Facing neoliberalism through dialogic spaces as sites of hope in science education: experiences of two self-organised communities

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the role of dialogue in two layers; first, in relation to two self-organised communities of science teachers in which we participated and, second, our process of coming together during our PhDs to analyse these communities, a dialogue about the dialogue. Regarding the first layer, there is much to learn from science teachers and science teacher educators when they are organised in sites of learning that can be spaces of hope, beginnings, and becoming, as is illustrated in the case of these two self-organised communities. Regarding the second layer, we discuss the value of dialogue and the possibilities it offers to develop ideas for science education in a way that might be democratising, emancipatory, and offering counter-narratives in a neoliberal Chile. By engaging in this dialogue revisiting the practices of our communities, we gained a sense of agency within the field of science education. However, we realised that we need to move towards a critical view within our communities, and more contextual and transformative science education by translating these sites of hope to our educational praxis today. For us, this relates both to developing a collective view of how to make science education provide pedagogical conditions and experiences for critical and engaged citizenship and thinking how we can act and engage with different settings in solidarity. One way of moving towards this is by developing a political knowledge of our disciplines through a collective scientific conscientisation. Our communities are the departure points to achieve this.

Praxis crisis and the trouble with science teacher education for emergent bilingual learners

“…Teachers must have sustained and ongoing open‐ended opportunities that allow them to critically unpack their very diverse and complex positionings, in relation to both agency (their perception of being able to facilitate equitable opportunities to learn science) and structure (the limits or constraints—or perceived limits—on their abilities to do so) and to wrestle with these entangled tensions (Braaten & Sheth, 2017) among a critically aware dialogic community of practitioners, for example, in preservice teacher education, through induction and beyond (Bianchini & Cavazos, 2007; Tolbert et al, 2019; Torres‐Olave & Bravo González, 2021).…”

“…We must be honest and transparent with preservice teachers about the fact that these fundamental changes are not easy to achieve but require engagement with policymakers, participation in social movements, and organizing for labor rights, in addition to everyday acts of subversion and resistance (Anyon, 2014; Cochran‐Smith et al, 2015; Gutiérrez, 2016; Morales‐Doyle et al, 2020; Williams & Tolbert, 2021). Science teacher education must firmly commit to the project of educating itself as it simultaneously mobilizes a socially and politically conscious teacher workforce (McLaren & Baltodano, 2000; Tolbert & Bazzul, 2017; Torres‐Olave & Bravo González, 2021; Verma et al, 2022). Our task, then, is not only to stay with the trouble but also to make trouble—“good trouble, necessary trouble” (Lewis, 2018).…”

“…Without dialogue, there is no communication, and without communication, there can be no true education … the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom does not begin when the teacherstudent meets with the students-teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks [themselves] what [they] will dialogue with the latter about. (Freire, 1970, p. 93) Teachers must have sustained and ongoing open-ended opportunities that allow them to critically unpack their very diverse and complex positionings, in relation to both agency (their perception of being able to facilitate equitable opportunities to learn science) and structure (the limits or constraints-or perceived limits-on their abilities to do so) and to wrestle with these entangled tensions (Braaten & Sheth, 2017) among a critically aware dialogic community of practitioners, for example, in preservice teacher education, through induction and beyond (Bianchini & Cavazos, 2007;Tolbert et al, 2019;Torres-Olave & Bravo González, 2021).…”

Broadening adult engagement and education in science cafés: lessons from an STS — science communication boundary spanning experiment

“…[Davies, 2022, p. 311] Our project actively engaged several scholarly areas -informal science education, STS, and science communication -each of which has evolved as a distinctly different research field, even while the boundaries between these fields have also been acknowledged to be porous, overlapping, and historically contingent [Lewenstein, 2015]. Ultimately, the dynamics of our scholar-practitioner partnership mirrored those identified by researchers on interdisciplinary collaborations [Tartas & Muller Mirza, 2007] and teacher-education researcher collaborations [Torres-Olave & Bravo González, 2021].…”