Science curriculum-making for the Anthropocene: perspectives and possibilities

ABSTRACT

This paper illuminates how science curriculum-making can be reinvigorated to address urgent local and global socioscientific issues that centres place as an interconnected part of larger socio-ecological and socio-technical systems. Given how industrial and capitalistic extractive practices have pushed the planet beyond its complex life-sustaining limits, we draw on theoretical perspectives that recognise schools as complex systems, nested within local, regional, and global social-ecological-technological systems. Science curriculum-making in these systems prompts dialogue regarding knowledge and competencies required to address planetary sustainability, as well as ontological questions connected to systems, relations, and responsibility. Consequently, schools are important places for curriculum enactment practices. Furthermore, teachers, students, administrators, and school community members are enmeshed with local ecologies that are constituted in the cultural, material, and social arrangements found in or brought to a school and its local community. In our work, we draw on a curriculum commonplaces perspective to investigate curriculum-making practices. Specifically, we use empirical data from two cases of elementary and secondary science teachers developing and enacting curriculum and adopt a philosophical-empirical deductive approach illustrative of how to apply complexity theory, systems thinking, and associated ontological and epistemological views to practical reasoning of science curriculum-making for schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum
• socio-scientific issues
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The Brock University Social Science Research Ethics Board has reviewed the ‘Connecting School Science to Local Communities: Promoting Meaningful Engagement for Students’ research proposal affiliated with this manuscript and considers the procedures, as described by the applicant, to conform to the University’s ethical standards and the Tri-Council Policy Statement for social science research involving humans in Canada. The ethics approval number is: 18-234 – FAZIO.

Notes

1 We recognize the recent news of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratiagraphy voting against formally ratifying the Anthropocene as an Epoch because of a restrictive geological logic; nevertheless, our paper supports the call for a reconsideration of a rigid geological defintion of the Epoch in acknowledgement of the systemic and complex human relationships and their impacts with Earth's physical and biological systems (see Henderson & Vachula, 2024).

2 See: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=curriculum (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.).

3 Buckley (1967).

4 Applying systems thinking to educational systems was promoted decades ago by Bela H. Banathy in Systems Design of Education: A Journey to Create the Future (1991), and A Systems View of Education (1992) texts. However, these texts received little attention from educational researchers.

5 This process ontological approach for study of complex systems is predicated on the philosophy of Deluze’s systems theoretic that goes beyond static ontological entities: see Weinbaum (2015) for more details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [435-2018-59].