SAQ, SSI and STSE education: defending and extending “science-in-context”

Many scholars suggest that recent major science education initiatives apparently tied to intense economic competitiveness and growth have prioritized education about “products” (e.g., laws, theories, innovations) and skills (e.g., experimentation) of fields of science and technology. Such initiatives also, apparently, tend to avoid research findings from fields of humanities and social sciences that frequently link, more or less directly, fields of science and technology with many often-controversial harms for individuals, societies and environments. Cited as particularly problematic among humanity’s many challenges is devastation from climate change associated with humans’ uses of petroleum-fuelled technologies. Over about the last five decades, however, science education scholars have been conducting research that may help educate students about “science-in-context” (SinC) conceptions, perspectives, skills, etc., regarding controversial harms like those mentioned above. In this review article, we analyze summaries provided here by four prominent scholars in their respective SinC fields, that is, about: Science, Technology, Society and Environment relationships, Socially-Acute Questions and Socioscientific Issues. Based on extended experiences by the authors here with aspects of the three SinC fields, we suggest that despite some niche differences in ontological, epistemological and axiological positions of scholarship among them, their congruences perhaps offer hope to those wanting to provide students with more holistic and critical conceptions of associations of fields of science and technology with many of humanity’s numerous personal, social and environmental threats that students may, in turn, use to contribute to a more just and environmentally sound world.