Antiracist science education and feminist science education from within the critical perspective have influenced science education research. This influence though has not been widespread.
Perhaps the difficulty for science education research, grounded in a traditional scholarship within the empirical-analytical perspective, with the critical perspective lies in the critical perspectives insistence on a politically overt agenda that interrogates not only knowledge production but also how the knowledge is disseminated and whose interests are being served. Science education
research, which includes biology education research, is mainly concerned with the issue of access to science education. A critical perspective on biology education has as yet to emerge. The critical perspectives influence on science education through science education research is located within the realm of an antiracist approach and feminist science pedagogy.
3.7.1 Antiracist Science Education
An antiracist approach for Hodson (1999, p776) is concerned with revealing, confronting and combating racist attitudes and practices which disadvantage and discriminate against some minority groups and result in an unequal distribution of opportunity, wealth and power that results in
inequality and justice. Questions asked by antiracist education must also be asked of antiracist science education. The questions include why and how members of some ethnic minority groups continue to be underrepresented in positions of power and in higher education, underachieve in school, are overrepresented in crime statistics, tend to have poor health, lower life expectancy and poorer housing conditions. Antiracist education and anti racist science education also asks what can and should be done about these social realities. Key elements/principles of antiracist education for Hodson (1999) include that:
• it recognizes and directly addresses the social effects of "race" through the curriculum;
• it acknowledges that the full social effects ofrace cannot be understood without recognizing how race intersects with other forms ofsocial oppression based on class, gender and sexual orientation;
• it questions White (male) power and privilege and the rationality for this dominance;
• it addresses the marginalization ofcertain voices in society and the discounting ofthe knowledge, beliefs and experiences ofthe minority groups;
• it recognizes that the personal identity ofstudents plays a crucial part in learning and so acknowledges both the needfor a pedagogy that meets the challenges ofethnic diversity in the classroom and the urgency for a more inclusive education system that is responsive to minority concerns;
• it challenges the "deficit model" and "blame the victim" explanations ofeducational failure which locate the problem in the family, home environment or local community and
so divert attention away from the institutional structures ofschooling and the curriculum as the real cause ofproblems;
• it acknowledges the role ofthe education system in producing and reproducing inequalities based on differences in gender, sexual preference, religion, class and aims to do something about it; and
• it recognizes that education is a political act inseparable from the material and ideological circumstances in which students are positioned (p777).
Inscience education these elements for Hodson (1993, 1999) can be addressed through both an explicit antiracist science education and through multicultural perspectives for science education grounded in a global view of science education. Combining both perspectives will make a critical science education possible. The antiracist science education as envisaged by Hodson (1993, 1999) will identify and replace all racially offensive and stereotyped curricular content; will establish
participatory democratic teaching-learning processes where student involvement located in a mutual tolerance, respect and value for all will drive the curriculum; and will draw attention to scientific racism through which science and scientific ways of presenting science knowledge have been used to underpin racism through a study of the notion of race and its misuse in the perpetuation of stereotyping and institutionalisation of injustice and through that the misuse of science for sociopolitical motives. Inthis way the first four key elements of an antiracist education will be achieved within an antiracist science education.
The second four elements will be addressed in an antiracist science education through multicultural perspectives. Such perspectives would draw from as wide a range of cultures and countries as possible in order to provide a global view of science. Contributions from outside of the west that have contributed to contemporary science practice will need to be recognised. This perspective will also emphasise science as a culturally determined practice. The conventional view about the nature of science as a well-defined, infallible, all-powerful method in the production of knowledge by scientists engaged in an apersonal venture will need to be challenged. Issues of equality, freedom and justice within the context of scientific and technological practice that enriches some while impoverishing many will also need to become part of the science education discourse and the multicultural perspective will make such discourse possible.
Crucial elements to an antiracist science education are the demythologising of science and the politicisation of science education. For Hodson (1999) the science that comprises science education is shrouded in myths that are the outcome of how science is taught by science teachers. Itis these myths that continue to perpetuate incorrect views of science and scientists. The myths include the understanding that true and reliable knowledge has to come from direct observation and that science is true and reliable because it starts from observation. The observation allows for science then to produce knowledge by induction. Inscience experiments are understood as decisive. Science is made up of discrete, generic processes. Scientific inquiry is projected as a simple, algorithmic procedure. Science as a value-free activity also contributes to the notion of science knowledge as true and reliable. Science remains portrayed in the main as western and post-Renaissance and scientists possess scientific attitudes essential to the practice of a true and reliable science. The removal of these myths would allow for the development of a critical scientific literacy that would in turn then make possible engagements with myths located within the nature, history and the complex language of especially school science. The politicisation of science, by providing students with opportunities to challenge socio-economic issues within scientific and related technological
and environmental aspects, together with a critical scientific literacy will make possible an education for political literacy. For Hodson (1999) a political literacy is inherently part of any ideology of education for social reconstruction. Social reconstruction is seen as wide and varied and as including, confronting and eliminating racism, sexism, classism and other forms of
discrimination, scapegoating and injustice; a shift away from consumerism and towards a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle. Such reconstruction will work towards social justice. Any such change will also require that teachers too acquire both a critical scientific and political literacy with regard to their own educational practice.
3.7.2 Feminist Science Education
Feminist pedagogy has also contributed to a reconstruction of science education through
challenging science education derived from a traditional scholarship. Feminist science pedagogy for Mayberry (1998) has worked to develop a critical analysis of the epistemology of Western science, its privileging of the masculine and its inability to reorient the relation of scientific inquiry to social policy and social development. Feminist science pedagogy has also begun to create sciences that speak from lives of marginalized groups and women specifically.
Bloor (2000) highlights that feminist science pedagogy in the period from the 1980's through to the 1990's was characterised by efforts at including women and other oppressed categories such as class and race within science education. This inclusiveness occurred within the context of science as an objective, true and reliable knowledge form. Barton (1998) has characterised the efforts at
inclusiveness as the first and second waves of feminism in science education. The first wave was focused on addressing equity issues through inclusiveness. The second wave focused on gender- inclusive science and women' s-ways-of-knowing and drew on works of feminist philosophers of science such as Harding and Keller.
Harding (2000) through her standpoint philosophy challenged the notion of inclusiveness within an objective science. For her science is not objective 'enough' because it ignores the voices and the perspectives of the marginalized groups. The voices and perspectives of the marginalized must be incorporated into new scientific practices so that less partial and distorted beliefs than others can be generated by a new and democratic science. Through her standpoint theory she advocates that all sciences must be local and start from the position of the lives of the community and a conceptual framework from a particular moment in those lives; that the subjects are not dissociated from the
objects of the study; that it is recognised that historic moments produce knowledge; and that subjects are multiple, heterogeneous and contradictory (as opposed to the traditional unitary, coherent and homogenous). The standpoint philosophy is grounded in the notion that individuals must actively work to adopt a standpoint; that a standpoint is a perspective and not an entity with which one is born.
Barton (1998) identifies this as a third wave of feminism in science education that for her emphasizes the situated nature of knowledge, power and authority. Itis this that makes possible reconstruction. In science education reconstruction through feminism is located in the recognition that science and the science curriculum exist as political texts and schools as legitmisers of
hegemonic ideals. A feminist science pedagogy also recognises and draws its strength from teachers and students as agents and actors who actively and collectively shape and reshape their own
understandings of the world from specific standpoints. For Bloor (2000) the challenge lies in how to actualise the standpoint perspective within science education and the science classroom itself. She suggests that a possible solution could lie within multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches to learning.
An antiracist science education with an agenda that is directed explicitly to social reconstruction will work towards social justice. One goal of such a science education will be the elimination of existing oppressions. Feminist science pedagogy has as a goal exposing cultural, social and political contexts within which science has been produced and used to privilege masculine and associated, interconnecting multiple perspectives of power. This exposure is what will allow for developing the critical consciousness required for any social transformation. These theorisations have contributed significantly to understandings around the origin and the continued perpetuation of oppression and subordination in science and science education. Such approaches however, within science education fail to involve the oppressor directly in engaging with and turning in upon itself the perpetrated oppressions. In this way the stature of science and science education as objective is silently retained.
Not involving the oppressor in efforts towards social justice within critical antiracist and feminist science pedagogy continues to exclude a crucial component that has a role together with the oppressed towards effecting any significant social change. At best then these efforts become tokenist because they translate into nothing more than yet another attempt at inclusivity of the subordinated and the oppressed. The challenge then lies in involving the oppressor and sustaining this involvement since relinquishing privilege and power will not be a preferred choice.