The Armchair at the Borders: The 'Messy' Ideas of Borders and Border Epistemologies Within Multicultural Science Education Scholarship

摘要

This paper aims to further articulate multicultural science education scholar-ship. In particular, it explores the notions of borders and border epistemologies as intellec-tual resources to think again about the challenges of science education in the global worldthat demand more sophisticated concepts to unravel some of its complexities. It respondsin part to Osborne's (2007) call for more "armchair science education" to "develop bettertheories about our goals and values" (p. 11). Borders and border spaces reconceptualizeand extend the view of borders typically presented within the literature as unproblematiclines between cultures and knowledges that need to be crossed. The constructs of borderepistemologies introduce to science education the work of cultural theorists, Boaventurade Sousa Santos and Walter Mignolo. Collectively, their scholarship helps to theorize alter-native epistemologies from the Global South that argue social and political justice must bepremised within epistemological justice. I finish by problematizing some of these ideas forongoing thinking around multicultural approaches to science education.