Acculturation is a concept borrowed from cultural anthropology and applied to education (Eisenhart 2001; Aikenhead 1996), in which teaching-learning is understood as cultural transmission-acquisition and meaningful learning is assumed. Within cultural anthropology, science has been described as a cultural entity (an ordered system of meaning and symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place; according to Geertz 1973). As a subculture of Euro-American cultures, Eurocentric science (ES) can be distinguished from other cultural ways of rationally and empirically describing and explaining the physical world (Aikenhead and Ogawa 2007).

Accordingly, conventional science education seeks to transmit the culture of ES to students so they can conceptualize, talk, value, and behave scientifically – being scientific. Two extreme reactions can result. Science-oriented students are eager to be identified with being scientific because their worldviews tend to harmonize with a worldview endemic to ES conveyed by school science (e.g., they often embrace a mathematical idealization of the physical world). The way these students’ experience the cultural transmission-acquisition of ES is called enculturation , in which being scientific enhances their everyday world. However, for non-science-oriented students whose worldviews are discordant with a worldview endemic to ES in varying degrees, the school is attempting to get them to comply with being scientific and to significantly change or add to their self-identities and everyday thinking, more or less. This is a transmission-acquisition experience called assimilation (Aikenhead 1996). Most non-science-oriented students resist assimilation successfully.

Between the extremes of enculturation and assimilation lies the transmission-acquisition experience of acculturation: the selected modification of one’s currently held ideas and customs under the influence of another culture (Aikenhead 1996). An ideal goal of school science acculturation is to have students master and critique ES without, in the process, diminishing their own worldviews, self-identities, and culturally constructed ways of knowing the physical world.

When participating in acculturation, a non-science-oriented student most often changes a concept or belief, or adds new ones, to their understanding of the physical world. A key phrase in the definition of acculturation is “selected modification,” because selections can be made either in an explicit, informed, autonomous way or in an implicit, uninformed, pressured way. The former is called autonomous acculturation (Aikenhead 1996), while the latter could be seen as coercive acculturation.

Examples will help clarify these categories of acculturation. A non-science-oriented student experiencing autonomous acculturation makes a decision in a fairly deliberate way to adapt from the culture of ES attractive aspects of being scientific. For instance, a non-science-oriented student takes on sufficient aspects of being scientific to become more critical of science-related advertisement claims. Another example is non-science-oriented American Indian students adding the scientific concept of disease to their Indigenous understanding of poor health (i.e., the imbalance among the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of humans) because they anticipate gaining power by addressing ill health from two cultural perspectives. In both examples, students autonomously appropriated knowledge from the culture of ES. Their decisions were guided by intellectual independence.

On the other hand, selections can happen under mild coercion, that is, made subconsciously or without full cognizance of the consequences. Intellectual independence is mostly absent. An example of coercive acculturation is a situation in which reductionist and/or mechanistic metaphors in ES replace a student’s holistic and/or aesthetic images of nature and thereby causing angst for the student. Another example is an isolated American Indian community purchasing a satellite dish, only to discover that the next generation of children has become fluent in English at the expense of their native tongue and therefore losing a critical aspect of their culture. In other words, the community has experienced coercive acculturation into mainstream American culture by the community’s selection of a technology without understanding the consequences. If instead of offering satellite dishes, the dominant society implemented residential schools harmful to American Indians or refused to include American Indian perspectives in school science courses, that act would be assimilation.

The line between coercive acculturation and assimilation is a vague one. On the one hand, coercive acculturation is associated with inadvertent action by educators who perhaps have not critically considered how their policies or teaching indoctrinate non-science-oriented students and how these students risk unconsciously altering their self-identities or worldviews without the benefit of considering the consequences. On the other hand, assimilation is associated with actions by educators who achieve their intended consequences of indoctrination.

The degree to which non-science-oriented students actually incorporate being scientific into their self-identities and everyday subcultures reflects the degree to which acculturation has taken place (Aikenhead and Jegede 1999). Such students can be empowered to draw upon the culture of ES in appropriate situations, such as working at a job or profession, judging a science-related personal or social issue, participating in a science-related event, or making sense of one’s own community or society increasingly influenced by ES.

The process of acculturation, however, does not apply to those non-science-oriented students who are able to acquire enough content from the culture of ES to pass science courses but without understanding that content in any meaningful way, in other words, without integrating aspects of the culture of ES into their self-identities or everyday world. Those students tend to avoid any of the cultural transmission-acquisition processes related to science education. The process these students follow has been labeled “playing Fatima’s rules” (Aikenhead 1996), and the “rules” comprise various strategies of resistance against any attempt to enculturate, acculturate, or assimilate these students.

Cross-References