Introduction to Science Teaching

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of each chapter in the section entitled Science Teaching. The chapters cover a wide range of multicultural themes, particular to each contributing author’s scholarly interests from the United States of America, México, or Lebanon. The chapters cover a wide range of subjects such as the language used to teach science, bilingualism, and translanguaging. The chapters also cover issues associated with rural/urban science teaching and the nature of science, all situated within sociocultural aspects of position/situate science teaching. Our standpoint is that science teaching cannot be disassociated from the contexts within which learning is enacted. Specifically, a set of ongoing global sociocultural influences contextually situate science teaching, influencing the teacher’s role in science teaching, learners’ learning processes, and the context in which education is enacted and situated. In using sociocultural lenses, we differ from positivist epistemological positions. Understanding how culture unfolds in science classroom spaces acknowledges that outside agents are constantly mitigating upon them. In this sense, the chapters in this Handbook’s section Science Teaching are framed by ontological, epistemological, and axiological interpretations that underscore the complexity of the social and cultural processes that influence educational spaces.