Sociocultural Influences on

Science Education: Innovation

for Contemporary Times

LYN CARTER
Trescowthick School of Education, Australian Catholic University, 115 Victoria Parade,
Locked Bag 4115 DC, Fiztroy, Victoria 3065, Australia

Received 26 September 2006; revised 21 May 2007; accepted 22 May 2007

DOI 10.1002/sce.20228
Published online 9 July 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the significant sociocultural literatures on science stud-
ies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science to develop theoretical perspectives for
science education more suitable to the challenges of contemporaneity. While the influences
of science studies and cultural diversity are not uncommon within the science education
literature on innovation, the difference here is the inclusion of the newer field of sustain-
ability science. These threads are drawn are together to help formulate a view of science
education that contributes to the ongoing discussion of what it could be in the 21st century.
Finally, a science unit in a preservice teacher education course is then described, which
aims to engage, inform, and empower beginning teachers in ways that tackle the challenges
of contemporaneity.
C 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 92:165 – 181, 2008

INTRODUCTION: RECENT SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

IN SCIENCE EDUCATION
Recent decades have seen an increase in sociocultural perspectives within science edu-
cation that are reflective of the cultural turn in intellectual theory more generally (Lemke,
2001). These critical, historical, political, and socioecological views, together with post-
modern and feminist thinking interested in access to scientific knowledge, education, and
power, are part of enlightened science education discourse (Wong, 2001). Three areas
within the sociocultural are of particular interest here. First, the recent critiques of science
generated from those subfields collectively known as science studies have become increas-
ingly influential in the science education literature (see, e.g., Cunningham & Helms, 1998;
Hodson, 1999; Kelly & Chen, 1999; Weinstein, 1998; and the special journal editions:
Educational Policy, edited by Bromley & Shutkin, 1998 and Research in Science Educa-
tion, edited by Roth, 1998). Science studies have challenged Western science’s traditional
claims to be value free, objective, and universal truth, revealing instead the sociocultural

Correspondence to: Lyn Carter; e-mail: [email protected]

C 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
166 CARTER

construction of scientific knowledge, and its coexistence with other various and multiple
local/indigenous versions of science.
Second, considerable attention has been focused on crossculturalism, and the encounter
between the normative culture of science education and cultural and linguistic diversity
(Lemke, 2001). This is evident from the increasing frequency of studies (e.g., Jegede &
Aikenhead, 1999; Krugly-Smolska, 1999; Lee, 1999, 2003; Ogawa, 1996), as well as in the
publication of three special journal editions. These are a 2001 Science Education edition
introduced by Aikenhead and Lewis (2001) on multiculturalism and science education,
one issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) on language and cultural
diversity introduced by Lee (2001), and several JRST issues edited by Calabrese Barton and
Tobin (2001, 2002), devoted to science education in urban settings where linguistically and
culturally diverse students concentrate. While not explicitly acknowledged in the literature,
science education’s increasing interest in diversity is a consequence of the complex trans-
formations of our rapidly globalizing world (see Carter, 2005a). Globalization has meant
that at the local level, the world’s peoples rub more closely together ensuring that diversity,
plurality, hybridity, and dislocation have become the leitmotifs of the global age.
Finally, the impact of social life on natural planetary systems and the potential for
ecological crisis has become the focus of some science education literature (e.g., Andersson
& Wallin, 2000; Gough, 2003; Hogan, 2002; Manzanal, Barreiro, & Jiménez, 1999; Snively
& Corsiglia, 2001). The high levels of resource consumption and waste production within
the global technoscientific progress paradigm, consequent to what Hamilton (2003) calls
“growth fetishism,” means that humans have fundamentally altered the conditions for life.
Limits to growth scenarios have emerged highlighting the complex question of how to effect
the transition toward a sustainable future (Brown, 2004; Meadows, Randers, & Meadows,
2004). Sustainability science is a new field of transdisciplinary science that investigates the
complex nature–society interactions, so as fundamental human needs can be meet at the
same time the earth’s life support systems are conserved. Science education has engaged
with ecological issues to date largely through environmental education, but differently
placed, it has a crucial role in any transition toward sustainability.
These three sociocultural perspectives in attempting to situate science education in the
broader material and cultural conditions, in which it is produced, raise some crucial issues
at the very time when taken-for-granted and shared meanings have receded, and have been
replaced by the uncertainty and insecurity. Concern over sustainability, now often manifest
as global warming (see Gore, 2006), when connected to destabilized ideas of science, and the
increasing prominence of culturally diverse students, knowledges, and practices, profoundly
challenges what it means to enact science education appropriate for our ecologically fragile,
rapidly globalizing, technoscientific, and complexly multicultural world. Clearly, a science
education derived from highly abstract and fragmented statements of Western canonical
knowledge, as many versions of the widely applied standards-based science curricula
seem to be (see, e.g., Bianchini & Kelly, 2003; Cross, 1997; McNay, 2000; Ninnes, 2001;
Rodriguez, 1997; Settlage & Meadows, 2002), is ill-equipped to take us forward into the
21st century. Indeed research indicates that students perceive the traditional approach to
science education as largely irrelevant to the realities of their complex contemporary world
(Dekkers & de Laeter, 2000; Eisenhart, Finkel, & Marion, 1996; Millar & Osborne, 1998;
Ogawa, 2001). Significant amongst these studies is the recent and extensive Relevance of
Science Education (ROSE) Project that has found students across the developed world to
be largely disengaged from science education (for details, see the project Web site ROSE
Project, 2004; Schreiner & Sjǿberg, 2004). Despite years of formal science education,
students’ scientific misconceptions are common, and their lack of motivation and feelings

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 SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON SCIENCE EDUCATION 167

of alienation show in the decreasing numbers opting to take science beyond the compulsory
years (also Jenkins 2005; Jenkins & Pell 2006; Lyons, 2006).
The purpose of this paper is to review the significant sociocultural literatures on science
studies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science to help develop another vision for
science education more suitable to the challenges of contemporaneity. While influences
of science studies and cultural diversity are not uncommon within the science education
literature, the difference here is their juxtaposition to, and the inclusion of, the newer field
of sustainability science. Likewise, aiming to develop innovative or alternative visions
for science education is also relatively commonplace, and the literature contains many
suggestions for its own reformulation (see Aikenhead, 2006; Appelbaum, 2001; Hodson,
1999; McGinn & Roth, 1999; Millar & Osborne, 1998; Reid & Traweek, 2000; Weaver,
2001; Weinstein, 1998; as well as the Twenty-First Century Science Project from the
Nuffield Foundation, 2005, and University of York). My intention here then, in the interests
of diversity and plurality, is to add to these accounts to help foster more discussion about
what science education could be in the 21st century.
I begin by examining the recent sociocultural literatures on science studies, cultural
diversity, and sustainability science in the usual manner of a literature review, and go onto
consider ways science education has grappled with their implications for its own practice
to date. I then utilize the notion of recognition as a type of conceptual net that holds and
connects together these ideas to better enable their comprehension as major influences on
thinking differently about science education in the 21st century. Finally, I describe attempts
to enact this vision within a science unit in a preservice teacher education course, which
aims to engage, inform, and empower beginning teachers in ways that tackle the challenges
of contemporaneity.

SOCIOCULTURALLY LOCATED PERSPECTIVES ON SCIENCE

The Contribution of Science Studies and Diversity
Although science has provided powerful and reliable knowledge enabling much hu-
man flourishing, De Landa (1996) suggests that the intellectual critiques in undermining
sciences assertions to be objective and universal have been the most significant epistemo-
logical event in recent years (also Gieryn, 1999). The resultant so-called “Science Wars”
(Ross, 1996) has proponents like Wolpert (1997), Gross and Levitt (1994), and Sokal and
Bricmont (1998) aligned against those whose more critical perspectives have emerged from
the fields of postcolonialism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology,
and feminism. Known variously as the cultural studies of science (Weinstein, 1998), the
sociology of scientific knowledge (Rose, 1997), and elsewhere as science studies (Jasanoff,
Markle, Peterson, & Pinch, 1995), these areas more thoroughly examine the nature, history,
production, and sociocultural location of European and ethnosciences and other indige-
nous/local knowledges. Essentially, science studies argue that we can know nature only
through culturally constituted conceptual or epistemological frameworks, enabled and lim-
ited by local cultural features such as discursive practices, institutional structures, interests,
values, cultural norms, and so on (Turnbull, 2000). Its purpose is to know as much “about
the people and positions from which knowledge is constructed and for which it is targeted,
as it is to the status of knowledge made” (Haraway, 1996, p. 4).
Harding (1998) organizes science studies into the two schools of post-Kuhnian and
postcolonial. Post-Kuhnian science studies focus on the construction of Western scientific
knowledge within the Western-style scientific institutions, permeated as they are by social

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168 CARTER

and personal beliefs (Turnbull, 2000). A large literature has emerged (see Collins & Pinch,
1993; Jasanoff et al., 1995; Knorr-Cetina, 1995) that describes microsociological laboratory
studies, investigating the interrelationships between scientific method and knowledge to
understand how scientific statements emerge from practice. They show science behind the
scenes as characterized by the same messy and conflicting individual values and reputation,
tacit knowledge, social negotiation, and cultural constructions as any other knowledge field
(also Turnbull, 2000).
By contrast, postcolonial science studies move beyond Kuhn’s focus on Western sci-
ence, to indigenous and localized perspectives emerging from a renewed acknowledgment
of cultural diversity within the globalizing world. Also known as oppositional science
studies (Haraway, 1996), they draw from anti-Eurocentric histories such as “science and
imperialism studies” that have revealed links between the development of science and
European colonialism (Osborne, 1999; Paty, 1999). Postcolonial science studies argue that
the normative conceptualization of “science” contrasts it to earlier European (premodern)
and non-European (including indigenous) knowledge systems and practices. For Harding
(1998), the identification of “science” with the epistemologies, practices, and applications
of the West recasts Western science itself as an ethnoscience and reveals its subjugation
and assimilation of different non-Western scientific and cultural traditions. These practices
fit within Bauman’s (1995) view of modernity that sees Western science as privileged
truth whose might resides in its power to define and make the definition stick. Moreover,
postcolonial science studies argue that Western science and cultural indigenous knowledge
traditions should be treated on an epistemological par as each developed in response to
their culture’s need to understand, predict, and influence its environment. Along with oth-
ers including Paty (1999), Harding (1998) argues for a more diverse and inclusive view
of science that sees it as any systematic attempt to produce knowledge about the natu-
ral world including local knowledge systems, ethnosciences, and science as local cultural
practice.
Together, these strands of science studies erode the mythological status of universal
science within the rationalizing framework of modernity and refract it through the prism
of culture. Even science’s claim to epistemological superiority (see Siegel, 2002) becomes
bound and mediated through cultural codes, and social and economic power interests
that need to be teased out and exposed. Indeed commentators, according to Aronowitz,
Martinsons, and Menser (1996, p. 8) “have often claimed that science is the dominant
institutional and ideological player in the global cultural scene, the one that most dramat-
ically affects or . . . permeates our corporeal, subjective and social being.” Similarly, for
de Alba, Edgar, Lankshear, and Peters (2000), science as culture means engagement with
sociocultural constructs to better elaborate the ways by which science is shaped and shapes
our contemporary world (also Fuller, 2000).

The Contribution of Sustainability Science

The recent emergence of sustainability science, while not yet a recognized field or dis-
cipline, responds to the growing acceptance of the ecologically fragile state of our world
with its irreversible loss of biodiversity, altered atmospheric and geological conditions, and
its vast human load beginning to exceed carrying capacity. It has developed from a variety
of the fields including environmental science, science and technology for sustainability,
Third World development studies, economics, social and political sciences, globalization,
cultural studies, and anthropology. Sustainability science draws heavily upon, and is sup-
ported by, a large number of international reports and meetings including the 1992 United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Agenda 21; the U.S. National
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Research Council 1999 publication, Our Common Journey; the 2000 United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly Millennium Declaration; the World Summit on Sustainable Development
held in Johannesburg in 2002; the International Council for Science’ 2002 collaboration,
Science and Technology for Sustainable Development; and as the major themes of the
2002 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the 2003
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Significant among these international reports/meetings was the Swedish Friibergh Manor
Workshop on Sustainability Science (see Kates et al., 2001). In essence, the Friibergh
Workshop identified sustainability science as a transdisciplinary approach that recognizes
the limitations of traditional science and other disciplines in investigating the complex-
ities of socioecological assemblages (see also Clark & Dickson, 2003; Gallopin, 2002;
Hamilton, 2003; Raven, 2002). Its core questions include the following (Kates et al.,
2001):

1. How can the dynamic interaction between nature and society, including lags and
inertia, be better incorporated into emerging models and conceptualizations that
integrate earth systems, human development, and sustainability?
2. How are long-term trends in environment and development, including consumption
and population, reshaping nature–society interactions in ways relevant to sustain-
ability?
3. What determines the vulnerability or resilience of the nature–society system in par-
ticular kinds of places and for particular types of ecosystems and human livelihoods?
4. Can scientifically meaningful “limits” or “boundaries” be defined that would provide
effective warning of conditions beyond which the nature–society systems incur a
significant risk of serious degradation?
5. What systems of incentive structures, including markets, rules, norms, and scien-
tific information, can most effectively improve social capacity to guide interactions
between nature and society toward more sustainable trajectories?
6. How can today’s operational systems for monitoring and reporting on environmental
and social conditions be integrated or extended to provide more useful guidance for
efforts to navigate a transition toward sustainability?
7. How can today relatively independent activities of research, planning, monitoring,
assessment, and decision-making support better integration into systems for adaptive
management and societal learning?

Building upon the Friibergh Statement, Clark and Dickson (2003) have organized an
agenda for sustainability science into four components. First, they argue for a more sys-
tematic and international consensus on the priorities, goals, and assessment mechanisms
facilitating the transition to sustainability. For example, the “WEHAB” targets for water,
energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity drawing from the Millennium Declaration and
the World Summit on Sustainable Development provide a focus for problem-driven re-
search (also Kates & Parris, 2003). Second, such problem-driven research needs to exit
within a variety of spatial scales from the global through to national, community, and
the local that maybe geographical, biological, temporal, discursive, and communitarian
(see also Harvey, 2000). The resultant production of diverse and successful place-based
knowledge will probably remain largely unknown beyond their places of origin and ap-
plication. Third, Clark and Dickson (2003) describe a major role of sustainability science
as producing important fundamental knowledge on the complexity of ecological –social
systems. Such knowledge would move beyond the reductionist tendencies within the envi-
ronmental sciences that have provided islands of understanding within oceans of ignorance
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(Lowe, 2001). Sustainability science is thus a network science that emphasizes the patterns
and relationships emerging from self-organization and coevolution (see also Holmgren,
2002). Finally, sustainability science investigates questions of methodology best summa-
rized by the Friibergh Statement itself:

By structure, method, and content, sustainability science must differ fundamentally from
most science, as we know it. Familiar approaches to developing and testing hypotheses
are inadequate because of non-linearity, complexity, and long time lags between actions
and their consequences. Additional complications arise from the recognition that humans
cannot stand outside the nature-society system. The common sequential analytical phases of
scientific inquiry such as conceptualizing the problem, collecting data, developing theories
and applying the results will become parallel functions of social learning, which incorporate
the elements of action, adaptive management and policy as experiment.

Clearly, sustainability science moves beyond the environmental sciences that have, by con-
trast, privileged the natural subsystems, reducing human interactions to a series of inputs
or outcomes now thought to be inadequate for understanding the dynamics and complex-
ities of the nature–society interactions (Gallopin, 2002). A recent example is Kaneshiro
et al.’s (2005) study of the Hawaiian Island’s unique mountain-to-sea ecosystem from a
social –ecological systems perspective that attempted to translate the theoretical perspective
“into practical, ‘on-ground’ solutions to sustainability problems” (p. 2). Kaneshiro et al.
used interdisciplinary research teams, and a “learning community” approach of scientists,
researchers, teachers, agency and nongovernmental personnel, and private citizens, to focus
on ecological and cultural restoration initiatives of local communities, as well as outdoor
laboratories for studying ecosystem and human health linkages. They found that project
participants required a great deal of tenacity, resilience, and commitment, and needed to
take extensive risks in order to move beyond the institutional and paradigmatic barriers that
frequently limit knowledge development.
Such transdisciplinary sustainability science approaches have much in common with
postcolonial theorizations of borders and boundaries found in postcolonial science studies
and elsewhere. These views see epistemological, ideological, political, physical, and even
biological boundaries/borders as profoundly ambivalent constructs. They meet at different
places, they are momentary locations in transition beyond which one attempts to move,
and they are in-between sites variously described as liminal, interstitial, or hybrid that
can be multiple and contingent, and change both the nature of the boundaries and those
who define them (Ashcroft, 2001; Kraniauskas, 2000; Mignolo, 2000). “They become
not boundaries so much as a variety of attempts to draw boundaries” (Beck, Bonass, &
Lau, 2003, p. 19). This leads to a multiplication of claims to knowledge with knowledge
boundaries between scientific and unscientific, between science and politics, and between
experts and layman becoming drawn in several different places simultaneously, making it
“abundantly clear that every given is in fact a choice, and that at the level of fundamental
propositions, such ultimate starting points can only be normatively grounded, or defended
as useful a priori constructs” (Beck et al., 2003, p. 16; see also Kraniauskas, 2000; Mignolo,
2000). Unfortunately, developing this argument further would move me beyond my purpose
here. Hence, it is sufficient to note that “philosophical and epistemological border thinking
scholarship” (after Mignolo, 2001) like this, reiterates the validity of sustainability sciences’
transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge producing as a way forward for the complexities
of human–nature interactions in the 21st century.
Finally, it can be said that sustainability science acknowledges the sociocultural con-
struction and interest-driven nature of scientific knowledge revealed by both post-Kuhnian
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and postcolonial science studies. More importantly though, it extends science studies into
an overt values-based position that promotes diversity as it seeks the preservation of the
planet’s life support systems that have been threatened by so many aspects of scientific and
technological production.
In the next section, I review the impact of these sociocultural strands of scholarship on
recent thinking within science education.

THE IMPACT OF THESE SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON

SCIENCE EDUCATION
Science Studies and Science Education
In much the same way as science studies have critiqued the construction of scientific
knowledge, they have also been used to critique the traditional approaches to science cur-
ricula using fragmented bodies of canonical knowledge to reiterate a conceptualization of
science as universally applicable objective truth seeking. Some scholarship draws on sci-
ence studies’ research methodologies to explore school science as embodied sociocultural
practices (see, e.g., Cunningham & Helms, 1998; Costa, Hughes, & Pinch, 1998; Kelly
& Chen, 1999; Roth & McGinn, 1998), whereas other studies situate science education
in society and culture (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee & Fradd, 1998). Still others have
coupled the intersections of race, gender, and class with sociotransformational education
(Calabrese Barton & Osborne, 1998; Rodriguez, 1997). There is also scholarship on ways
that practitioners can innovate congruent with science studies research (Hodson, 1999;
McGinn & Roth, 1999; Weinstein, 1998), as there is on the implications of debates about
the nature of science (McComas, Clough, & Almazroa, 1998). Drawn almost exclusively
from what Harding (1998) would identify as post-Kuhnian science studies, these accounts
are among the myriad seeking to challenge and w/ri(gh)t/e science education (after Roth &
McRobbie, 1999).
Taken together, this research argues the need for science education to go beyond imparting
scientific conceptual knowledge and skills and advocates critical participation in a world
dominated by science conceptualized its sociocultural and political interests. Clearly, there
are intersections here with the aims of sustainability science. The science education–science
studies scholarship exposes the mythologized views of scientific practice recapitulated as
received knowledge in school science curricula and leads to calls for more “authentic”
school science experiences (for instance, Boulton & Panizzon, 1998; Cunningham & Helms,
1998; McGinn & Roth, 1999; Segal, 1997). It argues for students to be shown the messiness
of scientific knowledge construction, predicated on the belief that students learn best when
engaged with the practices and concepts of “real science.” For example, Cunningham and
Helms (1998) contend such approaches “will better equip people to appreciate science and
assess scientific claims and issues. Furthermore, it can make science study more democratic.
Striving for authenticity can simultaneously foster inclusivity. . . . . . . science may become
more attractive to marginalized students” (p. 487). Moreover, McGinn and Roth (1999)
argue that see a reformulated vision of “authentic” science within a critical guise will
develop a politically engaged stance in the long-term and futures orientation project of
social reconstitution.

Diversity in Science Education

Just as science studies have influenced some of the recent scholarship in science educa-
tion, the increasing consciousness of cultural diversity as a consequence of globalization
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has also become prominent within the science education. Carter (2004) argues that this
literature displays a number of related tendencies that seem to draw together into two main
positions: one focused on the identities/subjectivities of those learning science, that is, the
culturally and linguistically diverse students themselves, and the second, on considerations
of science as culturally located, Western and non-Western knowledge, frequently identified
as multicultural approaches to science. There are a number of other approaches that are
grouped together for analytic convenience into a third more general category.
The first tendency in the literature refers to the culturally and linguistically diverse stu-
dents themselves (see, e.g., Lee, 2003). This position usually acknowledges the inherent
Eurocentricism of Western science, but as it is judged to be humanity’s most “powerful”
and “best” knowledge system, its clear delineation within the school curriculum is pro-
moted (Cobern & Loving, 2001). There is widespread agreement (see Atwar, 1996) that
“every student should have access (to it) in order to function competently in the main-
stream, in a global economy and in an information society” (Lee, 2001, p. 499). The
focus is on developing pedagogical strategies and curricula to enable student’s “border
crossing” into Western science (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee & Fradd, 1998; Michie,
2003). The second tendency sees science as both Western and non-Western knowledge
that, to some extent, draws from Harding’s (1998) postcolonial science studies. This posi-
tion raises questions about the place of these knowledges and practices in school science
(Stanley & Brickhouse, 2001), with those like Snively and Corsiglia (2001) arguing for
the inclusion of indigenous and traditional science knowledge (see also Aikenhead, 2001,
2002; Arellano, Barcenal, Bilbao, Castellano, Nichols, & Tippins, 2001). While much of
this discussion emanates from the First World, there is an increasing contribution from
non-Western and/or Third World contexts struggling with the tensions of multiple knowl-
edge systems that see cultural, linguistic, religious, and political imperatives compel the
maintenance of traditional/indigenous knowledge, at the same time as national develop-
ment priorities demand the expansion of Western technoscientific knowledge (see Aikman,
1997; Nakayama, Kawano, & Kawasaki, 2003; Semali, 1999).
There are other more eclectic approaches to cultural diversity in the science educa-
tion literature not easily categorized into either of the above positions. Prominent here is
the work of Angela Calabrese Barton (e.g., Calabrese Barton & Tobin, 2001; Fusco &
Calabrese Barton, 2001) that focuses specifically on urban settings where the consequences
of cultural diversity and economic–political disadvantage play out. Dear and Flusty (1999)
describe cultural diversity in urbanized cities as multienclaves of mixed identity, making
for heterogeneous spaces where the sociocultural dynamic works with economic polariza-
tion, social unrest, racism, and homelessness to provoke innovative solutions to interethnic
relations and inequality. Conscious of this, Calabrese Barton (2000) calls on a range of
perspectives including those from science studies, to raise questions about the nature of
scientific knowledge, the relationship between science and society, and the implications for
school science in these complex postmodern settings. She seeks to reframe what is meant
by science and diversity so that diversity can become resourceful rather than problematic.
She argues for a critical urban pedagogy within science education that “must respond to
the political and ethical consequences that science has in the world, and must be equally
infused with analysis and critique as it is with production” (p. 343).
As a whole, the cultural diversity literature, like that of the science studies –science
education literature, recognizes the need for science education to develop culturally sensitive
and sociocultural perspectives beyond the normative canonical knowledge and skills that
have traditionally dominated its agenda. Snively and Corsiglia (2001) applaud such an
approach, claiming that science education has finally begun to explore what it means to
prepare students for a culturally diverse world.
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Sustainability Science and Science Education

As a relatively new area, sustainability science is only just beginning to have an impact
upon science education. Its influence is more apparent within the tertiary sector that tends to
have greater access to recent research and scholarship. Not surprisingly, it has had minimal
influence at the school level, locked as schools are into traditional structures, interest groups,
and interpretations of curricula that perpetuate the various forms of environmental science.
One exception is the Kaneshiro et al. (2005) study of the Hawaiian Island’s mountain-to-
sea ecosystem described above. Within the study, Pauline Chinn reports on Malama I Ka
‘Aina curriculum and teacher development initiatives that integrate traditional Hawaiian
sustainability and modern environmental practices to develop K-12 science curricula for
teachers of Hawaiian students. She describes the “human-in-ecosystem” approach that
brings together teachers, students, scientists, and indigenous practitioners in place-based
learning projects of bioremediation, mapping, monitoring, and ecological restoration. For
Chinn, this approach addresses questions 3, 5, 7 of the Friiberg Statement (see above) that
Kates et al. (2001) consider as vital to the agenda of sustainability science.
Within the tertiary sector, courses and units in sustainability science investigate the so-
cial, political, economic scientific, and technological dimensions of sustainability, method-
ological questions, natural planetary systems, carrying capacity and footprints, the impact
of globalization, and strategies and implications (see, e.g., Vondracek, Pullins, Rosales, &
Savanik, 2002). Pedagogically, they also tend to draw from the Friibergh Statement’s recog-
nition of the importance of social learning with a range of actors that include indigenous
and community groups, activists, and others with a commitment to sustainability beyond
the usual groups of professional scientists. Indeed, the statement suggests that

[S]cientists and practitioners will need to work together with the public at large to produce
trustworthy knowledge and judgment that is scientifically sound and rooted in social un-
derstanding . . . . [and] will learn to work with all manner of social groups to recognize how
they come to gain knowledge, establish certainty of outlooks, and adjust their perceptions
as they relate to each other’s needs.

There is great potential for sustainability science to make a valuable contribution to any
science education interested in becoming part of the transition to sustainability. Such a
science education would include an understanding of networks and systems both natural
and social, ecological knowledge, futures, permaculture design, and energy studies (see
Holmgren, 2002), along with the more traditional concepts of science. It would work with
social groups so that students could engage in real science-based problems located in
their local community or in the cyber community. Its success would require significant
reorganization and collaboration. But if science education is to take the challenges of the
Friibergh Statement seriously, it needs to develop new perspectives that are necessary for
the kinds of deep social change and learning that sustainability demands.

DRAWING THESE SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES TOGETHER

There are many ways of connecting together the above discussion on science studies,
cultural diversity and sustainability science, and teasing out both sympathetic and disparate
themes to be considered further. These could include the notions of community, localism,
difference, resilience, multiculturalism, social and redistributive justice, equality, the uni-
versalist –particularist dialogic, the politics of identity, and so on; indeed far more than there
is room here to ponder. It is also important to consider which themes or notions can help
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174 CARTER

formulate better versions of science education more suitable for contemporaneity. For me,
the above discussion speaks overwhelmingly of the desire for recognition from all types of
peoples, in all types of contexts, for all their knowledge generating endeavors that grapple
with the complexities of living in our plural world. Recognition is a useful conceptual net
for this discussion as it subsumes many of these related themes. It was the focus of the 2001
special volume of Theory, Culture & Society introduced by Lash and Featherstone (2001)
that explored aspects of diversity in the global world from a cultural sociology perspective,
with contributions by prominent philosophers and scholars including Zygmunt Bauman,
Nancy Fraser, and Paul Gilroy.
In essence, recognition sits behind the challenges of multiculturalism and difference, and
the desire to be understood and respected for ones’ own and ones’ cultural singularity. This
occurs in a risk-driven era not only known by its “War on Terror” and its identity politics,
relativities, and fundamentalisms but also for its ecological and social destructions such as
global warming. Recognition seeks acknowledgment without the specter of relativism and
evaluative judgments of cultures/contexts that is guided by ethics and esteem as it works
toward a politics of the practical and the redistribution of social and natural goods (Lash
& Featherstone, 2001). Fraser (2001) and Bauman (2001) argue this can be done only if
cultural claims are treated as questions of morality, justice, and esteem. This does not mean
all cultural claims are celebrated for their own sake, as all differences are not equal. What
is equal is the right of participation, and the right to be heard and present a case which is
then open to the judgment of esteem and status.
That said, the difficulty in knowing how to regard those cases must include the under-
standing that legitimacy is not tied to any one culture’s or groups’ social and political
traditions. Gough (2003) has found Turnbull’s (2000) comparative analyses of cultural and
knowledge claims useful for thinking about this issue. Having investigated the activity of
knowledge production in diverse social spaces that include Gothic cathedral building in
medieval Europe and rice farming in Indonesia, Turnbull’s (2000) focus on the localness
and performance of culture and knowledge argues it to be a process of “making connections
and negotiating equivalences between the heterogeneous components while simultaneously
establishing a social order of trust and authority resulting in a knowledge space. It is on this
basis that it is possible to compare and frame knowledge traditions” (p. 553). Turnbull’s
(2000) means of comparing knowledge coupled with his theorization of third spaces where
“contrasting rationalities can work together without the notion of a single transcendent
rationality” (Turnbull, 2000, p. 228) creates room to facilitate recognition and opens pos-
sibilities for the coproduction of knowledge. Ultimately this approach, Fraser (2001) and
Bauman (2001) contend, allows for a communal reciprocity of recognition as a basis for in-
tercultural dialogue and interpretative understanding that seeks cultural justice and humane
cohabitation. Similarly, Walby (2001, p. 8) argues that the “ideology of recognition may
be used as a “handmaiden for struggles of equality” in today’s global era (her italics). The
very complexities of contemporaneity means that perpetual coexistence is all we have (my
italics), and our fundamental need and purpose is to give “everyone a chance” (Bauman,
2001, p. 146).
It is clear that seeking the right of participation, the right to be heard, and the right
to present a case are embedded within the literatures on particularly, postcolonial science
studies and cultural diversity, as well as their intersection with science education. Reit-
erating Harding’s (1998) view from above that argues for a more diverse and inclusive
view of science as any systematic attempt to produce knowledge about the natural world,
including local knowledge, ethnosciences, and science as local cultural practice, is evidence
enough. Furthermore, it is also apparent that the sustainability science and sustainability
science education literatures seek a politics of the practical and the redistribution of social
Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce
 SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON SCIENCE EDUCATION 175

and natural goods. This is most evident in the questions contained within the Friiberg
Statement.
So, while the ideology of recognition allows the voices to be heard within these literatures,
it is another matter to know what to do with these voices. Hence, the judgment of esteem
and status as a question of morality on the endless quest toward cultural justice and humane
coexistence is not only a thorny issue but worthy of more space than is available here! Gough
(2003) for one sees it as a process of creating transnational “spaces” in which scholars from
different cultures/localities collaborate in reframing and decentering their own knowledge
traditions and learn to negotiate trust in each other’s contributions to their collective work.
His view has much in common with the border epistemologies and theorizations described
earlier (see Mignolo, 2000). However, I can only tackle this difficult area by illustrating
from my own theory and practice, which I do in the next section.

DEVELOPING A VISION FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION

The preceding discussion on science studies, cultural diversity, and sustainability science
as it coheres around the notion of recognition has begun to influence my thinking, and that
of my colleague Caroline Smith, about the forms a more contemporaneous science educa-
tion could take. [It is worth noting that there has also been other influences that include
ideas from ecofeminism (see Warren, 2000), postcolonialism (Young, 2003), globalization
theory (Beck, 2000), future studies (Slaughter, 1996), critical theory (Tyson, 1999), per-
maculture (Holmgren, 2002), and deep ecology (Cocks, 2003). Space limitations preclude
their discussion here, and indeed several of these perspectives have been considered in our
writings elsewhere, for example, Carter (2005a, 2000b, 2007, in press) on globalization
and science education, Carter (2004, 2006) on postcolonialism and cultural diversity in
science education, Smith (2004) and Mudzeilwana and Smith (2001) on future studies and
education, and Smith (2001a, 2001b) on permaculture. It has indeed been a very broad
church!].
Taken together, these influences have coalesced into a belief that science education should
not only work toward a deeper understanding of our planetary systems but also toward the
explicit goals of creating a more just, equitable, and sustainable world (see Carter & Smith,
2001, 2003, 2004). More specifically, our vision contends that humans have always tried
to understand and shape their world: sciences and technologies are as old as humanity.
All cultures create their own stories or cosmologies that not only help explain but also
provide a sense of wonder and awe about the universe and their place within it. This more
inclusive view of science sees it as any systematic attempt to produce knowledge about the
natural world and makes room for other local/indigenous, indeed multiple, and previously
excluded conceptualizations of scientific knowledge. Hence, scientific knowledge has arisen
from local contexts and in response to local needs. Consequently, reiterating postcolonial
science studies (Harding, 1998), and the growing acceptance of cultural diversity, there are
as many sciences as there are contexts/cultures. Western science can thus be understood as a
particular form of local knowledge tradition, shaped by and reproductive of, the culture and
society in which it is articulated. Its epistemological robustness, reliability, and the status of
the knowledge produced, however, has ensured its universal acceptance as a powerful way
of understanding our world. As such, it has been responsible for much human flourishing.
But enmeshed as it is in the global capitalist progress paradigm, Western science has also
been coproductive of hegemonic interests resulting in many unintended consequences. This
includes ecological devastation that threatens the future of planetary life and many forms
of imperialism. The new area of sustainability science seems to offer a timely approach that
may have the potential to transcend the epistemological and methodological limitations
Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce
176 CARTER

of Western science, build upon its strengths, and in making itself intentional and explicit,
facilitate the move toward a more just and sustainable world as part of the politics of the
practical.
My colleague and I have applied this vision of science education to the development of
a preservice general science unit for undergraduate primary teachers who, by and large, do
not have successful previous experiences with science, and are consequently more receptive
to a different approach (see Carter & Smith, 2003). The unit’s organizing framework draws
on the development of science as cultural story reiterating the themes of recognition,
difference, and localism derived from the literatures of science studies, cultural diversity,
and sustainability science. It begins by exploring cosmologies from various cultures to
develop the postcolonial science studies notion that all human societies have creation
stories that have arisen in local contexts and in response to local needs. Cosmologies
provide a sense of awe and wonder about the universe in which we live and our place within
it. The unit goes on to discuss the history(s) of the development of Western science from a
post-Kuhnian science studies perspective conceptualized within the cultural, economic, and
political forces of the times. Western science is thus presented as a localized ethnoscience
that has transcended its immediate determinants through its reliability and usefulness.
Again drawing from postcolonial science studies and the literature on cultural diversity,
other sciences including indigenous sciences are also acknowledged for their usefulness
and importance. The central Western science precepts of energy and matter are then studied
in more detail, both conceptually and within their historical context, as the necessary
precursors for the potent technologies of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The more
contemporary technologies of biotechnology and nanotechnology are examined and placed
within the globalizing capitalist ideology that is helping to shape their outcomes.
At this point, students are asked to draw their images of the future. Consistent with the
research (see Hicks, 1996), and with few exceptions, they tend to be dystopian, displaying
techno and ecological devastation that arises from the cultural conditions of the day. These
images are problematized, leading to envisioning different and more sustainable futures.
Systems theory, ecological knowledge, energy studies, permaculture design, indigenous
perspectives, community-based science, and citizen science as aspects of sustainability
science become privileged as ways of moving forward to a more just and sustainable
future. We attempt to finish the unit on an optimistic theme that enables students to feel
empowered about understanding the place of science in their world, and believing that they
can influence their futures.
Throughout the unit, there is a strong emphasis on the important conceptual ideas of
Western science that takes it beyond what might otherwise be regarded as a history and
philosophy of science approach. It explicitly aims toward the kind of deep social learning
and change encapsulated within challenges of the Friibergh Statement. It is an innovative
course in that it is strongly underpinned by theoretical perspectives not usually devel-
oped within a general science unit of this type. As this unit has only been taught for a
couple of years, there has been no systematic attempt as yet for its rigorous evaluation.
Nonetheless, students seem to appreciate the unit’s approach, considering it more relevant
to their lives and a broader view of science than the textbook-based and teacher-directed
science “education” of their previous school experiences. We believe that the continued
development of this approach has great potential for the future.

SUMMARY
This paper draws together the significant sociocultural literatures on science studies,
cultural diversity, and sustainability science to develop another vision for science education
Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce
 SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON SCIENCE EDUCATION 177

more suitable to the challenges of contemporaneity. While the influences of science studies
and cultural diversity are not uncommon within the science education literature, what is
different here is their juxtaposition, and the inclusion of the newer field of sustainability
science. Furthermore, these perspectives have been used to develop a different approach
to science education that sits alongside those within the literature promoting new ways of
looking at science education. The approach described here adds to these accounts as a way
of fostering more discussion about what is possible for science education. This approach
has been enacted within tertiary-based, general science unit for preservice primary teachers.
A number of dilemmas have arisen consequent to the implementation of the unit that need
to be further considered. Nonetheless, the vision of science education underpinning this
unit has the potential to engage science education in current dialogues about key issues that
are practically and intellectually urgent and that will both advance it as a discipline. While
we may wish for neat solutions to innovate better science education, as Turnbull (2000)
reminds us, we must live with the messiness of all knowledge making including scientific
because

[i]f we do not celebrate the messiness of all our knowledge making we will in the long run
condemn ourselves to an inevitable death bought on by the inflexibility and sterility of a
monoculture. In the long run, social and cultural complexity cannot be winnowed away;
it’s all there is (p. 227).

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Science Education DOI 10.1002/sce