The Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize is organised by the Museum of South Australia each year, with the winning works typically touring to other states. Named after the founder of the museum, it features art inspired by science. A recent visit to the finalist's exhibition of the Waterhouse prize had the author thinking about the narrowing of…

This essay responds to Jill Williams and Sara Tolbert (2021) and discusses the similarities and differences in curriculum, classroom, teaching and standards between Arizona, USA, and Victoria, Australia. Williams and Tolbert relate a good news story in a state of neoliberal educational despair. This essay argues that, from a relatively well…

Can science curricula truly cultivate morals and values towards nature? This is the question that is raised by Carolina Castano Rodriguez in her critique of the new Australian Science curriculum. In this response to Castano Rodriguez's paper we ask two questions relating to: the influence of curricula on the relationships of children and other…

Purpose: I take as a starting point the disparaging comments about the place of history and philosophy of education in initial teacher education (ITE) made by the chair of the Teacher Education Expert Panel established by the Australian Government in 2023, which I take to be the most recent attempt at resurrecting the tired debate over "the…

In this paper, I have positioned myself with Kean Birch and explored some of the political-economic actors/actants of policy suites implicated in the biotechnologies and bioeconomy. In particular, I have considered Australia's recent National Innovation and Science Agenda and allied documents and entities (that is, Innovation and Science…

What is science? Depending on who is asked, it may mean the pursuit of knowledge, explanations of the everyday world, a difficult subject at school, or a field populated by larger than life characters such as Einstein, Feynman, or Hawking. For the author, science has been and remains an unexpected journey, an adventure and an ever-changing career.…

Students in secondary school often find mathematics abstract and irrelevant, frequently questioning its usefulness and purpose. The discourse around STEM education has encouraged secondary teachers to attempt connecting mathematics with other STEM disciplines, most commonly with science. By making connections between content and skills through…

The "community of inquiry" as formulated by C. S. Peirce is grounded in the notion of communities of discipline-based inquiry engaged in the construction of knowledge. The phrase "transforming the classroom into a community of inquiry" is commonly understood as a pedagogical activity with a philosophical focus to guide…

From star systems to social systems, CONASTA 64 connects teachers to researchers and scientists working on the cutting edge of modern science. We asked two CONASTA 64 Keynote speakers, Steven Tingay and Ian Walker to share their passion for their work and their dedication for giving back to the science community.

The globalized nature of modern society has generated a number of pressures that impact internationally on countries' policies and practices of science education. Among these pressures are key issues of health and environment confronting global science, global economic control through multi-national capitalism, comparative and competitive…

In response to Meyer and Crawford's article on how nature of science and authentic science inquiry strategies can be used to support the learning of science for underrepresented students, I explore the possibly of reconciliation between the cultures of school, science, school science as well as home. Such reconciliation is only possible when…

The past 20 years or so have seen ongoing concern for the nature of science education in the Anglophone developed world. A particular focus of this concern has been the need to find new ways to frame science curricula that will engage students, yet it is proving difficult to achieve this goal. In this article I argue that the impact on science…

This response to the two papers (by Rodriguez and Carlone et al.) on science education reform acknowledges first the coherence of the arguments presented around four reform narratives; that of the process of becoming science-enthusiastic, the nature of beliefs of science reform teachers, the barriers to reform, and the institutional expressions of…

Although in the late 1990s there was much discussion as to whether the idea of information literacy was necessary or had longevity, global interest in the phenomenon has increased rather than diminished. Information literacy standards have been developed and become widely accepted in educational systems. Research centres for information literacy…

This article is a personal history of the Science and Mathematics Education Center (SMEC) in Perth, Australia, during my time there as a student. I make use of narratives to express what I see as the impact on my professional practice of having attended SMEC. I am grateful to SMEC, but what is being grateful really? In this paper I try to…