Science & Education最新文献

As part of the special issue, Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this commentary responds to Alexis Patterson Williams and Manali Sheth's paper, “Cultivating Inner Witnesses Attuned to the Emotional Experiences of Students of Color in Science.” We articulate critical empathy as an emergent set of concrete practices for researchers, teachers, and others to consider, grounded in a deep curiosity about our own and others' emotional experiences and in a steadfast commitment to collective action toward more just and humanizing science education. We offer several suggestions for enacting critical empathy in work on noticing emotions in science education: (1) Reflect on one's own emotions and positionality; (2) Attend to students' and teachers' emotions; (3) Build on emotions as incitements to redress inequities at interpersonal and systemic levels; (4) Illuminate and disrupt dehumanizing emotional rules and politics of affect; and (5) Resist the reduction of emotions and the noticing of emotions to measurable quantities and “best practices,” and instead work to support messy learning in all its complexity. We argue that attuning to the emotions of students of color in humanizing ways requires not only addressing individual teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions but also systemic changes to teacher education, science education, and schooling more broadly.

In this article I explore the case of the Mariana dam disaster in 2015 in Brazil seeking to contribute to reflections about the role of chemistry and chemistry education in environmental injustices. Drawing on stories about this disaster shared in the Dead River Podcast (2024), on wider literature and on other cases of environmental injustices associated with mining complexes around the world, I explore the historical and contemporary connections between chemistry-related knowledge, practices and industries with mineral resource exploitation. In particular, I examine how this example of a mining complex in the Global South, like many others across the world, can bring to light chemistry's complex socio-political and socio-historical entanglements with extractivist, neocolonial and socially unjust practices that structure the triple planetary crisis we currently face. From this theoretical-exploratory work, I then elaborate on a decolonial perspective for chemistry education to support critical engagement with such entanglements. Here I seek to offer some insights into what a nuanced and critical decolonial perspective can bring to those interested in the role of chemistry education in the context of environmental injustices.

This study analyzes the effect of different instructions on threshold concepts within material covering natural selection on students' use of concepts about evolution. Moreover, it examines students' use of concepts as interconnected networks when reasoning about natural selection and analyzes how these concepts relate to each other regarding their connections and centrality within the network. We recruited a sample of N = 128 German 10th-grade students to address these aspects and conducted an experimental intervention study with three groups. We assessed the effect of instruction on the threshold concepts of randomness and probability by teaching them either in contexts of biology, the original discipline of mathematics, or not at all, along with input on natural selection. We analyzed the number of students' key concepts, misconceptions, and threshold concepts by applying an inferential statistical and concept network approach. The results reveal that teaching threshold concepts in biological or mathematical contexts leads to significantly higher use of key concepts than in the control group. Furthermore, only teaching them in a biological context resulted in a significantly higher use of threshold concepts than in the control group. The network analyses reveal descriptive differences in the structures, significant correlations of concepts, and most central and influential concepts (i.e., key concepts: selection factors or limited resources, change in the population; misconceptions: teleology/need, anthropomorphic conception; threshold concept: probability). We discuss the valuable potential of explicitly teaching threshold concepts and utilizing network theory to enhance a nuanced understanding of how students organize and apply evolutionary concepts.

In this response to Dylan Paré's “Queer reorientations in virtual reality: Designing for solidarity in science and technology learning environments,” and as part of the special issue “Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education,” I invite educators to consider “the virtual” that always exists alongside actual reality. Drawing from recent research by Dylan Paré entitled “Reorienting Toward LGBTQ+ Belonging in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics by Feeling and Thinking With a Queer and Nonbinary Person in Virtual Reality,” I argue that things like solidarity, ethics, and justice are not possible without the existence of ‘the virtual’; which is part of the everyday existence of things, making the technology we call “virtual reality” but a tiny example of “the virtual.” Virtuality determines the lines of possibility that a being might take toward ethical becomings and different forms of actualization in the world. Using sociomaterialist philosophy this article encourages educators to explore the virtual for just futures and multispecies flourishing. Using the technology of virtual reality in the way Paré does is one way to open the wide potential of the virtual dimension. While virtual reality research for justice and inclusion might seem like a niche area of computer science, the learning sciences, or technology education, such research helps reintroduce educators and students to the vast aspects of reality that have not yet actualized but are nonetheless real and ever-present.