**Aswathy**: What if we begin with *what they like* about their lived environments? To people like us, from relatively privileged backgrounds, what stands out the most about these children's settings is the filth and the waste. However, as educators, it might be worthwhile to work on consolidating and affirming their positive experiences of their environment as well.

**Himanshu**: That might be a possible way forward, and I have also been thinking along these lines. Environmental education initiatives that seek to establish pro-environmental attitudes through hands-on farming, composting, gardening, etc. do exist in India. Though some exploratory studies (Dutta & Chandrasekharan, 2018) suggest that these activities lead to the development of pro-environmental values in some of the participants, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of whether the compassion and connection with "nature" extend beyond these built environments (gardens, farms etc.). After all, interventions that use built environments package and present "nature" to participants in a certain way, as thriving, flourishing, enchanting, and clean. The question that I find myself asking is—are there ways to tap into and validate experiences or feelings of connection that children of marginalized communities have with what—in our sanitized perception—is "degraded," "filthy," "unclean" landscapes, which are home to them? This does not mean that we ignore the physical dangers in these spaces—the illnesses, the pollution, the harmful and unpleasant odors. But we often tend to focus only on unpleasant experiences. Probably, a starting point could be to build on the sense of relatedness that these children have to their environments and other people in their communities.

**Aswathy**: Working with the privileged will be more challenging. How do we get them to question their privileges and develop a sense of empathy with the marginalized and their physical environments? More importantly, how do we convince them that developing these sensibilities is essential?

#### Concluding Thoughts

India's environmental movement has combined ecological concerns with class and caste politics (Guha & Martinez-Alier, 2013; Kumar, 2016). It is pertinent that transformative science and environmental education in India that is critical of the Anthropocene discourse incorporate these concerns. Our examination of textbooks reveals that the textbooks support sustainable development and the ecological modernization paradigm. Interactions with student groups of different socioeconomic backgrounds also suggest that their subjectivities, as manifested in their values and aspirations, are shaped by the Anthropocene discourse. In our conversation, it emerged that working with both the marginalized and the privileged is necessary. More importantly, we realize that working with their emotions is an essential step toward their politicization, which resonates with other science education researchers' views. For instance, referring to Claudia Ruitenberg, Ralph Levinson (2010) argues that political emotions are distinct from personal insults or feelings of moral outrage. The former entails feeling a sense of anger on behalf of groups less privileged than one's group. Similarly, drawing on the scholarship of bell hooks, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt, Bazzul, and Tolbert (2019) argue for the necessity for political love to underpin our critical and transformative educational agendas. They write:

political love is pursued in the name of collective joy—a refusal of the politics of domination and a recognition that other worlds in common are possible. Love is pedagogical; and so how can we learn to love each other better? How can we learn to extend our love beyond love of self/extensions of self (e.g., our own genetic families) toward a love of/for/with the multitude? (p. 306)

The challenge for educators working with marginalized communities is to find ways to inculcate political emotions that have the power to alter their living conditions. While working with marginalized groups of students living in ecological degradation sites, it might be important to validate their sense of community and their positive relationships with their physical environments. Transformative pedagogical practices involving privileged groups of students would entail getting them to understand how their career choices, lifestyles, and the broader neoliberal power structures are implicated in the sociopolitical and ecological crisis that we are faced with. Undoing privilege is a difficult task, but is a worthwhile goal to aspire for.

#### References

Achuthan, A. (2011). Re:wiring bodies. *Bangalore: The Centre for Internet & Society*. Aggarwal, M. (2019, May 25). *What Modi and BJP's return means for environmental laws in India*. HuffPost. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/modi-green-lawsenvironment\_in\_5ce7dba1e4b0a2f9f28d7cc4?guccounter=1.

*Conference to Review Research on Science, Technology and Mathematics Education* (pp. 67–73). Cinnamonteal. http://episteme.hbcse.tifr.res.in/index.php/episte me5/5/paper/view/130/13.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### Rethinking Historical Approaches for Science Education in the Anthropocene

*Cristiano B. Moura and Andreia Guerra*

*"Este es un mundo al revés. Este es un mundo de mierda. Pero no es el único mundo posible."*1 —Eduardo Galeano, in an interview to #acampadaBCN, a social movement occurred in Barcelona in 2011

Climate changes experienced in different parts of the planet indicate that the Earth may be rendered inhospitable to human life soon. What once seemed more like a science fiction movie plot is now an urgent reality that is increasingly part of political and academic debate. Political actors, such as the young Greta Thunberg and the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, have made us reflect on fundamental issues on a global scale: What are the conditions of life on planet Earth in a near future? How do we maintain human life in the (paradoxically) so-called Anthropocene era?

At the same time that such questions are regarded as fundamental to contemporaneity, the answers to them seem distant, intangible, under the

1 Spanish for "This is a backwards world.  But it is not the only world possible".

e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. B. Moura (B) · A. Guerra

Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Education, Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca, Rio de Janeiro, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_13

current paradigm. As Eduardo Galeano elaborates in the opening of this text, this seems like an upside-down world: the growing of global anxieties does not seem to produce any major shifts in the ways which we think and live (with) the Earth. Santos (2016) formulated this apparent paradox through what he calls the crisis of the Western society's paradigm, which is directly linked to Western modern science (WMS).2 The author states that in times of crises like the one we are experiencing, the crisis deepens as strong questions such as those highlighted above have only been responded to with weak answers, that is, answers that do not defy the limits of WMS. According to Santos (2016), strong questions are those that challenge ways of life grounded in WMS, ones that push on, or interrogate, its boundaries. Santos' arguments are not only axiological, but also epistemological: he questions the limits of WMS knowledge systems, and the kind of epistemic responses WMS can produce as it strives to claim a unique position of universality.

The idea that we live in a new geological epoch called Anthropocene has gained momentum since the early 2000s, as the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Paul Crutzen, started using the term in his publications (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). The prospect that anthropogenic action has been of such a scale that it has altered the Earth's balance, profoundly changing environmental conditions, is already a consensus in the scientific community (Oreskes, 2007). Despite this, there is still a controversy regarding when the Anthropocene would have started: those who advocate the start date of 1610 claim that the "Great Navigations" (or the Age of Exploration, a period of extensive imperialism and settler colonialism that occurred between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries) were an unprecedented process of exchange of animal and plant species, at a time when there were also profound changes occurring in the size of the world's population, which had an impact on atmospheric composition. Others state that 1964 should be the chosen date because, added to the repercussions of the great acceleration that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century, a peak of Carbon-14 was identified in the global atmosphere that year, related to the nuclear tests that occurred years before (Lewis & Maslin, 2015).

Turning now to Science Education (SE), those of us who work in the field of History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science (HPSS) and SE note that, despite the seriousness of the crisis that we briefly outlined above and the

2 We are aware of the debates concerning the WMS / Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Science Education and the criticism about using this terminology regarding the bounds they impose (Kim et al., 2017); especially when one take into account the processes of appropriation of local knowledge (Harding, 2015). But, for clarity, what we refer here as Western modern science, based on Quijano (2000), is the way of producing knowledge developed by the end of the Middle Ages from European canons; this way of producing knowledge accounted for the cognitive needs of capitalism, and it "was imposed and admitted in the entire capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as an emblem of modernity" (Quijano, 2000, p. 343). In this way, our choice carries a political stance we sustain as crucial throughout this paper.

urgency of the theme of Anthropocene for science educators, research developed in these fields have given too little attention to such discussions. Our perplexed reaction is the same as that of Bazzul (2012), who points out that this community, gathered at a congress in Greece during a deep political and economic crisis in 2011, held discussions that seemed hermetic to the world that surrounded them at that time. On the other hand, the controversy over the initial date of the Anthropocene seems to point to an important aspect of the Anthropocene as a concept, which is its historical dimension. Choosing one or another marker as the start for this new geological era seems to us to be a decision that goes far beyond deciding on the best stratigraphic indicators—it is a decision with political implications. In summarizing the history of 1610, and the years around, known as the Age of Sail, when the "New World" was "discovered,"3 as a great movement of species, it is not clear who started this movement, with what intentions, and what the consequences were. The same line of thinking applies to the year of 1964 and the nuclear bombs that increased the concentration of 14C in the atmosphere. Who did it, with what intentions, and what were the consequences? Responses to these questions vary, depending on who is telling the story. Also, as Moore (2017) states, the way we choose to periodize the story completely changes its interpretations. Our intention is not that stratigraphers do the job of considering these factors as criteria for defining the new framework for the Anthropocene, but to point out how important it is for multiple counter-stories to be told. We argue that science education can be fruitful space for grappling with these complex considerations.

The Anthropocene can be used as an analytical lens in history and philosophy of science, though it has not yet materialized as such, given that it is a fairly new concept. Nature of science (NOS) studies have also yet to give much consideration to the Anthropocene. NOS frameworks are used to guide research and pedagogy, but have not explicitly attended to the history of science (HoS). In times of climate crisis and a future at risk, we think that such an omission may have even wider consequences than those related to HPSS in Science Teaching (e.g., Eastwood et al., 2012).

Our objective in this chapter is to underscore the importance of attending to the historical dimensions of the Anthropocene, particularly in HPSS fields of science education. We maintain that it is not possible to act in any field of research—especially in SE—without taking into account the time of strong questions and weak answers in which we live, as well as the role of Western scientific knowledge and diverse forms of knowledge. First, we seek, through a historical case study and with the support of Santos (2002, 2016, 2019), to reframe WMS, bringing other stories and other perspectives into a dialogue about its emergence and establishment. We discuss how Western modern

3 The quotation marks used here intend to express our concerns with these expressions which for a long time have been problematized by postcolonial scholarship.

science as a knowledge system was shaped by the triad of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Such an analysis not only challenges WMS claims to universality but also honors and uplifts other forms of knowledge that can help to inform solutions for the present moment (Harding, 2015). We argue that enhancing the political-historical dimension of WMS in science education is fundamental to building futures that produce different and potentially less (self)destructive multispecies relationships.

#### Reframing Western Modern Science: Thinking About Other Stories that Can Be Told About Its Emergence and Consolidation

*"So that is how to create a single story: Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become."* —Chimamanda Adichie.

In a 2009 lecture, Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, drew attention to the dangers of a single story. For instance, the danger of making a people, a country, or a fact to be identified by only one story. In the lecture, she emphasized how this act of essentializing a story contributed to shaping the global imagination about Africa and Africans, with devastating consequences, such as the dehumanization of Africans and "storying" Africa as if it were a place where good things do not happen. That is, as if it were not a place of creation, beauty, and poetry (Adichie, 2018). Adichie also states that the problem of the single story is closely linked to power and how it is asymmetrically distributed in the world. Therefore, questions such as how stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, and how many stories are told are all dependent on power structures.

Adichie's claims are also useful when it comes to the historiography of WMS. In other words, we still live from a historiography of (if not single) dominant stories, and this is quite evident in science education. Even when it comes to a reinterpretation of episodes that seek to bring down the glorious narratives of the "great geniuses of Science"—the famous fight against a presentist and decontextualized history—theoretical and political commitments that animate these tasks are rarely made explicit (Moura, 2019). In other words, writing a historical narrative is in and of itself an exercise of power and involves political commitments, yet these power dynamics and political commitments are insufficiently addressed in science education. Science education needs to attend in more depth to questions of "who has benefitted and who has suffered in its formation" (Nyhart, 2016, p. 7). Such efforts require a more intentional and in-depth search for other stories about the same events, or stories that reveal other historical events that help to tell different stories about science. These ideas are ones that are also being tackled by such research fields as global history (Roberts, 2009). This is still an incipient movement inside the HPSS and science education research fields, though there are some examples of these new historiographies emerging (Moura & Guerra, 2016; Gandolfi, 2019).

Postcolonial and feminist scholarship similarly challenges Western modern science's claims to universality, exclusivity, and totality. Santos (2002) argues that WMS grounds itself mostly in these three premises and that the obsession with these premises blocks possible understandings of the world that can exceed WMS. Moreover, Harding (2015) contends that WMS appropriated the observation of Indigenous people about their environment and their knowledge from the fifteenth century and marginalized this knowledge by framing it as myth, magic, and superstition that should be replaced by a "universal" WMS. Harding points out how WMS is also full of myth. Her work reveals how science and society are co-constitutive, i.e., producing each other.

The European territorial expansion was also guided by the same three premises of universality, exclusivity, and totality (Santos, 2002). The worldview that places outside Europe could be and should be dominated is also informed by a Christian religious understanding, that God would have given the world to humans ("Fill and subdue the earth," according to the book of Genesis). In this way, the Europeans left the territory they had occupied until the Fourteenth century to colonize others who they considered as non-beings (Santos, 2019), whose knowledge was false, and whose rules of coexistence were illegitimate. The colonization process occurred either through violence, trying to eliminate those who were different, or by assimilating the Other to the precepts of the European world, including WMS.

Harding (2015) and other feminist and postcolonial scholars tell a story about how the exploitation of natural resources and contact with other cultures boosted and helped in the consolidation of WMS, that is, in the consolidation of a universal rationality (Harding, 2015). In other words, although WMS makes claims to universality, this has not prevented WMS from appropriating cultural knowledge through colonization. For example, the specimens collected, the fossils found, the practices, and the knowledge learned in the different colonies expanded the horizons of WMS (Pimentel, 2007). However, the whole process of meeting with the Other in the colonies was understood by colonizers as a mere process of "data collection," extraction of raw material to expand scientific knowledge, rather than a two-way cultural exchange (Livingstone, 2003). Some scholarship has illustrated the importance of contact with the colonies for WMS (Pimentel, 2007; Raj, 2013), contributing to a more diverse array of "origin" stories that can be told about WMS.

In the process of colonizers' masking the epistemologies found and appropriating them as WMS, we reveal what Santos (2002) calls a waste of experience. A range of experiences and knowledge traditions around the world—that were often wider and more varied than the WMS ones—was "wasted" because they were "absorbed" as WMS production or simply neglected or discarded (Santos, 2002). This waste also refers to what is "worth knowing": the questions and answers usually produced by WMS ended up eclipsing the experiences outside its realm. This means that in dominant stories (even in the non-Whig, non-presentist, and non-decontextualized ones), contact with the colonies is often diminished or relegated to a peripheral role in the production of WMS. If we take into account the aspects that current historians who have engaged in the task of rewriting this story are trying to clarify, we can conclude that: (1) there is more cultural/traditional knowledge from the colonies that was "absorbed" as WMS than what is often communicated in dominant histories (Raj, 2013); thus, we can question how much WMS it actually "European" or actually "universal" (even though it has asserted itself as such); (2) the epistemicide that occurred during the colonization process (and that continues to occur due to various forms of colonialism) may have narrowed possibilities for the future, as much of this knowledge engages with thinking about other forms of existence on earth (e.g., relational forms) and the coexistence with the "more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman" (Haraway, 2015). That is the so-called waste of experience. To overcome it, one has to re-inquire into the past (and, thus, the present).

Therefore, when we advocate the need to historicize modern science, it is important to note that we are not dealing with any and all historical approaches. There are those approaches, for example, that can even contribute to further essentialize other ways of knowing, which is not what we seek. Rather we propose the (re)telling stories about the past in ways that render identifiable the power structures inscribed in those histories—that histories, and even histories of science, must be understood as fabricated narratives and not natural ones (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). As Santos (2019) and Harding (2015) teach us, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are among the main forms of structural inequality that drive contemporary society; therefore, identifying the various forms of colonialism and patriarchy, as well as the hybridizations between capitalism, colonialism, and science, is fundamental in providing us with tools to imagine other futures. Next, we share a case study related to the history of botany that helps to contextualize our argument.

#### Going Deeper: A Short Case in the History of Botany

Botanical activity developed in Europe had undergone a major change during the eighteenth century when, in the early part of that century, botany began to acquire a strong economic character, prior to focusing on the pharmaceutical function of plants (Sigrest & Widmer, 2011). In this context, the colonizers invested in obtaining natural products from colonies to compete with trade monopolies maintained by other nations (Bravo, 2005). This change in botany increased the demand (and, consequently, the flow) for specimens from the colonies, encouraging the practice of European expeditions to colonies. Spain, for instance, supported expeditions to America and the Philippines to collect, describe, and identify new plants, subsequently publishing these findings and commercializing these natural commodities (Bleichmar, 2011).

The expeditions from Europe to the colonies, with both commercial and taxonomic goals (Bravo, 2005), had the function to locate American plants with potential for commercialization, such as American varieties of cinnamon, tea, pepper, nutmeg, and others. In these expeditions, scientific practices such as the collection and pressing of plants, illustrations, notes on observations of the places where the plants were collected, the transport of plants, activities aimed at adapting them far from their place of origin, and others, were widely developed and mobilized different social actors (Sigrist & Widmer, 2011).

These state-sponsored expeditions were considered an opportunity for young European men to join the scientific *milieu*. Those who wished to accompany these expeditions were trained to be able to take the plants they were looking for to Europe. Thus, in different locations there were book publications, such as the one published in Spain and entitled, in a free translation, "Instruction on the safest and most economical way to transport live plants by sea and land to the most distant countries" (Gómez Ortega, 1779), whose author was a member of the Botanical Society of Florence and of the Royal Medical Academy of Madrid. These publications served as professional conduct manuals for young travelers, in order to reduce the loss of collected specimens, and to train these men as "reliable witnesses" since the observations made by them in colonies could not be verified by botanists in Europe (Livingstone, 2003). The expeditions enlisted naturalists, physicians, clergymen, surgeons, imperial and colonial administrators, and artists. Training the eighteenth-century botanist became a global project (Bleichmar, 2011).

Part of this endeavor, the illustration practices, which were pivotal for the development of botany at that time, enlisted plant collectors, botanists, and also artists (Bleichmar, 2011). To get an idea of the importance of this process, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), who published a classification system that stands out in this context, received from only one expedition 250 herbarium specimens between 1767 and 1778, and two sizable collections of images produced in the colonies (Bleichmar, 2011). About the work of the artists, one can say that they were not free to represent the plants any way they saw fit. They were carefully trained to produce a version of the plants that was fitting for taxonomic description (Daston & Galison, 2007), ensuring that a plant collected in the colonies could be identified within a classification system used for the study of plants in Europe (Bleichmar, 2011). Thus, while the collected plants were recognized as something familiar, the identification of something hitherto unknown within the system strengthened the premise that the knowledge produced in this process was truly "universal."

In this context, atlases of botany played a central role in the dissemination of the knowledge of botany produced by Europeans in colonies and in Europe (Daston & Galison, 2007). The botanists who participated in the production of plant illustrations guided the hired illustrators so that they represented what the botanists thought that need to be represented (Daston & Galison, 2007). In this process, the differences between the leaves and flowers of the same plant were not portrayed. In the search for order and regularity, Linnaeus' classification system was built based on "plant sexuality," ordering the specimens in class and order (George, 2006). The number or proportion of male and female parts of each flower, called stamens and pistils, distinguished the classes and the orders. Thus, we find parts of the plants registered in the atlas' images that allow the identification of stamens and pistils (George, 2006). The names of the species and genus who were considered to be named received a Latin name derived from the name of the person who first described the species in publication. In this process, the artists and many other social actors who participated in the botanical processes were made invisible.

Sixteenth-century Europeans came to the Americas and learned about medicine and edible plants unknown in Europe, and they shared this knowledge in the European continent. Physicians and naturalists who never came to America used this knowledge to improve medicine and botany (Bleichmar, 2005), even though Europeans simultaneously disregarded knowledge from the Americas as less sophisticated (Harding, 2015). As Schiebinger (2005, p. 144) argues, "European colonial expansion depended on and fueled the search for new knowledge concerning tropical medicines. At the same time, colonialism bred dynamics of conquest and exploitation that impeded the development of this knowledge." Local knowledge was not only invisible in the illustrations and botany publications, in fact, the value of local knowledge was also disregarded. José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808), a Spanish botanist who lived in Colombia for twenty-five years and whose name was used by Linnaeus to name a specimen, drew much knowledge (which he published) from conversations that he had with local people from various social and ethnic groups. In these conversations, he asked local people about the local knowledge of flora and their medicinal use. He recorded and used these responses in his research while also denigrating local knowledge (Bleichmar, 2011). In 1686, Fontenelle (1686/1993) wrote a book to disseminate the Copernican system and astronomy knowledge to European women. In his book, that had several editions translated to many languages, Fontenelle also denigrated American Indians' knowledge and ways of life. To summarize, a powerful knowledge about plants taken from the colonies was developed, and, at the same time, powerful knowledges and ways of thinking about the same plants and the environment were marginalized, or, in Santos' (2002) words, were "wasted." In Europe and in sites where cultural knowledge appropriation occurred, such as the United States, however, only some stories, perhaps even a single story, about this knowledge construction are taught. If we intend to seek strong answers to the questions that the Anthropocene imposes in contemporary times, it is necessary to recognize these colonial erasures and consider that the neglected knowledge, the "wasted" epistemes, could have built paths to support answers to our current urgent questions. Societies' visions about the HoS are shaped by these hegemonic stories that frequently neglect processes of pillage and erasures that were foisted on native people of the colonies. When these stories are not told, the mythic ideals as to the universality of WMS are reinforced, and one extends the cycle of "wasting" other possible ways of living on the earth.4 This process of unveiling other stories that can be told about science in schools, we argue, can benefit Anthropocene discussions. In the next section we are going to explore how historicizing the Anthropocene is a way of telling other stories about sciences, and, thus, how it has great potential for reshaping some conversations inside Science Education research and practices.

#### When Anthropocene and History of Science Meet: Some Insights for Science Education

*"Este mundo de mierda está embarazado de otro […]"*5 —Eduardo Galeano

The idea of historicizing the concept of Anthropocene is not something only we uphold. Moore (2017) also joins this criticism, who argues that the term "Anthropocene" itself disguises the real story behind how we got to the present moment. Moore (2017) claims that a more appropriate term would be Capitalocene, which would decentralize Man (*Anthropos*) from history, and bring attention to the role of capitalism in our current dire circumstances. According to Moore, during the rise of capitalism, the expulsion of many humans of their homes and from humanity (mainly women, people of color, Indigenous people) provided a material condition for seeing nature as external (Moore, 2017). Haraway (2016) also criticizes the story behind the concept of Anthropocene, which does not make clear the process of looting and plunder involved before the Industrial Revolution, which some advocate is a milestone of the beginning of the Anthropocene:

One must surely tell of the networks of sugar, precious metals, plantations, indigenous genocides, and slavery, with their labor innovations and relocations and recompositions of critters and things sweeping up both human and nonhuman workers of all kinds. The infectious industrial revolution of England mattered hugely, but it is only one player in planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations. The relocation of peoples, plants, and animals; the leveling of vast forests; and the violent mining of metals preceded the steam engine; but that is not a warrant for wringing one's hands about the perfidy of the Anthropos, or of Species Man, or of Man the Hunter.

4 Here we use the words of Ailton Krenak, an indigenous leader that confront the idea of nature and the world, at large, as a place we live in. As Krenak puts it, the indigenous people are the forest itself and not just "live" there. In our vision, the same goes for all the humans and the earth.

5 Spanish for "This shitty world is pregnant with another world.".

It is this critical view of history that we share, and these are the other stories that we seek to tell about what happened in the past. The stories we tell about the past are not dissociated or dissociable from our present or from our perspectives for the future. As Chakrabarty (2018) puts it, the Anthropocene has challenged us in the sense that if once we constructed our histories about the past with a more or less secure prospect of the human existence in the future, now it is not the case anymore. So, this retelling of the past is not (only) a matter of justice for those who were erased from the dominant histories, but an active and imaginative process of reinvention of this past which could allow us to take care of the present (Haraway, 2015) to move forward and make our existence on this planet possible in the future. We argued, in another work, that the sociology of absences, proposed by Santos (2002) would help in the task of seeing the waste of experience in the past-present, identifying the absences in history and in the present time. We believe, along with the sociology of absences, that the sociology of emergencies (Santos, 2002) can help us to imagine possible futures from the recovery of the past and the present. According to Santos:

Here, too, the point is to investigate an absence, but while in the sociology of absences what is actively produced as nonexistent is available here and now, albeit silenced, marginalized, or disqualified, in the sociology of emergences the absence is an absence of a future possibility as yet not identified and of a capacity not yet fully formed to carry it out. This is a prospective inquiry operating according to two procedures: to render less partial our knowledge of the conditions of the possible and to render less partial the conditions of the possible. (2002, p. 258)

What are the consequences of this reconceptualization for science education with a historical approach that tells another story about the relationship between modern science, capitalism, and colonialism? To think about this issue, it is important to highlight our standpoint, in order to try to make it clearer why we say what we say, as Chimamanda Adichie teaches us. As woman and man from Brazil, who work primarily in the field of science education, and, perhaps by living in Brazil of 2020 we probably feel more heavily the consequences of social inequalities, climate change, and the rise of political authoritarianism, we consider science classes as a space for social struggle. Therefore, we consider it as a place for the construction of ideas and possibilities for responding to contemporary dilemmas. As science teachers, we believe that the HoS emerges as a possibility to recognize that science education has a fundamental role to play in questioning the exclusivity of WMS. Indeed, "there is no knowledge without practices and social actors" (Santos & Meneses, 2009).

There is a long tradition of research in science education that presupposes that it is essential to promote the study of the nature of science (NOS). Although we recognize the potential of such initiatives in promoting debates about sciences, we consider that, because they do not explicitly consider that WMS was built and consolidated in the light of the triad of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, they do not problematize the concealment, violence, and appropriation processes that occurred in the establishment of WMS. Consequently, the universalism intended by modern science appears as something given and natural rather than as a premise that, in order to be valid, it committed erasures throughout the process of development of scientific knowledge. In this way, the potential of science education to be a space for social struggle, a space for the development of ideas and possibilities for responding to contemporary dilemmas, is also wasted.

We find possibilities within the premises behind HPSS in science teaching:

[I]t can humanise the sciences and make them more connected with personal, ethical, cultural, and political concerns; it can make classrooms more challenging and thoughtful and thus enhance critical thinking skills; it can contribute to the fuller understanding of scientific subject matter—it can contribute a little to overcoming the "sea of meaninglessness" which one commentator said has engulfed science classrooms, where formula and equations are recited but few people know what they mean; it can improve teacher training by assisting the development of a richer and more authentic epistemology of science, that is a greater understanding of the structure of science, and its place in the intellectual scheme of things. (Matthews, 1992)

Given the current state of affairs and our situation as an endangered species, perhaps it is time to revisit some of these purposes. In the first place, we think that revisiting the HoS such as that we have presented takes us on the path not of humanizing science, but of seeing it as an enterprise that has a certain look at Nature and at the human–nature relationship that is not unique and absolute. This may go beyond humanizing the sciences, in the same sense that understanding our "era" as Capitalocene instead of Anthropocene also does. About thoughtful and challenging classrooms, we certainly cling to this objective. As Harding (2015) points out, the vision that WMS is a science from nowhere should be denied; all sciences are politicized. This concept is still incipient in HPSS & SE research field.

Recalling Santos (2008), our need may not be the refusal of WMS but its reconfiguration "in a broader constellation of knowledge where it coexists with practices of non-scientific knowledge that survived the epistemicide [...] whether or not they have a non-capitalist horizon as reference" (p. 156). We understand that our (urgent) task is to look for ways to retell our stories, having a clear political commitment to the present and the future. Whether in WMS, or in science education itself, we need to reexamine how stories are told, who tells them, when they tell them, and what the power structures underlying these stories are. What could it mean for science education research and practice? Firstly, it is important to remember, as Paulo Freire (1987) states, that there is no education in a political vacuum. The same goes for science education. One important but the overlooked dimension of using HoS in science education is seeking to understand the erasures in our understanding of history. This is a complex reconstruction that will take a time long to be accomplished by historians of science in ways that begin to effectively challenge dominant stories. But, as science teachers, we can seek to unveil the erasures in each history, and maintain a critical awareness of the role of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy in History and, thus, in HoS, opening up possibilities of thinking-acting in the present to build different futures. This can help to bring back wasted epistemes to the game of knowledge, reinventing our *histórias*. 6

To reinvent the future, we need to reinvent the past, which is a task that we should not fear. If we live today, in a *mundo de mierda*, we must remember that it is pregnant with another world—as Galeano teaches us. It is urgent that, following Paulo Freire, we roll up our sleeves to *esperançar*7 this new world. If there is a certainty in studying HoS, it is that the world has changed a lot throughout history, so that another world is possible. We invite the reader to *esperançar* the world—or the world after the end of the world—together.

#### References

Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). *Objectivity.* Zone Books.

Eastwood, J. L., Sadler, T. D., Zeidler, D. L., Lewis, A., Amiri, L., & Applebaum, S. (2012). Contextualizing nature of science instruction in socioscientific issues. *International Journal of Science Education*, *34*(15), 2289–2315.

6 In Portuguese, the word "histórias" may refer both to History (the hegemonic History with capital H) and stories (the stories we can tell about anything). So, we opted to use "histórias" here to highlight this twofold meaning and also to highlight how different rationales (sometimes expressed by language) can help us to think differently.

7 *Esperançar* (pronounced is.pe.ran.'sar) is a Portuguese verb, stemming from Paulo Freire's thought, derived from *esperança* (hope) that differs from "being hopeful" because instead of meaning to be in a waiting state, *Esperançar* does not mean to conform, but to pursue and fight for goals.

Fontenelle, B. B. (1686/1993). *Diálogos Sobre A Pluralidade Dos Mundos*. Editora da Unicamp.

Freire, P. (1987). *Pedagogia do oprimido* (17ª. ed.). Paz e Terra.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### Reflections on Teaching and Learning Chemistry Through Youth Participatory Science

*Daniel Morales-Doyle, Alejandra Frausto Aceves, Karen Canales Salas, Mindy J. Chappell, Tomasz G. Rajski, Adilene Aguilera, Giani Clay, and Delani Lopez*

This chapter captures a panel discussion from the 2019 conference of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS) in Norfolk, Virginia. The panel included two high school students, three high school chemistry teachers, a community organizer, an administrator for a large urban

Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. J. Chappell e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Frausto Aceves · M. J. Chappell · T. G. Rajski · A. Aguilera · G. Clay · D. Lopez Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
T. G. Rajski e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Aguilera e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Canales Salas Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Frausto Aceves School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

© The Author(s) 2022 M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_14

229

D. Morales-Doyle (B) · M. J. Chappell

school district, and a university-based science educator. These panelists, the authors of this chapter, had been collaborating on an initiative to support youth participatory science (YPS) projects in high school chemistry classes (Morales-Doyle & Frausto, 2021). We share this lightly edited transcript of our conversation as a way to communicate perspectives about the opportunities and challenges of YPS from viewpoints across these constituency groups.

YPS combines critical and pedagogical elements of youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008) with the disciplinary and democratic elements of citizen science (Irwin, 1995). The project described here is a collaborative effort to engage high school chemistry students in YPS projects about urban heavy metal contamination. In Chicago, like other (post)-industrial cities, there are numerous sources of heavy metal contamination. Communities of color in this hyper-segregated city tend to be disproportionately impacted by this pollution. Lead contamination in the environment comes from decades of leaded gasoline and lead-based paint. Lead and mercury were both emitted as biproducts of two coal power plants that were shut down as the result of a long community struggle in 2012 and a waste incinerator that was shut down in the 1990s. Biproducts of fossil fuels like petcoke and fly ash contributed to contamination as huge piles were irresponsibly or illegally stored outdoors. Besides lead and mercury, there are also metals like manganese and molybdenum, which continue to be emitted by chemical and steel plants in the city. Unlike lead and mercury, these are essential elements, but still have negative health and environmental effects in larger amounts that are less well-understood. Of course, there are also countless miles of lead pipes delivering drinking water to homes throughout the city. In the wake of the Flint water crisis, our group, who had been working together informally for a number of years, refocused on developing YPS projects about heavy metal contamination (Morales-Doyle et al., 2019). As you will read in our comments, different groups of teachers, youth, and scientists have taken up different specific local manifestations of heavy metal contamination in their YPS projects.

We want to emphasize that the work we share has been possible because of long-term involvement and collaboration. Building relationships between students, teachers, university-based scientists, and community organizations is challenging. Establishing trust requires reciprocity, time, humility, and commitment. Some members of our group have collaborated since 2004, with some version of the current project ongoing since about 2012. In 2017, our collaboration became more formal when we secured funding and then held three annual institutes that brought together teachers, young people, scientists, and community organizers to learn from each other and plan curriculum. In 2019, we had a YPS conference that brought about 150 students from neighborhood public schools in Chicago to the University of Illinois Chicago to share our work with each other. The 2020 version of that conference was canceled because of the pandemic.

Over the years that these collaborations have been built, some of our roles have evolved. In the present discussion, Karen Canales shares from her role as a community organizer with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). But Karen originally participated in this project as a high school student years ago and has been involved in environmental justice work ever since. Likewise, Alejandra Frausto and Daniel Morales-Doyle, who share from their respective roles as a district administrator and university faculty member, were originally involved in this work as high school teachers. If readers are taking up or planning similar projects, we want to emphasize the length of involvement and the importance of relationships over time. Taking on educational projects that challenge the presumed goals of schooling requires that we be generous and patient with ourselves, and with our collaborators and students.

We also want to be clear in how we are engaging the science. These projects happen in chemistry classes. We study the properties and reactions of metallic elements, asking questions like: why are heavy metals in the environment? how are we exposed? why are they toxic? how can we measure their concentration in the environment? We have been fortunate enough to collaborate with three brilliant and humble university scientists, Alanah Fitch, Shelby Hatch, and Kathryn Nagy. They have helped us learn more about these questions as educators. In our classes, we get into issues of sampling and spectroscopy and the design of environmental studies, but it is really important to us to teach that chemistry is only one way of understanding the problem. We have developed the YPS Curriculum framework, which prioritizes learning to appropriate and appreciate the scientific context. We are learning to critique and change science itself and hopefully to use science as a tool to change society (Morales-Doyle & Frausto, 2021).

The remainder of the chapter is organized around three questions about YPS that structured our panel discussion:

We share a lightly edited transcript of the answers that we gave to these questions during the 2019 SEEDS conference with a brief discussion that connects some of our statements with some of the scholarship that informs our work.

### Question #1: What Are Some of the Challenges and Possibilities When It Comes to Engaging with YPS in Science Classes?

#### *Giani Clay (Student, George Washington High School):*

One of the main challenges is apathy. If students are not interested in the topic that you're teaching, they are only memorizing it for a test and not learning it and keeping the knowledge. I've actually seen this before with one of my closest friends. He used to have poor grades. He would always tell me that we should ditch class, but once we started Ms. Aguilera's class, his behavior started to change, and he became more knowledgeable. He would start to say stuff like, "let's ditch all the first periods and let's go to Ms. Aguilera's class because I want to learn something in her class or tell her something I learned."

We were studying the bioaccumulation of mercury in fish. My friend, he actually taught me how to fish, and I taught him science. As we learned how the mercury accumulates in the fat of the fish, he got more interested, and I also got more interested in the topic. So, while apathy is a challenge to get students interested, once you get them interested it should be a pretty good class.

But another challenge is also trying not to go away from the science. I'm going to be an aerospace engineer and so I wouldn't want to just talk about politics in my science class, I want to learn the science. So, for some students, like my friend, the challenge is apathy and for others, like me, the challenge is not straying too far from the science.

#### *Alejandra Frausto (Project-based Learning Manager, Chicago Public Schools):*

I want to talk about the challenges and possibilities from three perspectives; as a high school science teacher that transitioned to middle school, as the lead teacher on the project, and in my new position in the district. As a middle school science teacher, while it was challenging to modify the curriculum that we were co-constructing for a chemistry class, for my sixth graders, it was important that my younger students also had an opportunity to act in our community. Sometimes we weren't able to do all the same labs or activities as the high school students. But we were just as capable of taking on some of the same questions, learning some of the same science, and taking action to address heavy metal contamination in our neighborhood.

As the lead teacher on the project, being very intentional in how Daniel and I designed our time together during the summer institutes allowed us to have more co-constructed possibilities with the teachers, students, community organizers, and scientists. While we had some ideas about things we thought needed to be addressed, like pedagogical needs, we also wanted to position all the participants as the experts that they are. It was important for us that in these institutes, everybody was both a teacher and a learner. The challenge was making the time to co-construct those learning moments together, especially with the unexpected work you don't think about. For example, we held a YPS student conference and we learned there are a lot of logistics with getting together 150 students.

Currently, I lead the district's service-learning project requirement and civic-oriented project framework that supports this requirement across about 105 high schools. This creates an opportunity for more YPS projects to happen in science classrooms as school leaders look to provide opportunities for students to meet the requirement. But the challenge now lies in the willingness to make space and time to make the pedagogical shifts needed to co-construct projects like these with students and community. Last year, 243 service-learning projects were completed in the district and only about 20 of them were in science classes. As we work to expand civic-oriented projects across disciplines, science class will also need to focus on who's making the decisions around specific environmental policies that impact our communities. I hope to better understand how to integrate YPS projects like these into science classrooms at a larger scale while making sure the projects are still meaningful, community responsive, and student led as the work spreads.

#### *Tomasz Rajski (Teacher, Hubbard High School):*

I predominately teach chemistry. A project like this can seem very intimidating to a new teacher. Being in my third year proved to be a real challenge that I faced when engaging with YPS. I was relatively new to social justice in science, even though I might have had some experience from my student teaching placement.

However, one of the good things about our project is that it does become more like a professional learning community. Not only in the fact that we are working with other teachers, but working with students, community organizers, professors; and so, there is a lot of different input of information that helps a new teacher develop their skills.

So, what we have noticed is this project grows with the people who take part in it. One of the things we did was a tuning protocol of a lesson that I have taught as part of the YPS program and that is similar to the wonderings that we had here at the SEEDS conference. One of my students was there; some of my colleagues were there, including other members of this panel. They listened to my presentation of the lesson, asked questions, and offered me a lot of advice and critical feedback on how to improve it.

After the protocol, my student who participated in this lesson a couple of months before told me that she felt awful because they were tearing my lesson apart by adding this and changing that. It is important to realize that was an experience for my student and myself. We had to understand that they were not just tearing the lesson apart or that they had a negative view of it, but what was actually happening was that they were giving critical feedback. I was learning from it, and I did not feel bad after hearing the changes that needed to be made. I felt confident that the next time I teach it, it will be improved. So, it is a moment of vulnerability that you end up learning quite a bit from.

#### *Mindy Chappell (Teacher, North-Grand High School):*

I teach students who are in 10th grade chemistry at North-Grand High School. The pipeline discourse, from Sputnik to Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind, commodifies students who are well adapted to science, technology, and math. It positions science education as a place to build knowledge capital for a global market. This type of science education continues to produce functioning beings with the knowledge and skills to *exist* in the current system rather than pose questions about it or add methods to *transform* it. If we're being honest, STEM education continues to be a site of continual racial stratification of the U.S. workforce and associated differences in economic wealth.

Science education should allow students to see science as a tool for interrogating their world and lived experiences and evoking social change. For me as a teacher, I am not concerned with whether my students choose to be in STEM once they leave high school. That's their choice. What I want them to walk away from the classroom with is that their knowledge is valuable, and they *can* engage in rigorous science classes, regardless of their desire to study STEM. YPS gives me the opportunity to create this type of learning environment, which promotes the usefulness of scientific knowledge outside of the pipeline discourse.

#### *Daniel Morales-Doyle (Assistant Professor, University Illinois Chicago):*

One of the possibilities of YPS is connecting science classes with organizing efforts in the neighborhood. When I started teaching in the Little Village community in Chicago, I went to the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and humbly asked them to teach me about the issues around which they were organizing. And they were gracious enough to do that. I had the instinct to ask because I came from a politically engaged family where my dad was a community organizer. So I had this sense that I needed to learn from community organizers if I was going to be an effective teacher in the community.

But one of the related challenges of doing YPS is constantly being engaged with complexity and contradictions. In this project, folks in schools, community organizations, and universities are working together. All of these can be contradictory, problematic spaces in and of themselves, but there are also power and resource differentials between them. Universities have tons of power and resources the schools don't. And even public schools often have power and resources that community organizations don't. So, the relationships we have built with each other are good and trusting and rich and long term. But, especially in terms of the relationships between institutions, they're definitely not unproblematic.

#### Question #2: How Has Engaging in YPS Exposed Both Insights and Oversights of Scientific Ways of Knowing?

#### *Adilene Aguilera (Teacher, George Washington High School):*

What I learned from leading YPS projects over a few years is the importance of recognizing each other and our families as sources of valuable knowledge who are capable of leadership.  You know all of this information that people who are labeled as scientists also know, the only difference is that you do not have the title, but you definitely have a lot more experience.

I share this interpretation with my students and encourage them to think about their families this way. I tell them, "Your parents know more than you think, or more than they show you. Therefore, you must ask them." The students themselves don't always view their parents as scientists. This is where we begin to learn how to acknowledge our families as a resource. In our school, the parents are resources because in the Southeast side of Chicago, they were either working for the industry that was polluting our areas or knew someone directly affected by the contamination. There was a year where we had about three students whose parents passed away from some type of cancer, so these students became more involved. They said, "I wonder if our air and our soil is causing our parents to pass away." These were their ideas. They were looking for information on their own to tackle these issues. This allowed us to have authentic student engagement. Even if we only searched through different databases for, let's say, asthma rates in the Southeast Side, students were engaged and leading this work in one way or another.

When our students took leadership, they went back home to tell their parents about these issues of heavy metal contamination going on in the Southeast side of Chicago. But, just as students do not always see their parents as a source of knowledge, parents often do not believe their children. I remember this dynamic in my house growing up. And this is especially true when students' analysis places blame for their circumstances on power structures. Unless some parents see their children's analysis confirmed on the news, a high school student is not a credible source. However, this changed with YPS; students became more vocal about issues of power and pollution, and they felt their voice validated.

The YPS conference that we organized as part of this project inspired me to organize an annual community conference at my high school. At this conference students present their work and parents came to show support for their children and their research. The fact that this conference is held yearly for students creates a sense of fulfillment for the students and it validates them as scientists. Something as simple as the conference program with their name and project title with abstract on it has students saying, "wow look at this, I did this." Now, at this very moment, Giani is experiencing the bigger picture. He is here. It's real to him and he's feeling that agency and fulfillment!

#### *Tomasz:*

So, I would like to expand on that a little bit. I feel that YPS can expose a lot of insight into student prior knowledge. In framing this, I looked at myself as a student learning with my students. Daniel presented to my class, and we started looking at maps of the neighborhood. Part of the process was identifying what might be areas in the neighborhood that we might consider industrial, what are the parts of the neighborhood where people live, what parts of the neighborhood might be considered beautiful, what parts of the neighborhood might be considered ugly. Interlocking that prior knowledge gives students that opportunity to take back ownership of their community. These are their observations. They live there. They know it better than I can ever try to know it, and I do really try. That is where the conversation begins, but oftentimes, that conversation then grows when you actually go on site. So, we had identified an area that we were interested in sampling, in the residential areas and parks close to a chemical plant down the street from the school. As community experts, we devised a plan to sample soils. We figured out our grid, where we want to go and why. Then we hopped on the bus and set off to collect samples.

As community experts, the first observation that we made on site was that the facility looked appalling.  Not only did it look dreadful, but it also smelled horrible. There was this lingering smell that a lot of us attributed to whatever was coming out of the smokestacks. Looking at EPA documentation, that company does release a toxic inventory report for the heavy metal, molybdenum. This gave us a starting point to focus on.

The process of developing that prior knowledge from the community perspective began by observing how the facility looks, how it smells, what the area around it is—and led to students fusing that prior knowledge into a scientific perspective. We collected these soil samples. We looked at the EPA Toxic Release Inventory reports. We looked at what heavy metals are being released and the concentrations of the heavy metals released. Suddenly we are going beyond just experts in the community and becoming science experts within our community.

#### *Alejandra:*

I want to mention some insights and oversights as I share some of the work my middle school students did. Two years ago, I introduced our study of heavy metal contamination with an assignment that is similar to what Tomasz described. Students were asked to take four pictures in their working-class community where most of the residents are of Mexican descent: something that's ugly, something that's beautiful, something that's clean, and something that is contaminated. We noticed that many students took pictures of the viaducts that many of us walked under on our way to school. These viaducts, underneath the railroad tracks, have rust and chipped paint that flakes off and can be found in the soil in the next block. So, we decided to collect soil samples near the viaducts. The first year our results weren't really conclusive. So, an oversight that arose was needing to be explicit that one experiment won't usually answer a question conclusively. My middle school students that year realized addressing the paint chips of the viaduct was going to take more time.

In the second year, Daniel and I collected paint chips ourselves and found lead levels 170 times higher what national standards should be. We quickly realized science wasn't the *only* thing we had to learn; we had to also look at what policies existed and who made them. My students decided to present our findings to our local elected official, which in Chicago is our alderwoman or city council member. We contacted her and invited her to come and listen to my students' presentation and recommendations. Since that day, we have gotten excuses for why the city has not addressed the viaducts and an informal invitation to present to the commissioner of public health. But our scientific data was not enough. We have proof that high levels of lead are there and yet we have to keep fighting to convince the city to properly remove the lead that is toxic.

### Question #3: In YPS, What Are the Relationships Between Learning Science and Engaging in Political and Community Issues?

#### *Delani Lopez (Student, North-Grand High School):*

I began working on this project my sophomore year, with my wonderful teacher, Ms. Chappell. For me, the goal of learning science is to further engage students in political and community issues so they can relate and empathize. So sometimes not all social and political issues are obvious, especially if you don't know the reason behind it. For example, I was not aware of heavy metal contamination in general. So, to look at maps and all of this information on how there were high contamination levels in predominately Black and Latinx communities is something that made me really passionate about this project. Alejandra mentioned the paint chips in the viaducts. That's a good example of how a lot of people don't realize what chemicals they might be exposed to in their everyday lives. So, what made me prioritize learning about this was that it affects me and the people in my communities.  Because it doesn't just affect me, it affects the people around me and other people that I don't know. You have to be able to stand up for that.

The learning I did in this project also made me curious about what other scientific, political, or social issues I am unaware of and how can we not only carry on this knowledge but build from it and find ways to face these issues head on. YPS gives students a sense of encouragement and empowerment: "This is wrong, and I have the science and proof to tell you this is wrong, so you can't knock what I say." A lot of times, youth are seen as inferior, like they don't know as much. That's not true. We know as much and we have the proof to fight against injustice. I also feel like knowing the science about these situations, and how it leads to them, it sparks an interest in students, but not only in the scientific field but in political issues as well. Now you see how something that didn't seem as big of a problem to us, because we're unaware of it. Now it's a bigger issue. It affects me. It affects other communities. It affects my family. We need to do something about it.

#### *Mindy:*

For me as a teacher, Delani's last point is exactly what it's about for many communities, but especially those that are marginalized and largely impacted by environmental injustice and racism. We need scientifically literate experts who become the engineers, scientists, science teachers, and advocates who determine our future. We need experts that protect us from the harms that get a pass in the name of science. YPS positions science education as a tool for students to understand the world and use science to transform the experiences and conditions in their communities. Maintaining the United States' place in the global market is removed from the conversation about science learning and replaced with pedagogy regarding science knowledge as a means of addressing environmental injustice and other socioscientific issues. This critical and social perspective to STEM education promotes the development of students' STEM knowledge through social issues that directly and indirectly impact their lives. The students are engaged through their knowledge of STEM to challenge and fight against oppression in multiple strands such as environmental racism and economic exploitation. Young people are not mere spectators, but they are actors who use their science agency to promote necessary change. And so for me, as a teacher I'm not concerned with whether or not my students go on to be scientists; if they choose to, by all means. But I want them to use their scientific literacy to advocate and evoke change in their communities and know that they are capable and deserving of their seat at the table.

#### *Karen Canales Salas, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO):*

As was mentioned above, I have been involved with this project since 2012. Now as a community organizer, I've noticed that young people generally want to take a step back from talking about politics. We've noticed that at times, it can feel as though politics is something that you talk about when you're able to vote, so it can feel intimidating to young people or people who are not citizens. However, through the popular education work that we do, we try to show them that everything around us is political. From the clothes that we wear, the way we wear them, to the businesses we're supporting. Every decision is a political one.

In YPS, it allows us to do science politically without even realizing it. Students are actively engaged in a social justice issue without even realizing how impactful the work is in the moment. In my case, I was doing the science and wasn't necessarily thinking I'd become a community activist or an organizer, but it happened naturally. YPS gives students a direct way to engage more meaningfully with science because of the social justice issue. I transferred to my neighborhood high school, which ironically enough is named, Social Justice High School, for the last two years of my high school career. I had failed general chemistry as a sophomore at a magnet high school; the only reason why I took AP Chemistry is because I didn't want to disappoint my environmental science teacher. Because I had failed general chemistry, I had a lot of self-doubt before I even started the school year. I thought to myself, "How can I go into AP Chemistry after not even knowing what a mole is?" Regardless of this self-doubt, I ended up doing really well in AP Chemistry and part of that was because I was actually engaged in something that meant more than just chemistry problems.

*My* neighborhood was *my* classroom. That was really important for my success in the class and as a high school student doing the project. In this context, I was actually more into the science content instead of the social justice issue. However, it wasn't until mid-way through the school year, or even a little bit later, that I started making the connection that it truly is my responsibility now that I have gained these new skills and new knowledge to be able to communicate it with my community. A lot of the language that we use when we talk about heavy metal contamination can go over our heads sometimes. It can be very empowering for me, and students, to be able to communicate the scientific language and jargon to community members that maybe don't have access to that. We had a community science night at the end of the school year where LVEJO had the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency present, and their presentation was very technical, and I think went over a lot of our heads. I remember feeling as though people were more engaged when the group of us students presented our work. Seeing young people there, listening to their own children and actually able to understand a lot of the stuff that the EPA did mention but in a different way... it was really empowering. It was because of this class and through my walks and drives around the neighborhood that I started noticing that there was a lot of industry in my community. What's my responsibility to that?

Now that I work with LVEJO, I'm able to go back to classrooms and provide the sociopolitical context that I didn't want to talk about as a student myself. It's also important for me to talk about and teach community resistance and the agency that community members have, whether or not they have degrees, to create change. Little Village is also predominately a Latinx community, and earlier I mentioned how and in what ways community folks been able to fight against powerful, huge, polluting industries, and win. Our base members may not all be citizens, but that's never stopped them from being civically engaged in campaigns. They know that whether or not they have legal documentation, they're still able to make change. Politicians don't ask a crowd of protestors whether they can vote or who they'll vote for, they just see and hear a big crowd, and they're pressured to listen to community members. We recognize that community still has power whether or not they're able to vote, or whether or not you choose to vote. I'd like to believe that a lot of the ways that we encourage folks to be civically engaged is through resistance. We can share grassroots victories from our cities to show students how being civically engaged strengthens our community resistance.

#### *Daniel:*

The relationship between learning to use scientific evidence and becoming politically engaged is complex for me, even though there have always been connections between the two in my life and my work. Communities with political clout don't have to find evidence that an unwanted polluter is doing harm—they just say they don't want the polluter there. So, by even participating in the collection of evidence of pollution, we're legitimizing that it's up to the community to find that evidence. To take an example from neighborhood where I live and Tomasz teaches, we don't want a plant that manufacturers catalysts for the petrochemical industry and spews out molybdenum compounds with uncertain health ramifications along the way. Why is the burden on the largely Mexican, working-class community to find evidence of harm? Why doesn't the multinational corporation that owns this plant have to provide evidence to the surrounding community that what they're doing is safe and sustainable?

#### Conclusion

Among various ways to conceive of equity in science education, we find the most promise in connecting science learning with movements for social justice (Philip & Azevedo, 2017). At the same time, our work has taught us that forming these connections is complex, especially within schools. One complexity is navigating equitable ways to deal with differentials in power, resources, and constraints between schools, community organizations, universities, and the people who learn or work within them (Tolbert et al., 2018). A related complexity is considering the ways in which studying problems of environmental justice in science class reproduces "regimes of evidence" (Liboiron et al., 2018). We engage those responsible for pollution, or those who have failed to properly regulate it, on their terms. This strategy is often more reproductive than transformative.

Despite these challenges, our panel concluded the session with words of encouragement for others who might take up this sort of work. Among the panelists, one common reflection is how YPS has given us all an opportunity to be more responsive to the communities where we live and/or work. YPS is one way to value the ways of knowing and lived experiences our students bring into the classroom. It is one way to push back against the ways that environmental racism has shaped the landscapes of our city. During the Q&A session, we emphasized that projects like ours require patience, optimism, and determination, but also that they can inspire hope. We try to create spaces for learning, acting, and reflecting that build on each other's expertise in meaningful ways. A central part of this work is to flatten differences and imposed hierarchies between participants. We view sharing in this format as a small step in that direction.

**Acknowledgements** We would like to acknowledge the youth, teachers, and scientists who have contributed to our work but do not appear in this chapter, including Kenneth Booker, Tiffany Childress Price, Darrin Collins, Maribel Cortez, Alanah Fitch, Shelby Hatch, Elizabeth Herrera, Amy Levingston, and Kathryn Nagy, among others. We also want to acknowledge the advisory roles of Julio Cammarota, Ashaki Rouff, and Sara Tolbert. Sara graciously served as the facilitator for the panel discussion captured in this chapter.

**Funding** The work discussed in this paper has been supported by the National Science Foundation Grant #1720856. Any opinions, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or collaborators who are not listed as authors.

#### References

Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (2008). *Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion.* Routledge.

Irwin, A. (1995). *Citizen science: A study of people, expertise and sustainable development*. Psychology Press.

Liboiron, M., Tironi, M., & Calvillo, N. (2018). Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. *Social Studies of Science*, *48*, 331–349. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0306312718783087.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### Science Education for a World-Yet-to-Come

# Learning from Flint: How Matter Imposes Itself in the Anthropocene and What That Means for Education

*Catherine Milne, Colin Hennessy Elliott, Adam Devitt, and Kathryn Scantlebury*

James Lovelock in *Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth* (1995/1979), described how his idea for Gaia emerged when he was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in 1965. Collaborating on a team that was tasked with developing a series of experiments to look for life on Mars as part of the Voyager project, the planned experiments consisted of an automated microbiological laboratory designed to sample the Martian soil to see if it was suitable for simple microscopic life and exploratory examinations of Martian soil to see if the soil contained chemicals that might indicate "life at work," including amino acids and optically active substances (p. 2). After a year, Lovelock

C. Milne (B)

C. H. Elliott Department of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences, Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Devitt California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Scantlebury Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2022 M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_15

245

Department of Teaching and Learning, New York University, New York City, NY, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
started to ask questions that had not specifically been a focus of the scientists collaborating on this project including, "How do we know that life on Mars will reveal itself to tests based on life on Earth? What is life and what tests will tell us that there is life?" When other scientists there asked him how one might answer these questions, he suggested they would look for entropy reduction, since the ability to organize is a feature of living things. For Lovelock, this discussion initiated an ongoing exploration of the relationship between the material and the living in the world. In the 1960s, Lovelock was already grappling with the issue of the entanglement of the geo and the bio, matter and life, which has become of the mainstream focus of scientists like Robert Hazen (2012), who argue that life and matter are entangled and that the evolution of matter and life have shaped the Earth—an Earth which humans often seek to claim for themselves. Lovelock's thinking might lead you to think that science has not only been considering the entanglement of life and matter but has begun to move in that direction. However, as we show in this chapter, drawing on the effectivity of water as a solution, humans tend not to notice matter unless it brings an effect upon them.

#### Effectiveness, Agency, and the Anthropocene

In 2000, Paul Crutzen (1995 Nobel Prize co-winner in chemistry for his research on ozone depletion) and Eugene Stoermer (2000) published a statement, "an affirmation that our species belongs amongst other biological and geological forces" and with that claim, they proposed "the term 'Anthropocene' for the current geological epoch" (p. 17), superseding the current geologically accepted Holocene ("Recent Whole") epoch. Their rationale for a new epoch was based on an analysis of the impact that the expanding *human* population was having on earth's resources. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) claim that it was Crutzen and Stoermer's argument that the Anthropocene had already begun, which galvanized an increase in the usage of this idea and term. As Stacy Alaimo (2019) notes, the Anthropocene, as a claim for human exceptionalism, is both illuminating and misleading; illuminating, because it acknowledges the implications for global phenomena of taking seriously the intra-action between living (human) and nonliving and calls into question the separation of nature and culture that structures modernity, and misleading because it grants humans an exceptional status that is not assigned to any other living thing.

Of course, the presentation of "the Anthropocene" as part of the geological timescale is easy to critique, especially if it seems to come from a position of human hubris. Lewis and Maslin (2015) acknowledge that from a geological perspective, human activity is fleeting and recent. However, there can be no denying that human activity is speeding up the rate of change in a number of different contexts. If we accept that the issue is not only that science is coming around to the idea that the ontology of the Earth is an outcome of bio, geo, and chemo intra-actions but also that humans are not central, exceptional, or separate from nature, then what are the implications of such a stance?

Isabelle Stengers (2010, p. 7) notes, the category of human "has never been neutral because it entails human exceptionalism at its crudest.... From this standpoint, the very drastic opposition between humans and nonhumans would then itself be the witness of the unleashed power of this (nonhuman) idea that made us humans, as it allowed us to claim the exception, to affirm the most drastic cut between those beings who 'have ideas' and everything else, from stones to apes." So, it was the unleashed power of the non-human that allowed humans to claim this undeserved exceptionalism? According to Sarah Whatmore (2006, p. 602) the "livingness" of the world shifts matter, "from indifferent stuff out there, articulated through notions of 'land,' 'nature,' or 'environment' to the intimate fabric of corporality that includes and redistributes the 'in there' of human being." In *Inhuman Nature*, Nigel Clark (2011, p. 15) argued that the proposal for the Anthropocene constituted for Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) requires more than an appreciation that humans are part of the biological foment. It requires that scientists invest in a version of relationality in which observable realities are understood in terms of entanglements that are inescapable and inseparable, mutually interdependent, and relationally co-constitutive. However, as Melinda Benson (2019) notes, in science and in the everyday world, "the dominant ontology reinforces a familiar binary—one in which humans are separate *from* and doing things *to* nature" (p. 252). This ontological stance, which emerged during the Enlightenment, underlies environmental laws in the United States. As Benson observes, this ontology, and the associated laws, make assumptions about agency, which is assigned to only humans, and exceptionalism, which we have already noted. If humans persist with this ontological stance then cultural, government, and political strategies designed to address environmental challenges are likely to be limited in their effects.

Benson (2019) argues for the need to engage in practices and processes that "more accurately reflect our lived experience of the material world" (p. 254). Indeed, since the 1980s Earth system modeling has recognized the interrelation between bio (including humans), geo, and chemistry elements. However, when researchers argue for the need for Earth system models "to address explicitly the inter-actions between the ecosphere and the 'anthroposphere'" (Scholze et al., 2012, p. 131), one is left to acknowledge that the underlying stances of agency and exceptionalism remain unexamined and unproblematized in much of this work. In an exploration of the Rio Grande Forest System, Benson explores the need to decenter the human and "rather than seeing wildfires, flooding and other events as problems to be solved" (p. 276) or as "disasters," beginning with an exploration of the roles they play as actors in the system with humans in relational engagements with all elements and processes. In this case, we take Jane Bennett's (2010) notion of agency as effectivity rather than intentionality seeing agency as relational, when entities, material and human, intra-act, engendering phenomena that may be unpredictable. Benson sees the proposal of the Anthropocene not just as a geological epoch but as an opportunity to restructure human intra-action in the space time mattering of the Earth (Barad, 2007).

#### A Molten, More-than-Human World

However, for many people matter only comes to their attention when they encounter an ontological disturbance where matter forces itself on human experience and thus is noticed. The more-than-human world becomes "molten" and leaks into everyday experiences as the material world imposes itself on the everyday world of most human agents (Whatmore, 2013). In this chapter, we use the water crisis of Flint, Michigan, to explore when the material leaked into humans' everyday world to cause an ontological disturbance through water and other elements of the material more-than-human world, such as lead ions, legionellosis (Legionnaire's disease), corrosion control, and water pipes.

Flint is a city in the "rust belt" of the United States with a majority Black population. It was once a thriving economic city (although people knew little of the ecological costs) in an area that was the industrial heartland, where steelmaking and associated industries fueled the country's economic growth in the mid- to-late twentieth century. At one time, Flint was a focus of industry. In 1908, General Motors (GM) was founded in Flint, but by the end of the twentieth-century GM had closed most of its factories, which had a flow-on effect to other industries associated with the auto industry and small businesses supporting the community (Clark, 2018a). Nearly 50% of the populace left Flint, and one consequence was a decline in tax revenue for local government to run utilities and maintain infrastructure. Concurrent with a decline in local tax revenues, the state of Michigan reduced fiscal support to its cities, and by 2008, the Great Recession had a devastating impact on government budgets.

#### The Cost of Water

Not too long after the financial crisis hit the state of Michigan hard, Rick Snyder—a venture capitalist with no governmental experience—was elected governor in 2010. Early in his term, he declared the City of Flint in financial crisis and appointed an emergency manager, which effectively got rid of local governance for any fiscal decision-making. In early 2013, the managers of Flint decided to change the source of its water from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) to a pipeline from the newly formed Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), which planned to extract water from Lake Huron and pipe the water to cities in order to save money. Centering the water in analysis of the cascading policy moves reveals that the consequences of this decision were not just a material-human connection but unfolding agency of the Flint River water infrastructure, which co-constitute each other in the toxic phenomena that followed.

The cities were responsible for water treatment. However, the construction of the new pipeline was not scheduled until 2016, and the state-appointed emergency manager for the City of Flint decided that rather than continuing with the expensive DWSD, the city would use Flint River water treated at the defunct water treatment plant (Olsen & Fedinick, 2016). In 2014, the defunct plant was reactivated and the switch from DWSD to Flint River water was made (Dingle, 2016). There were two main issues with this decision. Firstly, the Flint River is more corrosive than the water from Lake Huron, raising issues of corrosion control which should have been addressed before the water was released to citizens, and secondly, the treatment plant required refitting and updating and the appointment of skilled staff. Within weeks of the switch to Flint River water, Flint residents reported that their water had turned brown, tasted metallic, smelled foul, and people were experiencing skin rashes and hair loss (Clark, 2018a). Further, some pediatricians like Dr. Hanna-Attisha began recognizing high lead levels in Flint children's' blood. Yet, only Flint residents in the direct path of the contaminated water recognized the agency of the water and their entanglement with it. As Dr. Hanna-Attisha argues in her book about the crisis (2018), testing the children's lead levels is actually a test of their lived environment, including the water infrastructure. This intra-action led to a recognition of a debilitating problem that required immediate action. Yet the decision-makers failed to act. It was not just lead in the water that flowed out of Flint residents' tap but failed governmental policy and woeful disregard for the agency of residents. The events illustrated environmental racism. It took local activism and national recognition through President Obama's eventual declaration of an emergency to spur local officials into action.

For Flint residents, the water was leaking into their everyday experiences in unexpected but real ways. As Clark (2018b) noted, when the people of Flint complained that their tap water was odorous and made children sick, it took officials 18 months to accept that there was a problem, even as doctors, led by Hannah-Attisha, began noticing higher levels of lead in children's blood. The phenomena that emerged from the intra-actions between the dissolved chemicals and humans was initially rejected by state and local officials (Olsen & Fedinick, 2016). Although high lead levels can exist without a change in water color, Flint's brown water was possibly the first indication of lead contamination (Torrice, 2016). A timeline of key events helps to communicate just how quickly the material world imposed itself on Flint (Flint Water Advisory Task Force [FATF], 2016). The FATF laid the blame for the Flint water event with replacing of local representative decision-making with state-appointed emergency managers. In April 2014, the City of Flint began distributing treated Flint River water to its customers1 and soon after residents begin complaining

1 According to the Flint Advisory Task Force (FATF, 2016), the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) determined that corrosion control, as legally required by the Federal Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) lead and copper rule, was not

about its odor, taste, and appearance. On July 1, 2014, Flint started its first sixmonth monitoring period for lead and copper in the drinking water. By August 15, 2014, discovery of *E. coli* bacteria violation led to a local boil water advisory and a month later, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality requested an evaluation for trihalomethanes (disinfection byproducts) in the water. By October 1, 2014, the Genesee County (the county in which Flint is the largest urban center) Health Department communicated its concern to Flint Public Works regarding the detected increase in Legionnaires' disease cases since April 2014. In October 2014, General Motors announced that it would cease to use water from the Flint WTP, citing corrosion concerns related to chloride levels in water from Flint WTP. Of course, for Flint one of the issues was that the material which was implicated in the phenomena that Flint residents reported is submicroscopic and therefore difficult to engage with. Also, the phenomenon that residents and the water constructed could easily be ignored by city and state managers because, effectively, they were not elected officials and not directly answerable to the residents.

The agents that were responsible for all the observed phenomena are still not completely understood. In some cases, even if residents lived in relatively new houses that had plastic piping into the house, the piping that distributed water from the treatment plant used lead or iron pipes. These pipes require the formation of a phosphate preservation layer to stop the lead or iron from the pipes dissolving into the drinking water. This preservation layer is created through the continued use of a phosphate corrosion inhibitor (PO4 −3), which has the goal of stopping lead or iron from the pipe dissolving into the water as lead ions (e.g., Pb2+, Pb4+) and iron ions (e.g., Fe2+, Fe3+). The phosphate does this by reacting with the iron or lead in the pipe to form lead (II) phosphate or iron (III) phosphate that forms a crust on the inside of the pipe. This inhibitor needs to be added as an ongoing process because without the continual supply of phosphate, the crust corrodes. When Flint's city officials decided to use water from the river, they failed to add the phosphate corrosion inhibitor, even though they were legally bound to do so because of the federal Copper and Lead Rule, which limits the levels of copper and lead in residential tap water.

Compared to the water from Lake Huron, Flint River water contained more particles, ions, organic matter, and microbes. Flint River water was naturally high in chloride (Cl−) ions (Dingle, 2016). As soon as Flint water was used, any iron pipes in the water distribution system began corroding as the iron phosphate in any remaining preservation layer reacted with the chloride ions, releasing iron (Fe) ions into the water. These iron ions then reacted with chlorine (Cl2), (different from chloride ions) that was added as a disinfectant to kill any microorganisms in the water. The chemical reaction between

required immediately but instead the Flint Water Treatment Plant would carry out 2 sixmonth monitoring periods and then the MDEQ would make a determination about the need for corrosion control.

iron ions and the chlorine in solution meant that the amount of chlorine was reduced, which forced the humans "overseeing" water quality to add more chlorine to control the coliform bacteria detected in the water (the presence of which indicated contamination from human and other animal fecal waste). While additional chlorine did control the bacteria, it also initiated the formation of trihalomethanes. The chemistry of trihalomethane formation is a little complex. When chlorine gas dissolves in water it forms a hypohalous acid. In water, this acid exists in equilibrium with hypohalite ion. In the case of chlorine, this would be hypochlorous acid (HOCl) and hypochlorous ion (OCl−). At low concentrations of the halide ion (Cl−), formed when chlorine reacts with water, the reaction stops with the formation of HOCl and OCl−. The formation of the trihalo ion, Cl3 −, which can form when more chlorine is available, does not take place to a significant degree (Boyce & Hornig, 1983). Both HOCl and OCl− are powerful disinfectants for removing coliform bacteria. However, the addition of more chlorine in a more basic environment initiates a reaction between chlorine and chloride with the resulting formation of trihalomethanes, in this case trichloromethane. The same types of reactions occur with all halogen elements, most commonly chlorine and bromine. The presence of trihalomethanes was concerning because of their association with negative health effects and reproductive health (Hood, 2005). Specifically, with everyday tap use, absorption through the skin and inhaling these chloromethanes can strongly affect the level of trichloromethanes in the blood.

Flint city officials did not take matters seriously, resulting in negative consequences for the material and the people of Flint. Officials did not attend to the possible issues this water was creating for the people of Flint, the same way that General Motors did for its engine parts. General Motors, because it was of interest to their business, listened to the phenomena that their materials were producing and they switched their water supply. The state and city officials in charge of making decisions for the residents of Flint did not listen to the ways the materials in the water and their residents were speaking to them, even as the material world had become molten for residents, imposing itself on their everyday lives.

At each stage of the process from the water that was chosen, the treatments applied to the water, the pipes that transferred the water to homes, and the people and other animals that used the water as a source of nutrition and cleanliness, the matter was taken for granted. Human responses to the materials coursing through the water pipes of Flint constituted phenomena depending on how the material-discursive practices were enacted and how cuts were made to establish the boundaries. If the management had acted on water treatment as a phenomenon in which agents come together, this might have resulted in a more holistic approach to water delivery and treatment. As such, the goal of water delivery and treatment would have acknowledged the role played by ions, water, pipes, residents, and their bodies as belonging to a system of water functioning instead of prioritizing management efficiency and fiscal prudence. As this example illustrates, the submicroscopic agents in water have their own ideas about how they will react under certain circumstances. Perhaps this case is also suggestive of how science educators might rethink their construction of systems thinking and the Anthropocene more specifically. An earth system approach offers the possibility of removing humans from the center of the narrative, while engaging in the intricacies of the systems that produce phenomena like water running out of a tap.

#### Implications for Science Education

The so-called Flint Water Crisis is an illustrative microcosm of the increasing number of global challenges delineating human-Earth-chemistry intra-activity. The Flint Water Crisis, in combination with other examples, such as the Australian wildfires, Amazon deforestation, and most currently, COVID-19, epitomize the onto-epistemological stance of human exceptionalism undergirding human activity and worldviews. At the same time, we need to accept that all participants, living and nonliving, have agency and therefore participate in a complex and dynamic system that is distributed across multiple and overlapping bodies (Bennett, 2010). As we have argued throughout this chapter, we are living in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, where nature and culture are inherently entangled—yet, science and current visions of science education fail to engage with this worldview. Rather than constructing Flint and other examples as emergencies or crises that need to be solved, in a worldview where nature and culture are entangled, education would explore the dynamic nature of these events and the intra-actions of all elements. We need to transform what science education looks like for both developing scientists and everyday citizens.

In the USA, the public K–12 educational system uses national standards to set the vision leading both curricular and instructional reforms. The current enacted vision of science education in K–12 education is dominated by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (Lead States, 2013). In the NGSS, disciplinary science ideas and the practices of scientists (i.e., human activity) are presented as dis-entangled dimensions of science learning. NGSS aims to connect humans with nature through an exploration of disciplinary core ideas, the practices of scientists and engineers, and the relationships of crosscutting concepts among traditionally separated disciplines (Lead States, 2013). While NGSS attempts to reconcile the role of humans in the natural world, it still promulgates a unidirectional impact of humans on the earth and maintains human exceptionalism in that the standards only focus on science that centralizes the human and human agency in the world (Maslin, 2015). For example, consider the report, *Using Phenomena in NGSS-Designed Lessons and Units*, which begins with the statement, "Natural phenomena are observable events that occur in the universe and that we can use our science knowledge to explain or predict" (NGSS Lead States, n.d., p. 1). Note that, in this description, phenomenon exists naturally to be observed and explained by humans using science. We advocate a need to understand the perspective of the phenomena; in other words, rather than looking for phenomena from predefined constructs, understanding how phenomena emerge out of situations like the Flint Water Crisis and how phenomena is emergent as humans and the material world are entangled.

A new vision of K–12 education needs to incorporate the role of intraactivity, nature, and human activity entanglements, making the emergent nature of phenomena explicit rather than telling learners what the phenomena is and then expecting them to recreate that example of phenomenon. For example, the human-nonhuman inputs in the phenomena of the Flint Water Crisis unfolded as the community intra-acted with the water and its unseen infrastructure, which only became "molten" and seeped into the awareness of the humans when the issues became visible and tangibly changed humans' lives. Flint water and the submicroscopic agents that were intraacting with human systems and initiating a range of emergent phenomena had negative implications for human health as a consequence of how the water came together with the pipes and how the political structures in the state of Michigan created positions for people to impose a new water source without community accountability. This series of intra-actions culminated in the contaminated (poisonous) water (sometimes brown in color, but also sometimes undetectable by the naked eye) that came out of Flint residents' taps.

Student learners under the present conception of NGSS, where life and physical science are dis-entangled from human activity, will most likely be inadequately prepared to understand the complexity of such challenges. While an important goal of NGSS is to prepare students to be problem-solvers (Lead States, 2013), essentialized knowledge and practices will deprive them of the criticality, knowledge, experience, care, and ethic they need to analyze the nuances involved in this situation and prioritize action. Learning continues to be theorized and practiced as a cognitive activity—where the "object" has an essence to become known by the "subject." By separating object and subject, this epistemology establishes the need for "representations" or concepts that are as like the object as possible but which need to be learned. This approach to education continues to influence how K–12 science education and teacher education principally theorize how science is taught. The goal for students is to provide symbolic representations of requested phenomena. Particularly from anthropocentric epistemology, we no longer can pretend that phenomena "exist" in an objective form nor that students can learn about pre-determined phenomena in an objective totality.

Hetherington et al. (2019) take a material-dialogic stance for reframing science learning and, subsequently, suggest nuanced explanatory rationales for explaining why common K–12 teaching tools and strategies are fruitful for teaching science. Explanatory frameworks for student learning, such as "visual learning," "making learning hands-on," or "adds motivation" saturate K–12 teachers' and teacher education discourses, whereas explanatory frameworks rooted in Barad's (2007) work would emphasize the role of material agencies intra-acting in the formation of student knowledge and pedagogical decisions. To illustrate, for example, the necessary intra-actions between phenomena and humans, Hetherington et al. (2019) rearticulate the role of students' gesturemaking during activity is evidence of material agency, "talking-back" (Schoen, 1996) shaping students' thought processes prior to typically desired symbolic representations of the phenomena (i.e., definitions, descriptions, formulas). From a dialogic-materialist perspective, gestures, which reverberate the voice of material, are recognized as significant communicative devices, whereas according to current assessment practices, only written, and in rare circumstances verbal, symbolic forms are worthy of evidencing meeting learning objectives.

Ultimately, the teaching and learning, and subsequently the materials used in assessment practices, matter. Likewise, experiments and activities are considered supportive of student learning because of the "hands-on" component but would offer more if the agency of the participating materials were acknowledged. A common experiment for students to explore conservation of mass is through observing ice cubes melting in a closed container and measuring the mass before and after the melting takes place. Yet rarely are learners asked to listen to what the ice cubes and the water and the container are saying to them. We argue that the framework of "hands-on" undermines any consideration of the role of scientists in how they engage in scientific work in real-world conditions, such as Flint Water, because this framework fails to provide a context in which consideration is given to the dynamic interplay between living and non-living in the emergence of phenomena that typically only become acknowledged when they become molten and seep into our awareness as they impose themselves.

Understanding the phenomena created in Flint necessitated a broad understanding of history, racism, classism, politics, and geography to appreciate what was pouring through the tap of residents of the Flint community. It was, in fact, everyday citizens, particularly mothers, who noticed how the phenomena of Flint water "responds back" to the human (Barad, 2012; Hetherington et al., 2019). They were the first to notice the discolored water, the smell, and the resulting rashes and hair loss of using said water. Likewise, auto workers working for General Motors (GM) in 2014 noticed that engine parts were corroding and swiftly switched water sources—an option that was not possible without the economic and political means. Rather than teaching facts, formulas, and demonstrations, we can learn a lot of scientific expertise and practices from people who are most impacted from crises, like the residents in Flint. Material-dialogism values the learning of new onto-epistemological frameworks that include social configurations, spatial relations, purposes, and the agential role of material resources. Such additional frameworks drastically enhance how teachers could reconfigure and be reconfigured when teaching science.

#### Listening to the Water and the People

The officials' failure to respond to the challenge of Flint water was because they devalued the lives of the city's African American residents. Moreover, those residents whose economic lives were already impacted by the city's declining fortunes were excluded from the decision-making process, which included brutal financial accounting and fiscal austerity. Ironically, in late August 2020, the state of Michigan proposed at \$600 million settlement for Flint's residents (Bosman, 2020).

Bullard (2001) shows us that this kind of inequitable policy decisionmaking is consistent throughout environmental policy in the United States and around the world. Consistently, lower income neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are majority Black are exposed to more pollution and more detrimental environmental factors due to governmental policies and corporate decision-making. The Flint Water Crisis is another example of environmental racism (Bullard, 2001) and classism that emerges from the intra-action between histories of racial injustice, outdated infrastructure, and corporate/government decision-making for fiscal interests over humane conditions. Therefore, we believe a systems approach that deepens perspectives on how the human and material agents produce unfolding phenomena would actually lead to a more humanizing perspective for these kinds of policy decisions and further scientific practice. This would inform data collection systems for lead testing of humans that would offer easier integration across providers (Hanna-Attisha, 2018), as well the ways we teach and learn scientific knowledge making processes. So instead of just building "hands-on" science pedagogies, science education and education in general should be building pedagogies that critically engage in material agencies intra-actions and the political nature of knowledge together. What the Flint Water Crisis also shows us is that scientific perspectives are important for building critical narratives about ongoing policy and infrastructure issues, which the residents and activists took up because their health depended on it. Science standards, like the NGSS, therefore must take into account the unfolding, complex, and intricate ways that science, politics, and ethics unfold currently and a vision of change for a more onto-ethico-epistemologically focused future (Barad, 2007).

#### References

Bennett, J. (2010). *Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things*. Duke University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 16

### Resurrecting Science Education by Re-Inserting Women, Nature, and Complexity

*Jane Gilbert*

#### Introduction

I am a female P¯akeh¯a1 New Zealander who has worked in science education for four decades, first as a high school science teacher and later as a university teacher and researcher. However, I have never really "belonged" in science or science education. In earlier years, this was just a feeling; however, it was a feeling I set out to explore in postgraduate study, first in linguistics, then feminist theory, political theory, and science education. Here I again found myself on the margins, an outsider to the intricacies of academia, but by then I had decided to see this marginality as a strength, a space from which to see things differently. I have a long-standing interest in what we now call "diversity issues" in science and science education, but I am critical of conventional strategies for attracting women and/or other marginalised groups into science. I am old enough to have seen the same strategies rolled out repeatedly with little discernible effect on the problem. In this field the issues tend to be conceptualised at the surface-level, and the "other" question in science

1 The M¯aori word P¯akeh¯a is used in New Zealand to describe the descendants of the European settlers (mainly British) who have come to New Zealand over the last 150 or so years. M¯aori are Aotearoa-New Zealand's *tangata whenua* (indigenous 'people of the land').

2 By the "other" question, I mean work exploring how science *conceptually* excludes or "others" certain major classes of human. See, for example, the work of Evelyn Fox Keller (1985, 1992).

259

J. Gilbert (B)

Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

© The Author(s) 2022

M. F.G. Wallace et al. (eds.), *Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene*, Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8\_16

has received little attention.2 In this chapter I want to argue that the coming of the Anthropocene could—and should—change this. Picking up the editors' invitation to think differently about science education as it is now, this chapter's starting point is that science-as-we-know-it can't provide solutions to the issues we now face because it is part of the problem. Re-imagining science education for the Anthropocene needs to involve much more than improving public understanding of science, especially climate science, or political activism, conceived of within the current conceptual system. This chapter argues against these strategies. Proposing deconstruction as a frame for envisaging—and resurrecting—science education for the Anthropocene, it advocates a pedagogical approach based on deconstructing science-as-we-now-know-it. The chapter argues that if we are to think our way out of the situation we're now in, we need to "unpack" the conceptual system that led us into it.

#### The Anthropocene

The term Anthropocene came to prominence in the first years of the twentyfirst century, when the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed, at a geologists' conference, that planet Earth has left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch that is defined by the effect of human activities, not just on other living things, but on the Earth's deeper physical processes. This new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene (from the Greek "anthro" meaning "human"), is the result of the widespread burning of fossil fuels since the time of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Burning carbon sequestered over hundreds of millions of years from the atmosphere, via living processes, has vastly increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which has in turn triggered a steady rise in mean global temperatures. This is expected to have a major impact on world sea levels, weather systems, and ecosystem stability, which will affect the habitability of the planet for humans and have major implications for human social, political, and economic life (Hansen, 2009; Klein, 2014; Kress & Stine, 2017; McNeill & Engelke, 2014; Scranton, 2015). These changes are already happening, but, as widely discussed elsewhere, we have not yet managed to put in place measures that could reverse or delay these trends, nor have we developed strategies for adapting to or mitigating their likely effects (Flannery, 2005; Hamilton, 2010; Jamieson, 2014; Oreskes & Conway, 2014). Many now argue that we are in a "climate emergency"—that urgent action is required if we are to avert abrupt catastrophic change.

The Anthropocene discourse originated in science. Groups of scientists, using scientific language and evidence, used the term to persuade nonscientists to put in place policies and protocols to address its causes. However, the concept was quickly taken up by scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Analysis of the intellectual implications of the Anthropocene is now well underway. Arguments are being made for new "post-carbon" philosophies (e.g., Irwin, 2010) and for new social, political, and economic theories (e.g., Elliott & Turner, 2012; Klein, 2014; Newell & Patterson, 2010; Urry, 2011). However, some scholars argue that, because the crisis we're now in is a direct consequence of capitalism, Capitalocene is a more appropriate term (e.g., Moore, 2016).

The Anthropocene's arrival has significant implications for education (and science education in particular), but scholarly exploration of these implications is only just beginning (the present volume notwithstanding). This chapter looks at how the Anthropocene challenges science education and explores how it could catalyse change. However, first it examines how the Anthropocene is portrayed by scientists in their interactions with policymakers, arguing that the story they tell is not a helpful basis for re-imagining science education.

The scientists' Anthropocene story emphasises evidence-based predictions, targets, and demands for urgent action. This rhetoric is accompanied by apocalyptic stories of collapse if something isn't done, or alternatively, by "it's already too late" stories. While there are good reasons for using this language in this context, this construction of the Anthropocene, if it is picked up and used "as is" in education, has several problems.

The first problem is that this story constructs the Anthropocene as an engineering and/or a policy problem that can be solved using existing ways of thinking. This construction misses the point. The Anthropocene names a new epoch in the history of planet Earth. The term was invented to denote a significant rupture with the past. It signals the advent of new systems and processes that quite possibly will not be comprehensible using current ways of thinking. However, more importantly for the present purposes, the circumstances the Anthropocene names have been *caused* by actions that arise from and are informed by current ways of thinking. The second problem with the scientists' Anthropocene story is that it reinforces the widely held idea that science and technology *are* the future: they are what will "save" us from the problems we face. But science and technology don't, in themselves, shape our future: they are guided by human values, choices, and actions (Slaughter, 2012).

The third problem with the prevailing climate change story is that it is profoundly anthropocentric and Western-centred. It exists in a filter bubble which puts humans front and centre and reifies their agency. Humans are constructed as separate from nature, active, autonomous subjects who can make meaning about, act on, and master an essentially passive nature. This draws on—and reproduces—the thinking system that is the source of the problem. The story also expresses the interests and worldview of particular humans in particular countries, obscuring the interests and worldviews of other groups of humans, as well as those of non-human living things and the nonliving things with which/whom we share planet Earth (Haraway, 2016). It obscures the fact that most of the world's humans play a very limited role in contributing to climate change,3 and it reinforces the idea that while we live "on" planet Earth, we are not part of it, that we are entitled to take what we want and to conquer and control it.4

A fourth aspect of the prevailing Anthropocene story that is unhelpful is that it sets up either/or choices. *Either* we succeed in saving the planet and human life on Earth can continue, *or* we don't and humans (and a great many other species) are totally eradicated. There are of course other possibilities. Catastrophic events causing mass extinctions of other species have happened many times in the Earth's history.5 Humans on planet Earth have experienced catastrophic events before and survived, often inventing completely new ways to be human. This could happen again, and it is possible that this could actually be positive.6 Completely new ways of thinking about what it means to be human could emerge, ways that we can't imagine from within existing thinking systems. The prevailing Anthropocene story allows only two possibilities—success or failure. If we don't do X, Y will inevitably follow. Why only two possibilities? What *other* possibilities are we avoiding thinking about in the present circumstances? What other possibilities can we *not see* in the present circumstances? Can we think *outside* the prevailing story?

In this chapter I argue that these "urgent action or collapse," "science will save us" stories are underpinned by the set of assumptions that have created the problem7 and, because of this, they aren't a helpful basis for re-imagining science education. Using these stories uncritically will produce science education with a focus on teaching students *about* climate change, engaging them in "climate action," and/or encouraging them to "contribute to the cause" by considering science-related careers.8 These approaches will reproduce the thinking systems that have produced the problem. In the current circumstances, this would be deeply *mis*-educative, in the sense meant by Dewey

3 According to a recent Oxfam study (Gore, 2015), 50% of the world's carbon emissions are produced by 10% of the world's population.

4 This is in contrast to the reciprocal relationship with nature assumed by many nondominant groups of humans (e.g. Kimmerer, 2013).

5 A well-known example of such a catastrophe is the asteroid strike sixty-six million years ago that sparked global firestorms, followed by a nuclear winter-like cold (caused by the smoke), that caused the mass eradication of 75% of the planet's species, including the dinosaurs. A new, radically different, world order eventually emerged: the age of mammals and birds replaced the age of the dinosaurs (Lee, 2020).

6 At the time of writing, we are in the grip of the global COVID19 pandemic. While at this point in time it is hard to see the positives, there are, in my country anyway, perceptible shifts in thinking. There is talk, not of going "back to normal," but of a "new normal" in which deep expertise and "essential workers" are newly appreciated while misinformation and social inequalities are not. The ubiquity of international travel is being challenged, as are many long-held assumptions about educational "delivery.".

7 These assumptions are outlined later in the chapter.

8 See, for example, https://educatorsdeclare.org/resources/.

(1938).9 Other stories are needed, stories that allow us to see science, the Anthropocene, and ultimately science education differently. Drawing on work in the philosophy and social studies of science (not science itself), in the next section I explore two alternative Anthropocene stories.

#### Seeing Science and the Anthropocene Differently

Bruno Latour, in his 2013 Gifford Lectures, argues that the Anthropocene's arrival is a significant challenge to science-as-we-know-it. It requires a major shift in how we think about science: what it *is*, what it is *for*, with what and whom it should *engage*, and how it should do this (Latour, 2013).10 Building on his long-term work on how scientists think about—and "do" science (e.g., Latour, 1993), Latour argues that scientists need to rethink their relationship with nature, to see it, not as something to be tamed, objectified or "deified," something we are "apart from," but rather as something in which we are inextricably entangled, embedded, and connected. This shift, he argues, will require completely new ways of thinking, new tools that allow us to investigate nature, not as a set of "entities" to be understood and controlled, but as constructed and reconstructed in reciprocal relationships with science (and scientists). He argues for a focus on this relationship, on the spaces or "crossings" between science and nature.

Donna Haraway, on the other hand, argues against using the Anthropocene concept (or the Capitalocene) to think our way out of the situation we're in. She argues that both discourses assume—and reproduce—the binaries of Cartesianism11 and using them can only, as she puts it, "end badly." For her, both terms too easily lead to cynicism and defeatism, to "game over, too late" thinking (Haraway, 2016). Instead, she proposes a new concept, the Chthulucene,12 as a positive way forward. In her new Chthulucene age, human entanglement with all other living and non-living things on earth is acknowledged, not denied.

Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are *not the only important actors* in the Chthulucene, with all the other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are

9 In *Experience and Education* (1938), Dewey argues that "educative" experiences are those that open up possibilities for active, ongoing intellectual growth, that is, the capacity to think in increasingly complex, abstract ways. M*is*-educative experiences, on the other hand, constrain, distort or arrest intellectual growth (p. 25).

10 See also: http://www.modesofexistence.org.

11 The next section has an explanation of Cartesian binaries.

12 The term Chthulucene, invented by Haraway, is derived from the name of a Californian spider (*Pimoa cthulhu*), which in turn comes from the language of the Goshute people of Utah (Haraway, p. 31). For Haraway the Chthulucene signifies entanglement, everything's connection to everything else.

with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this Earth are the main story. (Haraway, 2016: p. 55)