What we believe in: like Paolo Freire with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we reject the idea that students come into educational institutions as empty vessels that need to be filled, their minds shaped into a certain form. We believe that students come into the classroom with a unique set of skills, senses, attunements, and understandings of the world. We believe in honoring these complex skill sets and meeting students where they are to create collective learning experiences that are guided by curiosity, joy, and mutuality. This is our ideal of how education could be.
Science education specifically has a history of solely focusing on Western ways of thinking, learning, and doing science at the expense of every other way of processing information, transferring knowledge, and making sense of the world. The institutions working in this tradition have equally sidelined, excluded, and in its most extreme form eradicated indigenous ways of knowledge production and transfer. They have historically treated BIPOC scholars and practitioners as less than, often with existential consequences. We firmly believe that these institutions have a historical responsibility to repair these relationships.
As teachers/learners, we see our work as a contribution of doing science-education otherwise.
We believe that expertise comes through different routes than merely the formalized Western model. In this vein, we want to weigh in on the many practitioners that are rethinking and reconfiguring the idea of experts by foregrounding local expertise that practitioners have over the specific fields that they are operating in, and experts by experience. By lifting this way of knowledge production and transfer, we want to invite people to bring a multitude of eyes and ears to the sciences, so that we can collectively counter the climate crisis in its various shapes, local figurations, and specific forms.
Like bell hooks, we believe that the classroom is a deeply political space and teachers are political figures that are never neutral or objective, but come with very specific histories, hold convictions, and views of the world, whether they acknowledge them or not. Not taking a stance in our view is a misinterpretation of trying to be “objective” that all too often means quietly aligning with the status quo. And not taking a political stand is a highly political stand (hooks). We also believe that science education benefits from teachers making their position explicit instead of upholding the idea of a blank canvas. We believe in a democratizing effect when teachers make clear where (locally, land related, historically, philosophically, thus, politically) they stand, and allow their students to get an insight into how that informs their teaching philosophy, pedagogy, and way of thinking. Relations to specific land and the world as such matter.
The work of doing science otherwise is even more important now as our world confronts crises on almost all fronts of life: we have to deal with ecological, economical, social, and individual mental health crises to name but a few. We believe in evolving our ways of teaching science as more engaging to meet the needs and desires of complex societies in a more ethical, empathetic, and imaginative way.
Against the backdrop of many of these crises and finding a way out of it, we need to tune into this collective knowledge and foreground the tools and technologies that people come with, apply them, and teach each other what we know. Whether we want to get a clear picture of what is going wrong on the ground before catastrophic events set in or need to work with the fall-out of catastrophes, we need every scientist’s eyes, ears, skin, nose, and fingers involved. What’s at stake is nothing less than the survival of the planet. This also means bringing disciplines together and recognizing that the lab is not a place removed from the rest of the planet. Engaging STEM education creates the opportunity to bridge and cross disciplines and rethink some old-fashioned beliefs around what is knowledge, technology, and what kind of solutions we can bring to a world in need of healing.
