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Scientific Literacy and Social Transformation

Critical Perspectives About Science Participation and Emancipation

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Abstract

The paper provides a systematic theoretical analysis of the main visions of the concept of scientific literacy developed in the last 20 years. It is described as a transition from a transmissive educational vision of scientific literacy (Vision-I) to a transformative vision (Vision-III), with a stronger engagement with social participation and emancipation. Using conceptual tools from sociology and the philosophy of education, the notions of science participation and emancipation associated with transformative Vision-III are critically analyzed in order to draw attention to the growing need to define them with greater accuracy as key conceptual components of scientific literacy. Without such an approach, it will be difficult for science education to materialize and consolidate educational actions that are pedagogically sound, culturally and socially sensitive, and coherent with the social transformation of the diverse conditions of oppression. It is concluded that Vision-III should include both a broad conception of participation, which makes visible the invisible and informal acts performed by diverse groups to build society, and an alternative notion of emancipation committed to liberation.

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Notes

  1. A better understanding of intersectionality requires, from the point of view Collins and Bilge (2016), a careful review of the genealogy of the concept in order to avoid suppressing part of its history by erasing the activism to which it was linked from its origins outside of academia (a history that is frequently omitted), and that rooted the foundational knowledges of women of color who contributed to this concept, and that Harris and Patton (2019, p. 363) have named the “herstory” of this concept.

    While it is assumed in academia that the term “intersectionality” was coined and introduced by Crenshaw in 1989 to demonstrate how US social structures frame identities as isolated and mutually exclusive, resulting in the erasure of black women who hold multiple minoritized identities (Harris and Patton, 2019), Collins and Bilge (2016) have specified that the origins of intersectionality date back much further, in the 1960–1970 social movements of women of racially minoritized groups.

    Recalling this genealogy makes it easier to understand the link that intersectionality has with the development of a radical and transformative social and educational agenda, because it reveals that at the center of intersectionality, and beyond the intellectual interests, lies the praxis and the theme of social justice (Collins and Bilge, 2016). In this sense, Tefera et al. (2018) and Rice et al. (2019) warn us how intersectionality could be narrowly focused on issues of identity, forgetting that it is mainly a framework to examine and question the power and oppression, and that the intersectional analysis must be committed to social justice: “…intersectionality is not just a set of ideas. Instead, because they inform social action, intersectionality’s ideas have consequences in the social world….” (Collins, 2019, p. 2).

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This research was supported by UNAM-DGAPA-PAPIIT IG400920.

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  1. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, México

    Liliana Valladares

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Valladares, L. Scientific Literacy and Social Transformation. Sci & Educ 30, 557–587 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00205-2

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