In this forum paper, I grapple with critical questions about our understanding of science as a discipline and the education standards formulated within that framing. My exploration is contextualized in our current socio-political climate and is presented in discourse with Charity Winburn's "Meeting the needs of the individual student in the…

In this article, we argue that mainstream science education is contaminated by neoliberal values and functions in the service of political domination and exploitation and that a neoliberal and exploitative science education does not contribute to the building of a sustainable and just world. The work from Paulo Freire and Enrique Dussel underpin…

The aim of this work is to reflect on the challenging trajectory of international cooperation between East Timor and Brazil, which focused on the need to rethink teacher education from a critical intercultural perspective, aiming to build emancipatory relations, love, and solidarity. From 2009 until 2016, we coordinated the Qualification of…

This paper discusses the value of a Freirean liberatory perspective in community colleges, countering the traditional "second chance" or "social reproduction" viewpoints attributed by scholars to the education offered in these institutions, emphasizing its vital need in science and healthcare careers education. I explore the…

In the last decades, agroecological and permacultural initiatives and organizations have grown. These initiatives attend to notions of food sovereignty and alternative models of agricultural production. The confluence of different actors and social initiatives through which experiences and knowledge of cultivating food are shared, and new ones are…

This article explores ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) through a Freirean lens of critical consciousness, dialogue, and transformation. The purpose is to draw from where there have been processes of engagement of sociopolitical action in science and how these spaces can become meaningful entry points to take toward making a…

This paper makes the case that love, in particular a lover's discourse, is regularly excluded from the work we do in higher education. As educators, we are seldom empowered to reach for a discourse of love, nor are we taught to embody love explicitly in our work. This doesn't mean that love doesn't exist in education, but rather something more…

A number of scholars have shown the prevalence of multiple metaphors in biological conceptions of the living cell. However, there is little research into unpacking these metaphors to understand their ideological implications for scientific knowledge and science education. In this paper, I perform a critical discourse analysis of the representation…

Public debate often centers on issues that affect our lives and which reflect interests of various social groups and scientific communities, leading to controversies about what we may call socially acute questions (SAQs). In this paper we focus on two SAQs linked to the dominant model of meat production and consumption in Western countries, namely…

Science education has an important role in educating the public on learning strategies that will generate a scientific literate population. The challenges encountered in this time of crisis calls for individuals to make well-informed decisions, based on reliable information. Understanding scientific basic concepts can inform the population on…

We live in a world marked by a crisis that we understand, from post-colonial literature, as a crisis of the knowledge model that underpins Western Modernity. Therefore, science education which deals with the study of the production of scientific knowledge needs to be attentive to this question. We argue that the challenges imposed by the crisis…

This paper is in dialogue with Lisa Marco-Bujosa's article titled, "Soul searching in science teaching: an exploration of critical teaching events through the lens of intersectionality" where the author takes up the ways that Faith's Jamaican immigrant Black woman identities are shaped and how she understood and enacted teaching for…

Alterity is a concept with an extensive yet elusive history. Popularly conceived of as radical difference and Otherness, I identify alterity as the source of much of the virulent forms of racism, sexism, islamophobia, and other dichotomies in society that pit one group against another. Coming out of the tradition of critical qualitative inquiry, I…

Our study traces the pernicious whiteness of coloniality in elementary science classrooms in El Sur de Tejas, Aztlán. Our research method was an ethnographic case study that enabled us to explore participants' identities within bioregional contexts. In our findings, we emphasize the pernicious whiteness of coloniality via the participants'…

Addressing the critical question posed by Gudrun Jonsdottir and Anne Kristine Byhring who are asking what place for a common future in the science classroom, this paper focuses on and expands on the construct of "dialogical space." Not simply as an abstract concept to describe the presence of divergent ideas or the exchange of idioms,…