Browsing by Author "Zouda M."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Meeting Them ‘Where They’re At’: Critical Secondary School NoS Resource Development
    (Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2025) Kofman N.; Zouda M.; El Halwany S.; Del Gobbo D.; Ibrahim S.; Guerrero G.; Bencze L.
    © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.Apparently, most schools present relatively reductionist and sanitised views about relationships among fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics and societies and environments (STEM-SE). Despite Science and Technology Studies' research indicating, for example, that STEM-SE relationships often involve combinations of factors both internal (e.g., experiment design) and external (e.g., capitalist contracts with scientists) to the fields, school systems tend to prioritise more internalist perspectives. These often also appear to be very idealised conceptions of STEM fields—suggesting, for example, that they are highly apolitical. Some analysts suggest that difficulties in addressing externalist conceptions may be explained by assuming that vast and complex pro-capitalist ‘dispositifs’ lead schools to idealise professional STEM fields for recruitment purposes and to promote values like: competitiveness and cost externalities that seem largely responsible for serious problems like the climate crisis. Accordingly, since 2006, we have emphasised direct instruction about possibly problematic STEM-SE relationships and corresponding actions to overcome perceived problems. During her research assistantship with us, however, Nicole Kofman (first author here), a student teacher at the time, concluded that our team’s recent approaches have focused too zealously on more externalist perspectives about science. Consequently, she challenged us to ‘meet teachers where they’re at’—such as by exposing them to common internalist ‘misconceptions,’ such as that science practices are largely data-dependent, perhaps not subject to ideological positions, etc. This seems to be a prudent and, perhaps, humbling, message for a project that has ambitiously aimed to dramatically challenge existing socioeconomic systems through science/STEM education.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    School Science Students Envisaging (A)Biotic Alliances Prioritising Educated and Researched Values
    (Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2025) Bencze L.; Del Gobbo D.; Ibrahim S.; El Halwany S.; Hassan N.; Guerrero G.; Zouda M.
    © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.Educators are currently encouraged to interrelate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A major thrust of such movements is promotion of engineering designs, which government curricula have suggested may help solve problems like the climate emergency, de-speciation, etc. Many students may struggle with this, however, at least due to: omissions and/or distortions about possibly problematic influences of private sector entities on STEM fields and beyond; variations in students’ cultural and social capital may determine their abilities to discover important abstractions; and, with private sector entities manipulating public consciousness of adverse effects of their activities, it may be difficult for students to locate such information through secondary research. At the same time, faith in new technologies solving our various crises appears naïve. Particularly in democracies, successes of any entity (e.g., political leader, value, new technology, etc.) appears to depend on it being enmeshed in a large network of co-supportive living, nonliving and symbolic actants functioning like a machine to achieve congruent goals. Accordingly, in this chapter, we describe our long-term (over 5 years, involving the teacher and students in 8 semesters) efforts to encourage and enable high school science students to imagine networks supporting values, principles, etc. they believe are inherent to their new technologies. Some ontological, epistemological, methodological and axiological successes in this regard seemed to arise from direct application-based teaching about key concepts from Science and Technology Studies, like regulatory capture and sociotechnical imaginaries. Nevertheless, complexities of such teaching indicate needs for further action research regarding values mobilisation.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    STEPWISE Cartographies: Student Blueprinting of Socioscientific Issues and Actions Using Actor-Network Theory
    (Springer Science and Business Media B.V., 2025) Del Gobbo D.; Bencze L.; Zouda M.; El Halwany S.; Hassan N.; Ibrahim S.; Guerrero G.
    © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.School science and engineering challenges often involve abstractions. These abstractions may strip away complexities needed to understand broader societal and environmental implications of STEM issues, products and services. Alternatively, STEPWISE pedagogies have empowered secondary students to employ actor-network theory (ANT) mapping, blueprinting complex interactions of living, non-living and semiotic actants. STEPWISE empowers students to perform primary and secondary research and then produce science or engineering products as forms of social activism. In this way, students may come to realize how semiotics may obscure problematic science and engineering practices and innovations, such as coltan mining for cellphones. A historical background of actor-network theory (ANT) charts its development for use in analyzing science practice and its modifications for use in secondary educational contexts. Past educational implementations of ANT-mapping are compared with newer STEPWISE iterations which embed Foucault’s notion of repressive and normalizing power, as well as dispositifs, larger machine-like assemblages of actants that act with collective values and goals. Public awareness of dispositifs and complex power relationships revealed by ANT hint at new possibilities for science education, engineering, STEAM and activism. A full secondary implementation of actor-network maps including success criteria is explored with teacher recommendations.