Staying with the Trouble in Science Education: Towards Thinking with Nature

Staying with the Trouble in Science Education: Towards Thinking with Nature Marc Higgins, Maria Wallace and Jesse Bazzul Initial Premise: Nature, ‘Nature’ and Science Education We begin from the premise that Nature (which, following posthumanist convention, we capitalize to signal the totality of nature: the ways in which space, time, and matter are always already co-constitutive) always already has a role in the construction of scientific knowledge (i.e., ‘nature’) and that our ability to ‘tune-in’ matters: epistemologically, ontologically, and ethically. With the advent of the ontological turn in education, the role of Nature in the construction of ‘nature’ is increasingly being considered (as well as the role of Nature in constructing Culture). Under the banner of posthumanist and new materialist approaches to education and educational research, there is increasing awareness that the (re)production of ‘nature’ is only in part a human meaning-making practice and to take seriously the notion that it may not only be co-constructed with other humans, but also with other-than-humans, and morethan-humans as well. However, science education has yet to take this on fully. But it is a rich site of possibility: describing and defining ‘nature’ is at the heart of science education, for example in school science and science teacher education. Yet, at the moment, there is a telling and troubling paucity in the way science education is taking up questions generated by the ontological turn. We see this as being inseparable from the ways in which science education is premised on Othering Nature. The two predominant methods of teaching and learning science entail either coming-toknow what scientists know (i.e. cognitivism, intra-personal learning, scientific knowledge as representation of nature) or enculturation into how scientists come-to-know (i.e. socioconstructivism, interpersonal learning, scientific knowledge as representation of culture). In both, Nature remains in danger of being posited as ‘nature’. That is, as no more than an anthropocentric representation culturally mediated by the culture of science and school science to be pedagogically conveyed (as scientific knowledge) or co-constructed (through thinking like a scientist). Nature remains a passive backdrop against which ‘nature’ is constructed and remains separate and separable from its co-constitutive realm of Culture and its plural questions of politics, economics, discourse, and life. In this manifesto for another science education, therefore, we echo Isabelle Stengers’ (2018: 106) Manifesto for Slow Science and argue that ‘another science [education] is possible!’ However, the path to even an other science educations is fraught: science education has an over-reliance on practice divorced from theory and on hiding theoretical commitments in plain sight. Firmly, we repeat Haraway’s (2016: 47) mantra for Staying with the Trouble: ‘think we must; we must think.’ We must engage in the critical task of identifying, examining, and addressing the multiple ways in which science education continues to uphold problematic enactments of power. We call for a slower critical science education: a science education which does not dismiss the urgent work of building and sustaining social and ecological relations through the temporality of emergency. We do not just call for a strict slowing down for more time to think, but also to think about how we think: ‘it matters what thoughts think thoughts’ (Haraway, 2016: 35). Call it staying with the trouble in science education. There are two principles at the core of our manifesto. The first principle, Science education needs to think, but not like that, outlines three onto-epistemological moves that often occur within science education and (fore)close possibility: a) commonplace thoughtlessness; b) stupidity; and c), circular reasoning. The second principle, Science education must think otherwise, but not like that, offers three orientations for troubling thought which do not engage in the hubris of waving away the trouble. They are thinking as: a) slow science; b) minor inquiry; and c) disruption. First Principle: Science Education Needs to Think, But Not Like That (a) Thinking against commonplace thoughtlessness Thought is both the possibility of thinking anew and thinking again. So ‘It matters what thoughts think thoughts’ (Haraway, 2016: 35). If we are to engage Nature from a position that is ‘not in the world; but of the world’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 14), we must think, but not like that: thought in science education is far too often circular, stratified, dogmatic, and foreclosed. Haraway (2016) refers to thought which thinks again, that is thought that reproduces sameness rather than difference in its repetition, as ‘commonplace thoughtlessness.’ We must take heed of thoughtlessness in science education which, Haraway (2016: 36) explains, derives from Man, the Subject of Western modernity, who enacts it: Unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inherent in notoneself… someone could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in consequences or with consequence, could not compost. We must reject commonplace thoughtlessness which, as Haraway makes clear, is not a lack of or lapse in thought. It is thought-full-ness of another kind shaped by ‘a deeper surrender to … immateriality, inconsequentiality’ (Haraway, 2016: 36) which reinforces dominant ways-ofknowing-in-being. But what we know from the posthuman, ontological turn is that entire parts of the world do not come to matter in commonplace thoughtlessness as the world is already (fore)closed by what we already (think we) know of the world. Our reading, being, and learning must yield fresh ideas, not reproduce and reaffirm the things that we already know and the systems of power through which they come to be. (b) Thinking against stupidity Similarly, Stengers (2015: 119) states that the ways in which we too-readily and -quickly reify taken-for-granted notions in science education, could be referred to as ‘stupidity.’ Stupidity does not here refer to stupor, to paralysis, or to impotence. Stupidity is active, it feeds on its effects, on the manner in which it dismembers a concrete situation, in which it destroys the capacity for thinking and imagining of those who envisaged ways of doing things differently, leaving them stunned. Stupidity works towards being unable to respond to that which truly necessitates it. Yet, ‘It will not be said that “people are stupid” as if it was a matter of some personal defect. Stupidity is something … that it seizes hold of certain people.’ (Stengers, 2015: 117, emphasis in original). It is deeply entangled within the forces and flows of power which shape how we become and manufacture science educators. Science education’s identity and ‘epistemic privilege’ is premised on refusing, repudiating, and defining itself against its multiple Others, rendering their contributions inadmissible and at times unimaginable. For example, for a scientist to be agentic in constructing ‘nature,’ its other must be agency-less; science’s ability to define and describe Nature is contingent on Nature being mute or treating it as such. The inability to see or respond across the binary separation of Nature and Culture is in the interests of power and by design: The bifurcation of nature could not, however, have acquired this ‘all-terrain’ power of disqualification had it not been accompanied by an activity of the devaluation of thought—that I have referred to as stupidity—in its capacity to define what is important at any given moment. (Deblaise, 2018: 27) c) Thinking against circular reasoning We must, therefore, refuse the ways in thoughtlessness and stupidity circuitously operate through binary thinking, but also recognize that these logics operate circularly. Connecting the dots between concepts of ‘what counts’ and ‘what works’ in science education reveals a circle, a relation of closure to that which is non-science (e.g., Indigenous, feminist, spiritual, and many other ways-of-knowing-in-being-with-Nature). Each conceptual node within science education is a different articulation, and a (re)production, of the systems of power through which they are producible: objectivity rearticulates validity, which reaffirms reliability, which reinforces repeatability, ad nauseum. They are so circular that Lars Bang (2017) recently referred to them as Ouroboros-like, the figure of the snake who eats its own tail. Science education is an Ouroboros who has been self-consuming for so long that it has either become so-bloated or atrophied that it has lost all appetite for all thought outside itself. This is why ‘our task is to make trouble’ (Haraway, 2016: 1), not wave it away. We must (attempt to) break away from these problematic systems of thought but also non-innocently consider how we participate in the very thing we work against. As Haraway (2016: 38) states, ‘this is not a longing for salvation or some other sort of optimistic politics; neither is it a cynical quietism in the face of the depth of the trouble.’ In turn, staying with the trouble within science education is to differently inhabit the ouroboros-like circularity that governs our thoughts and desires in the sciences. It is to follow Patti Lather’s (2007) critical and complicit question: How do we think about how we think without using the thing with which we think (when the thing with which we think is part of the problem)? Second Principle: Science Education Must Think Otherwise, But Not Like That (a) Thinking with slow science This manifesto proposes the need to pedagogically make science stutter, slow, or stop with regard to taken-for-granted and received meanings and matters, and not by rejecting meaning, but through scepticism towards the authority that meanings already hold. For Stengers (2018: 100), Slow science is not about scientists taking full account of the messy complications of the world, it is about them facing up to the challenge of developing a collective awareness of the particularly selective character of their own thought-style. This is a way of getting lost (Lather, 2007). Not only is this a means of losing the way, particularly of importance in science education where the way comes to stand as a monolithic singularity which makes unimaginable the possibility that another science and science education is possible! It is also a process of losing the destination which often re-territorialize creative and critical efforts (e.g., the science education “pipeline” to participating and competing in the global marketplace). Making science stutter, slow, or come to a stop requires creating interruptions which place us in new relations with what we already ‘know’ or, more importantly, that which we do not yet and we cannot yet know. Yet, this is never as simple as engaging in self-reflexivity and the optics it enacts: pedagogical conditions matter in making thought stutter in how we think about our selves, science, and science education. We must re(con)figure pedagogy so that it perpetually produces moments of hesitation which ask to not forget ethics and politics in our construction of Nature. (b) Thinking with minor thought Working towards the production of such moments of hesitation requires a recognition that the thoughts we think are often inherently caught up in geographies of majority. Majority is territorial — reproducing a ‘constant and homogeneous system’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 105). Science education, as we think it, ‘implies a constant, of expression or content’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 105). Because of the homogeneity we consent to in science education, geographies of majority ground what is thought, what is thinkable, and the ways that major power structures are maintained. Majority thinking in science education values (only) dominant discourses, epistemologies, and views of reality (what students ‘ought’ to think), while minor thinking follows (ethical) lines of thought away from what rigid majorities would have us think and embody. In other words the minor follows, the ‘mights’ of science education. Such minor thought engages with the contour, the margins, and the yet-to-come by venturing into and taking seriously highly relevant and potent ways-of-knowing-Nature that are (fore)closed off to science through its casting as ‘non-science’. Thus, becoming-minor in science education is an ethical imperative; a refusal to think like that without vacating the territory of thought. Becoming-minor is a refusal to move to directly to the centre of circular thought and draw from those at the periphery, along its contour; becoming-minor is ‘very complex, with musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical, and political, references’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 105). These characteristics of minority are implicit within scientific inquiry but they often become overcoded by the major characteristics of science education. For example, the orthodoxy of Nature of Science (NOS) is often articulated as the only ‘proper scientific inquiry’; so much so that it is often articulated as the NOS! However, this is often without explicitly specifying the conditions under which even a particular ‘NOS’ becomes proper. Without critical contextualizations, becoming-major in science education is oft laden with forces and flows of anthropocentrism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and other vectors of power. Rather than reterritorializing NOS as it has become known and knowable, thinking minor thoughts demands science education question ontological and epistemological assumptions of ‘nature’: nature according to whom? Nature under what conditions? Nature for what purposes? Can an other science education might be thought and enacted in turn? To which parts of Nature might we be able to ethically respond? Further, what forms of accountability towards peoples, places, and practices previously excluded can be both thought and enacted? We urgently need to engage these minor thoughts in science education. (c) Thinking with disruption We need minor thinking which thinks with (not against) the diverse beings, critters, and potential kin who live life-in-the-detritus of the Anthropocene. In these strange times, staying with the trouble in science education necessitates finding ways to commune together: spiritually, politically, and ecologically. This is not only to disrupt science education, but also acknowledge that disruption happens. These ruptures are at once plural, diverse, yet interconnected. They are ecological, social, cultural, and psychic. Yet, we must learn from the ways more-than-human, other-than-human, and human entities responsively organize their lives in kinship and around commons. Following Anna Tsing (2015), this is a necessary aspect of all life and livability in capitalist ruins. Disruption matters. As Haraway (2016: 31) states, ‘nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.’ Disruption is complex and complicated force that provides necessary conditions for the emergence of different beings, ethics, and ways of living. Science education must learn to understand disruption on an a more intimate level. Not only so that it can responsibly learn of its complicities, but also because we must learn to learn from those tangled up in the trouble so that their details, stories, histories, science facts, and speculative fictions will have and will come to matter. What questions might we ask in a science education which thinks otherwise (but not like that)? For example, in the context of North America, a question might include: how does sustainability science seriously contend with the genocides of large Indigenous populations (as a marker of the Anthropocene) and our more-than-kin (such as the disappearance of Buffalo herds and grass species)? How are practices of forgetting these disruptions, intentional or not, part of genocidesin-the-making? Yet, this is but one of many questions that demands accounting for and being accountable towards in science education: there are multiple calls to heed. Conclusion: Towards Thinking with Nature Thought, but not like that, can only provoke us to know otherwise from outside that which we already know. Staying with the trouble in science education means working towards thinking with Nature (not ‘about’ Nature). We must work to disrupt and displace the very logics through which we become science educators without succumbing to the fantasy of transcending them. It matters what matters we use to think matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2016: 12) References Bang, L. (2017). In the maw of the Ouroboros: an analysis of scientific literacy and democracy. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1-16. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. 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