Science education policies and standards have called for educators to teach students about the Nature of Science (NOS) and engage them in Culturally Relevant Science Teaching (CRST), which requires critical shifts away from traditional science teaching. As such, teachers are being asked to possess or take up conceptions of science that challenge…

Traditional biology curricula depict science as an objective field, overlooking the important influence that human values and biases have on what is studied and who can be a scientist. We can work to address this shortcoming by incorporating "ideological awareness" into the curriculum, which is an understanding of biases, stereotypes,…

This study examined the conceptualisation of disability in a teacher education textbook. Drawing on Norman Fairclough's post-structurally informed approach to critical discourse analysis, I deconstructed the language used in a science teacher education textbook to portray disability, and examined relationships to broader socio-political contexts…

While science has profound social impacts, we often teach biology as removed from societally debated issues. Here, we address this gap in biology education through the implementation of novel materials that promote ideological awareness (IA). Using mixed-method analyses, we explore students' perceptions of the relationship between science and…

Learning democratic participation as future citizens is an important goal for science education for all students. To take part in debates and decision-making involving socioscientific issues, such as sustainability, students need to become aware of different positions and dilemmas regarding such issues. This study seeks to understand how…

Science is generally expected to respond to students and societal needs by adopting student and social accountability principles. Therefore, school science curricula are revised regularly to address emerging socio-economic, political, and scientific issues. Similarly, the National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement of South Africa was…

When engaging with socioscientific issues, learners act at the intersection of scientific, school, and other societal communities, drawing on knowledge, practices, and identities from both in and out of the classroom to address problems as national or global citizens. We present three case studies of high school students whose classroom…

What happens to education when the potential it helps realizing in the individual works against the formal purposes of the curriculum? What happens when education becomes a vehicle for its own subversion? As a subject-forming state apparatus working on ideological speciesism, formal education is engaged in both human and animal stratification in…

With the development of science and technology, a basically optimistic ideology of progress has emerged. This deterministic attitude has been challenged in recent decades as a result of harmful side-effects generated by the way technology and science have been approached and used. The study presented here is a part of a larger international and…

Although science, technology, society and environment (STSE) education has gained considerable force in the past few years, it has made fewer strides in practice. We suggest that "science" teacher identity plays a role in the adoption of STSE perspectives. Simply put, issues-based STSE education challenges traditional images of a science…