What do images communicate about humans’ place in nature? Medin and Bang posit that the artifacts used to communicate science—including words, photographs, and illustrations—commonly reflect the cultural orientations of their creators. The authors argue that Native Americans traditionally see themselves as part of nature and focus on ecological relationships, while European Americans perceive themselves as outside of nature and think in terms of taxonomic relationships.
In order to broaden the conceptualizations of argument in science education, Bricker and Bell draw from diverse fields: the sociology of science, the learning sciences, and cognitive science to help practitioners think of new ways to bring argumentation into learning spaces while expanding what counts as scientific argument.
To acquire skills associated with decision-making on socioscientific issues, students need to understand the concepts of risk. Teaching about risk involves acknowledging the uncertainty and limitations of scientific knowledge. This study explores the ways in which risk may be addressed in science education.
In this study, the authors describe a conceptual framework addressing culturally based ways of knowing, and provide a brief description of their efforts to design a community-based summer science program with a Native American tribe using this framework. To address the call to attract culturally diverse students to STEM fields, the authors advocate supporting students in their navigation of multiple and perhaps conflicting epistemologies, and using the student community as resources to be built upon, rather than pushing them toward replacing their personal epistemologies with canonical