Social justice and out-of-school science learning: Exploring equity in science television, science clubs and maker spaces

Ideas from social justice can help us understand how equity issues are woven through out-of-school science learning practices. In this paper, I outline how social justice theories, in combination with the concepts of infrastructure access, literacies and community acceptance, can be used to think about equity in out-of-school science learning. I apply these ideas to out-of-school science learning via television, science clubs and maker spaces, looking at research as well as illustrative examples to see how equity challenges are being addressed in practice. I argue that out-of-school science learning practices can be understood on a spectrum from weak to strong models of social justice. Thinking about social justice as a spectrum helps us think through what equitable out-of-school science learning practices might involve, both to analyze existing practices and, importantly, to imagine new, more inclusive ones.

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