillos, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Michael Reiss, UCL Institute of Education, London, UK
Thomas Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany
Bruno J. Strasser, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Marcel Weber, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Alice Siu Ling Wong, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Scope of the Series
This book series serves as a venue for the exchange of the complementary
perspectives of science educators and HPS scholars. History and philosophy of
science (HPS) contributes a lot to science education and there is currently an
increased interest for exploring this relationship further. Science educators have
started delving into the details of HPS scholarship, often in collaboration with HPS
scholars. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, HPS scholars have come to
realize that they have a lot to contribute to science education, predominantly in two
domains: a) understanding concepts and b) understanding the nature of science. In
order to teach about central science concepts such as “force”, “adaptation”,
“electron” etc, the contribution of HPS scholars is fundamental in answering
questions such as: a) When was the concept created or coined? What was its initial
meaning and how different is it today? Accordingly, in order to teach about the
nature of science the contribution of HPS scholar is crucial in clarifying the
characteristics of scientific knowledge and in presenting exemplar cases from the
history of science that provide an authentic image of how science has been done.
The series aims to publish authoritative and comprehensive books and to establish
that HPS-informed science education should be the norm and not some special case.
This series complements the journal Science & Education http://www.springer.
com/journal/11191. Book Proposals should be sent to the Publishing Editor: Claudia
Acuna. Email: [email protected].
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13387
Hagop A. Yacoubian • Lena Hansson
Editors
Nature of Science
for Social Justice
Editors
Hagop A. Yacoubian Lena Hansson
Department of Education Department of Mathematics and Science
Lebanese American University Education
Beirut, Lebanon Kristianstad University
Kristianstad, Sweden
ISSN 2520-8594 ISSN 2520-8608 (electronic)
Science: Philosophy, History and Education
ISBN 978-3-030-47259-7 ISBN 978-3-030-47260-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47260-3
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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Foreword
This book was conceived a few years ago during the ESERA conference in Dublin.
While reading the conference programme, I noticed a session organized by Lena
and Hagop on nature of science and social justice. I knew both of them personally,
I was well aware of the discussions and the debates about teaching and learning
nature of science, but I had never thought about the connection between nature of
science and social justice, nor had I read anything on the topic. Honestly believing
that as long as I live, I learn, I went to that session to see what it was about. I became
so interested that Lena, Hagop and I had already agreed to have the present book
published in this series by the end of the lunch break of the same day. Needless to
say, I am very glad that you are now holding it into your hands, and I hope that you
will find it as useful as I did.
An important issue in science education is the tendency of teachers to stick with
content knowledge, forgetting that if their students are to become citizens who are
literate about science, they will need more than that. Content knowledge is of course
important, but students also need to appreciate how science is done, what are the
features of scientific knowledge and scientific practices, how the respective contexts
matter, and a lot more. However, it is also important to reflect more broadly about
the relation between science and society. Science and society do not simply influ-
ence each other, nor do they simply interact, rather they are co-constructed. As a
result, students need to be able to understand and reflect upon such ideas.
This is of course far from easy to achieve, as it requires special skills by our sci-
ence teachers, who are not trained as philosophers, historians or sociologists. Worse
than that, those science teachers who come to teacher education programmes after
finishing their undergraduate studies in science often focus on content knowledge
because they have rarely had the opportunity during their studies to have any meta-
scientific reflections of any kind. This is why it is left to teacher educators to culti-
vate new mentalities and pave the way for teachers’ forays in the humanities and
social sciences. Do we always succeed? No, of course not. But we can always pro-
vide teachers with stimuli and ideas that will make them able to identify ideas and
topics that are important for education.
v
vi Foreword
Social justice and nature of science topics are already present in education.
However, the contributions to this volume nicely bring these topics together and
provide a lot of material for reflection. As the editors note, they also raise important
questions: Why should school science aiming at social justice address nature of sci-
ence? How can school science address nature of science for social justice? What
nature of science-related content, skills and attitudes are required when aiming at
social justice? I hope that the present volume will serve as the means to promoting
reflection on such questions and a motivation for future discussion and reflection.
Kostas Kampourakis
Series Editor
Preface
The initiation of our dialogue goes back to the summer of 2016, when we first met
in Flensburg, Germany, at the European regional conference of the International
History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group. At the time, we both felt passion-
ate about the need of an agenda that situates the discourse on nature of science
(NOS) in school science along a social justice (SJ) pathway.
We continued our dialogue over the next few months and enlarged our circle by
having other colleagues join the discussions. The result was the summer 2017 sym-
posium that we organized in Dublin, Ireland, at the biennial conference of the
European Science Education Research Association. The symposium entitled
“Nature of Science for Social Justice” aimed to create a dialogue among colleagues
regarding how NOS in school science could contribute to SJ.
The idea to develop this volume started in Dublin. We were fortunate to have
Kostas Kampourakis, our dear colleague and the Springer series editor of Science:
Philosophy, History and Education, in our audience. Right after the symposium, the
three of us started exploring the possibility of an edited volume in the series. A few
months later, we had already signed a contract with Springer and had expanded our
circle of colleagues to continue the dialogue. We are grateful that a number of schol-
ars accepted our invitation to bring their contribution to this volume.
The present volume aims at creating space for scholars to engage in a dialogue
on NOS for SJ, with the purpose of advancing the existing discussion and creating
new avenues for research. We do not aim to claim that the volume is comprehensive
in addressing all problems pertinent to NOS for SJ. In fact, the volume is an attempt
to bring two agendas of research, namely NOS and SJ, closer to each other with the
purpose of shedding light on how and why they can and should mutually contribute
to each other. The volume does not aim at reaching consensus and final answers, and
that explains the lack of a conclusion chapter. Instead, we aim for a dialogue around
a theme that we believe is important.
We have adopted an inclusive policy. The present volume, comprised of a set of
theoretical and empirical chapters, draws upon different frameworks of NOS and
SJ. Accordingly, the authors use different conceptualizations and approaches as
they explore issues that in different ways relate to the following questions: Why
vii
viii Preface
should a school science aiming at SJ address NOS? What NOS-related content,
skills and attitudes form the basis when aiming at SJ? How can school science
address NOS for SJ?
We hope that the different starting points and conceptualizations on NOS and SJ
serve the aim of empowering educators and researchers to reflect on their own con-
ceptualizations. Our hope is that the dialogue initiated in this volume can facilitate
further dialogue, formulate new questions and explore fresh avenues of research
that aims at bringing NOS and SJ agendas closer to each other.
As editors, we contributed equally to the development of this volume. Initially,
in late 2017, we set the vision of the volume and invited colleagues to contribute
with chapters. In our work, we took a micro and a macro approach. The micro
approach involved working with the authors to ensure the alignment of their visions
with the vision of the volume. We also organized an internal peer review process,
which helped provide constructive feedback to the authors. The macro approach
involved making sure that the overall volume is focused, coherent and organized.
We are grateful to all the authors for their patience and persistence with us
throughout this project. Not only did they develop their chapters but also contrib-
uted in reviewing other chapters. All the chapters of this volume have undergone a
rigorous peer review, whereby a panel of 2–3 reviewers reviewed each chapter in
addition to us. The number of times each chapter was reviewed ranged from one
to three.
We are also thankful for Kostas Kampourakis, for his continuous support and
advice to us throughout the project, as well as the external reviewers of this volume,
whose identities are anonymous to us, yet we believe their invaluable comments
helped improve the quality of the final product.
A word of gratitude also goes to our home universities, namely the Lebanese
American University and Kristianstad University for providing us with all the
needed support for completing this work.
Finally, we are both grateful to our families; this work would not have been pos-
sible without their support.
Hagop A. Yacoubian
Lena Hansson
Contents
1 Nature of Science for Social Justice: Why, What and How? . . . . . . . . 1
Lena Hansson and Hagop A. Yacoubian
2 From Nature of Science to Social Justice: The Political
Power of Epistemic Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Douglas Allchin
3 Balancing the Epistemic and Social Realms of Science
to Promote Nature of Science for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Zoubeida R. Dagher
4 Capitalism, Nature of Science and Science Education:
Interrogating and Mitigating Threats to Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
J. Lawrence Bencze and Lynette C. Carter
5 Political Entanglement and the Changing Nature of Science . . . . . . . 79
Jesse Bazzul
6 Does Research on Nature of Science and Social Justice Intersect?
Exploring Theoretical and Practical Convergence for Science
Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Sibel Erduran, Ebru Kaya, and Lucy Avraamidou
7 A Discursive Analysis of Relationships Between Nature
of Science and Citizenship Education: The Case of Brazilian
Science Textbook Evaluation Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Rita Vilanova and Isabel Martins
8 Teaching About Sciences in/for the Global South: Lessons
from a Case Study in a Brazilian Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Cristiano B. Moura, Iamni Torres Jager, and Andreia Guerra
ix
