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Acknowledgement of the role of cultural influences on science education is a relatively recent development, initiated in part by anthropological and sociological explorations of how specific contexts influence teaching and learning. Kenneth Tobin (2006) has written of science education experiencing a “cultural turn” as science education and discourse researchers begin to acknowledge and explore the influence of culture on science education, increasingly scrutinizing and critiquing universal notions of science practices and knowledge production. As a construct, culture owes its existence to the field of anthropology. Other fields, like education, with interests in the production of ideas, processes, and material social practices, have found the construct of culture to be useful for their purposes also.

What Is Culture? Models of Culture

At an abstract level, culture can be thought of as a theoretical category of social life that can be differentiated from other categories of similar stature such as politics, economy, and history (Sewell 1999). Typically, when we talk of culture, we are seeking to differentiate between different groups, identifying bounded entities of beliefs, practices, and ways of knowing as different cultures. Research that initially sought to explore cultural influences on science education was influenced by Clifford Geertz’s (1973) notion of cultures as clearly bounded, consensual, and resistant to change. This model supported productive research in science education on student negotiation of “border crossings” between students’ lifeworld culture and the culture of science leading Aikenhead to argue that treating science as a cultural enterprise constituted a radical shift in thinking for some science educators (see Aikenhead 1996).

But studies from history and sociology of science and from science education research have challenged this model of culture, leading researchers instead to endorse cultures as fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning that internally are contradictory, contested, subject to constant change, and weakly bounded (see Sewell 1999). The power of this model is that it allows researchers to acknowledge and value contradictions as well as coherences in data of human action, such as that collected from working with learners and teachers in classrooms, rather than try to explain away the contradictions that inevitably exist in all data sources.

Science Education, Cultural Reproduction

Historically, the goal of science education was twofold. First, all students would be assimilated into the culture of science through practice and assessment, a desirable end because of the superiority of science as a way of knowing and being. Second, through education, students would come to adopt and reproduce this superior form of knowing and being, including the norms, values and practices, and acceptance of what is real according to science (Aikenhead 1996). A cultural evaluation of these goals indicates that schooling has a role in ensuring that one vision of what constitutes scientific knowledge and practice is reproduced. However, challenges for this vision emerge in the differences between the everyday culture that students experience, in which they are experts, and the culture of science they are expected to reproduce throughout their educational experience in a school. A nuanced understanding of culture suggests, even more strongly, that the practice of assimilation exerts violence on students who come to science with different understandings. This construction of culture may help researchers to understand why so many students present negative perceptions of science or do not see science as part of their lifeworld and so do not choose to persist in science. Teachers may experience similar cultural disconnectedness from science; Carter (2008) uses the metaphor of science as a cultural story in order to allow beginning primary (elementary) teachers to identify a starting place for themselves in science.

Science as Culture and the Nature of Science

According to Sewell (1999), because cultures are contradictory, contested, and weakly bounded, the powerful (e.g., white, middle class, male in Western cultures) use power, not to establish uniformity, but to organize difference by identifying what is normal or accepted for a culture and marginalizing those that diverge from the norm. Such practices create a map of culture and difference, which tells people where they belong and what fits. However, because cultures are weakly bounded, loosely integrated, and contradictory, their borders are fuzzy and friable, and science education illustrates this issue very well.

What Is Science? In science education, one of the obvious questions that educators are often asked to explore is “What is the boundary of science”; in other words, “What is science and what is non-science?” While some science education researchers may present this boundary as objective and definite, implying that identifying science from nonscience is straightforward, a cultural perspective serves to help us identify the porousness of even this most strongly held belief about this boundary (see Pedynowski 2003). Additionally, cultural perspectives lead researchers and educators to accept that internally, science is heterogeneous and not homogenous as it is often presented in science education resources and in schools. One implication of accepting the porosity of this boundary and the heterogeneousness of the model of what constitutes science is accepting that there is an equally valid place in science for both the observational studies of geological sciences and the explanatory studies of particle physics. Studies within a specific science field also highlight that scientific work is nationally variable (see Fujimura 2000), not universally homogenous.

Traditionally, the development of scientific understanding has been presented as universal; immune to the culture, ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion of the knower; and dependent only on the restrictions of the natural world. However, cultural perspectives reject universal essentialist claims of scientific knowledge, recognizing that the practices, norms, and products of scientific inquiry vary across time and fields (disciplines) and encourage pluralist claims associated with the nature of science. Pluralist models of science education accept that all forms of knowledge exist in a cultural context, so the knowledge must be imbued with the values that are espoused by a culture. A willingness to accept the value-laden nature of knowledge construction is one of the first steps towards developing a richer understanding of a discipline, like science. These perspectives are illustrative of ongoing debates in science education between proponents of pluralist and universalist models of science education and the role of indigenous knowledge in science education (see McKinley 2005)

Beyond Concepts. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to recognize the role of historical context in the development of these practices and associated meanings. For example, in my exploration of the history of understanding the relationship between boiling point and pressure, shows that the development of the thermometer (material practice) was just as important as the conceptual development of an understanding of air pressure and boiling point (social practice) (Milne 2013). Without a way to measure temperature, the conceptual questions could not even be framed. Cultural sensitivity of social practice also leads researchers to acknowledge their cultural stance with respect to the field they are seeking to explore. For example, researchers developing a survey instrument or identifying questions they wish to ask research participants in an interview will always explain in their writings how their understandings, positions, and biases with respect to the concept or construct they wanted to investigate informed and influenced the questions they asked the participants. Typically, this is the practice most ignored by researchers without a cultural perspective.

Belonging to a Culture and Otherness: Categorizing Identity

One other area where culture has influenced science education is in helping us to understand the interaction between individuals and culture in terms of how individuals construct themselves or are constructed; that is their identity. Individual and group identities are culturally and socially constructed around categories such as ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and occupation, and individual people are categorized in various ways. Identity can be thought of as an objective sense of oneself, which individuals present to others for confirmation. Categories, such as white, Asian, woman, and brainy, can also be inscribed on people as an identifier of belonging to a particular group whether or not they wish to be so categorized. An individual’s identity is strongly connected to the cultural production (learning) she has experienced which can be disturbed if someone experiences a culture very different to that with which they are familiar and which they can experience as a form of “culture shock” (see Michie 2011). With greater cultural awareness, researchers and educators are more open to exploring how cultural categories, such as race and gender, are embedded in presentations of scientific knowledge. For example, Bazzul and Sykes (2011) examined heteronormative representations of gender in a biology textbook used with high school students raising the question of why such textbooks represent the constructs of sex and gender as identical and exclusively about men and women to such a vulnerable population.

Generalizing and Otherness. Cultural influences also induce researchers and educators to cast a critical eye on attempts to generalize behavior to a small set of principles. While we can celebrate Galileo’s use of idealization to propose the existence of gravity or Piaget’s attempt to find universal structures in learning and behavior, cultural perspectives support us to recognize that with this focus on sameness, we lose sight of difference. In many cases, difference becomes identified as otherness. A cultural perspective may prompt researchers to examine critically a catchphrase like, “Science for All,” asking, “Whose science? Who is left out?”

Summing Up

This short entry provides just an inkling of how culture influences science education. But hopefully it has communicated how any exploration of cultural influences from coherence and contradictions to identity and instruments offers the potential for a richer, more nuanced understanding of some of the elements that could serve to develop a more humane and inclusive science education. An understanding of cultural influences reinforces the notion that we have a responsibility to look with a critical eye, locally and globally, at how science education and science construct and use knowledge. We must examine not only who is included and marginalized through our stances, but how science education can better support the science learning of all children and youth. Finally, cultural influences support educators to answer one of the most important questions in science education, How does education support learners to see a role for science in their individual identities?

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