Section:
Pastiche Science: Bringing Cultural Studies of Science to Education and Education to the Cultural Studies of Science

Chapter/Intro:
Refractions on (post) modern (science) education

Peter Appelbaum, William Paterson University of NJ
(973) 720-3123; appelbaump@wpunj.edu
 

This chapter is included in a book published by Garland, edited by myself, Marla Morris, & John Weaver.
 

Pedagogies of Sciences

A provocative debate about the nature and context of science has emerged within the last decade, throwing "science" into a Sargasso Sea of social and cultural context (Gross & Levitt; Gross, Levitt & Lewis; Haraway; Holton; Latour; Ross; Serres; Sokal). The clamor effectively articulates important controversies and points of conflict about the approach to and nature of science and scientific efforts. However, participants do not talk about the pedagogy of science; players in these debates undertheorize education and inadequately address educational institutions of science. Meanwhile, those participating in or studying the so-called "science wars" are curiously absent from contemporary educational studies. And educators often accept a stereotyped and monolithic perspective on science. This section of the book seeks to respond to both of these empty spaces. We seek to pull science into current discussions of post-modern pedagogy and policy, while at the same time placing educational studies at the center of debate over controversies in science and post-modern science. We take as our starting points cultural studies of science, critics of these critiques of science, and contemporary theoretical orientations to educational studies. But we go further and describe what they have been doing now, as an entry into the ongoing creation of a postmodern education of science. We include both mathematics and science in our analyses because the general science studies dialogue includes both science and mathematics, and because mathematics is so often lumped in with science as "the language of science" or the "filter" through which potential scientists flow.

When critics of the cultural studies of science do address education, they express anxiety about a loss of traditional science in efforts to dilute science content. A good example is A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science, edited by Noretta Koertge (1998). This collection of key scholars in current debates about the meaning of cultural studies of science is pretty much a one-sided trashing of the cultural studies of science by traditionalists in science. In her own chapter, "Postmodernisms and the Problem of Scientific Literacy," Koertge characterizes "postmodernist accounts of science" as prescribing particular transformations of science education and a fundamental redefinition of scientific literacy. She declares that works such as Collins and Pinch’s The Golem (1993), Sue Rosser’s Female-Friendly Science (1990) and Teaching the Majority (1995), and Andrew Ross’ Strange Weather (1994) have a common project of revolutionizing science pedagogy. Her argument seems to go something like this:

I assume science practice as done by the popular image of scientist that I hold is good. I then believe that people could not understand what I think of as science unless they study traditional science. Now, there are people who describe what science is in an anthropological way, or through an analysis of the discourse and rhetoric of science, and these people describe some pretty horrific things. And there are also a few people at the college level offering courses in this stuff! What would happen if these courses became thought of as the "real" study of science? This indeed is an even more horrific nightmare! So I will ridicule what these people say and do as never being able to be called science according to my own definition, and then you too will call all of those involved in the cultural studies of science "Fools."

The fact that these authors do not claim to be scientists but rather observers of science is bypassed in an effort to "save" science.

But how does this discussion turn into a debate about science education? A leap from science to cultural studies of science, all of which might be "taught" in various departments at a university, becomes a transformation of science as we know it into postmodern science education. What do we hear from the people in education on this matter? Mostly silence. Perhaps it is because the cultural studies of science have occurred at the university level where educational studies is denigrated to a non-discipline on most campuses. Whatever contributions educationists might make have gone unheard. Yet it seems that there has been very little effort on the part of educators to grapple with the implications of the cultural studies of science. Perhaps it is because most of the people in educational studies have a social foundations, read social foundations background, that they are not comfortable talking about science. In general science pedagogy has been left to the science education people who teach methods, and there has been only occasional analysis within education fields of science as a cultural phenomenon. Also, teachers of science do not get exposure to the cultural studies of science and the implications for the teaching and learning of science, since this sort of critique of science is outside of the departments of science, and indeed is not the same thing as the science content they learn in their science courses. Science educators are mostly informed by traditional courses and perspectives in science. Discussions of curriculum end up being mostly about science content, the proper sequence of content, a perceived hierarchy of concepts and skills, and factual knowledge that becomes a foundation for later study. Only rarely do we talk about controversies about the nature of science in education courses about the teaching of science. Collins and Pinch, Rosser, and Ross are not commonly read as "science" in science content courses. What a sad state for educational studies! Yet what an opportunity for us now to enter the general discussion of science education as people who do educational studies, and respond to the perspective illustrated by Noertge. There is a modernist pedagogy of a modernist science, illustrated by what comes most immediately to mind when we picture a classroom in which science is being taught or learned. Here we expand our notions of science pedagogy to include post-modern pedagogies of modernist science, modernist pedagogies of post-modern science, and post-modern pedagogies of a post-modern science.

It is the case that mathematics and science educators have taken on some of the rhetoric of science studies. For example, there is attention to the importance of relationships among science, technology, society, and human values, and the importance of discourse and 'communities of inquiry' in the classroom. Assessment has expanded to include students' attitudes and relationships with the disciplines or topics. Yet these examples are representational in being so steeped in the rhetoric of standards, workplace readiness, and skill attainment, that most of the flavor of cultural studies has been lost. Nevertheless, critics of science studies are very nervous when they see the words in print, or hear about educators who focus on culturally constructed knowledges of gender, objectivity, social context, or relevance to students' lives and popular culture. Cultural theorists recognize these things as "signifiers;" the critics have fears, including a loss of privilege and cultural capital.

Koertge (1996) earlier wrote of feminist epistemologies and the pedagogies they support as thoroughly undermining science-as-we-know-it. This essay, " Feminist Epistemology: Stalking an Un-Dead Horse," again demonstrates a common set of fears and defenses of the status that scientists hold after going through their apprenticeship into traditional science practices. The presumption is that a post-modern pedagogy would always create a post-modern science that defies some core norms. We must ask, first, whether or not a post-modern education could indeed be most appropriate for achieving a traditional form of science knowledge and practices -- perhaps more effectively than other, common sense pedagogies. And second, we need to reflect on the potential impacts of a post-modern or other pedagogy that promotes the creation of a truly radical version of science itself. Koertge clearly worries about the second scenario: she believes that feminist and other epistemologies are so incompatible with the science that she has learned to embrace that they will destroy the possibility of continuing such a science; like other critics of the cultural studies of science, she sees the cultural studies of science as a haunting specter of the death of science. Surely a postmodern science education would not kill science. But we might indeed find a different science that Koertge would not name science. A postmodern science education must examine the norms of science -- the rules by which traditional science stakes its claim to have a story to tell -- and that examination must place into question which people have most to gain by the variety of challenges to, or efforts to save, these norms. Students do not necessarily act like adult scientists in order to learn science. On the other hand, what we think of as a scientist that should be modeled by a student "acting like a scientist" is not without its own complications (Gough 1998). And, indeed, I rarely find students in science classes enhancing their propensity to interpret the world as a scientist. Instead, they spend most of their time learning to parrot already developed techniques and applications of science. Furthermore, science education as it is currently practiced is not necessarily about being an apprentice scientist but promotes a variety of subject positions with relation to the content of science, including critical citizenship (decisions that use scientific information), responding to being the object of scientific study, and the role of science in social business policy (Weinstein 1996).

I bring up Koertge's complaints about feminist epistemology because I believe her highlights of this epistemology help mathematics and science educators identify just what pedagogical strategies would most serve their needs as educators of science, whether or not they want to transform or preserve the science itself. We can use what she criticizes as the initiation of an effective postmodern education. Koertge (1996) sees feminist pedagogy as a direct assault on the ideas of Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton. "When we turn to radical feminist critiques of science based on feminist epistemology, we find a repudiation of the ideals themselves." (Koertge 1996, 417) She uses the example of one certification program for science educators that requires a reading of Belenky et al.'s (1986) Women's Ways of Knowing, mischaracterizing this work as teaching the need to change science to meet the essential inadequacies of female minds. In her reading, such an approach necessitates a diminishment of the quality of science as science, thus underserving females in the long run. Of course, this is not at all what Belenky et al. want to say. They instead want to add to the narrow epistemologies (of science) in our repertoire to include richer comprehension of the possibilities for modes of knowing. The contemporary debate about postmodernism is so often framed in all or nothing terms (Kincheloe et al. 1999): we can either completely accept or completely reject Western modernism. This section of our book works to hold onto the value of modernist science while presenting images of currently existing practices that also enter into dialogue with postmodern perspectives on education and postmodern perspectives on science.

As we learn from John Dewey, beliefs are the key -- they are that upon which we are prepared to act. But what we believe about science is not necessarily what we believe about how to learn science. Maybe this is a little too idealist; but the ideas drive action in this sense even (more likely) if we see blind adherence to practice as constructing beliefs implicitly; then change is driven in academics or intellectuals by an enlightenment attitude that we need to rethink beliefs and then judge our practice based on these new beliefs. Viewing cognition as a process of knowledge production presages profound pedagogical changes. Post-formal teachers (Kincheloe et al. 1999) facilitate interaction at the frontier where information of the science disciplines intersects with understandings and experiences that individuals carry with them to school; they help students to reinterpret their own lives, and uncover new propensities, as a result of their encounter with school. These teachers see their role as creators of situations where students ' experiences can intersect with information gleaned from the academic disciplines. In contrast, if knowledge is viewed simply as an external body of information and codes of conduct and value, then the role of the teacher is to take this knowledge and insert it into the minds of students, to take these codes and police their students' behavior in accordance with the codes (Appelbaum & Clark in press). Evaluation procedures are intimately tied to the views we hold. Conceptual thinking would be discouraged in a modernist classroom, trivializing learning. Students would be evaluated at the lowest level of human thinking -- the ability to memorize and mimic behavior. Unless students are moved to incorporate school information into their own lives, schooling will remain an unengaging rite of passage into adulthood, an experience of biding time until it is over (Appelbaum 1999). Perhaps a view of some potentially post-modern pedagogies of science could help us with both the beliefs and the practices.

What is a Picture of (Post) Modern School (Science)?

We are in a first grade classroom. The class reads Desert Giant (Bash 1989). Whole-class discussion explores the multiple perspectives represented in the story; students write their own version of the story,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

extracting one of these perspectives. Later in the week, students take on a perspective of their own choice for field study in which they record in their notebooks observations of an area near the school. They write stories from the perspective they chose. Then, in groups, they weave multiple-perspective narratives about the eco-system they observed.
 
 

"Objectivity redefined with values antithetical to the traditional meaning: observers should always remain emotionally connected to what they are studying; the richness of subjective experience should not be stripped away in the vain search for a lowest common denominator of objectivity; intuition should not play second fiddle to abstract, cold rationality/objectivity; knowledge is always perspectival and tied to local context, and the attempt to find an objective or 'God's Eye' point of view always ends up privileging the powerful. Then the playful curiosity so characteristic of so-called pure science must be replaced by an attitude of caring and commitment." (Koertge: 417)Koertge presents a view to scorn. Yet I believe that students learn best when they care about what they are learning, when what they do matters, when there is a purpose, a commitment to what they are doing. The navel-gazing elitist love of a playful detachment undermines internalization and connection to what is being studied. Students in this first-grade class are experiencing the roles of context and participation in the collection of observational data and field notes. And, while they may or may not be interested in eco-systems for their own sake, they are introduced to a way of making meaning out of an eco-system that they are a part of. They are communicating their interpretation of this eco-system to others who also have intimate relationships with the same eco-system. A playful detachment might come about as students become fascinated with a particular aspect of science or as they become immersed in the process of an investigation; but this experience is serving the needs of a larger context of caring and engagement.

A fourth grade class is in the midst of a tree branch study. Over the course of a week they collect lists on large sheets of paper taped to the wall of the classroom: what they know, and what they wonder. Groups form by interests growing out of the list of wonders, and begin to collect data to help them guide an investigation about what they wonder about. Based on their initial data, and consultation with other class members in whole-class meetings, the groups design research projects based on more refined data collection. All along, two students take on the job of anthropologists, and two others take on the job of the media. They study how the "scientists" are doing their work and give media reports, representing the work of the scientists to the class.

Logic is a patriarchal device for brow-beating nonlinear thinking; since all knowledge is contextual, the search for generality is a form of imperialism; empirical validity must be tempered by moral and political appraisals. (Koertge: 417)Indeed, these fourth-graders are motivated to examine particulars of their own identification, and rarely follow a linear process in developing their investigations. The representation of science in the usual textbook or hands-on activity rarely creates images of disorganization, illogic, intuition, and so on. In this classroom, the anthropologists and media reporters help students to reflect on the work of actual science. Now, rather than search for generality, students here might focus on particularities. They may create thought experiments, asking what-if-not questions about what they observe, moving into a realm of science fiction and fantasy. Problem posing might highlight the special method of 'What-if-not?' taking illogic as the road to local, contextual validity that sheds light on the general.

Qishana reports to the class: "We needed to know, what do you have to add to 2/3 + 1/5 to get 1? (Walter 1989) We found, after a lot of work, 2/3 + 1/5 + 2/15 =1 … and then Shareefa laughed and said, we could've just multiplied the numerators and denominators instead of going through all that! Then we laughed and said, 'course not, that makes no sense. But Shareefa and I went off and looked for other combinations of fractions that we could solve the 'wrong way '. So we came up with…"

Later, Roza asks, "So do we know now when multiplying works, and when it doesn't?" Shareefa: "We know it works when it works, and it doesn't work a lot; but your question -- a good one -- is still out there for studying more. We're thinking it's one of those questions that keeps us learning without ever finding the answer to the question."

In Karen Grindall's fifth-grade classroom (Weaver and Grindall 1998) students are using multimedia software to construct a story about the extinction of dinosaurs. They create two characters that join the dinosaurs and witness their extinction, one a mellow male hippie, the other a man who sings all the time.

Student 1: OK, … the dinosaurs become extinct from a big explosion.

Student 2: No, they died from a cloud of dust.

Weaver: Could it have been both?

Student 2: No, I doubt it.

Weaver: Do we really know? Besides the issue is how will you create a story.

Student 1: Why don't we make our characters experience what we believe happened.

Weaver: Do you mean create two stories?

Student 1: Yes.

Weaver: Good idea, this way you leave it open as to how they actually died. You let the reader decide.

(Weaver and Grindall 1998, 244)
The hypermedia does not impose a modernist story structure of a beginning, middle, and end. The students were able to leave the story open-ended rather than try to reach a forced consensus in which only one possible story line was acceptable; they were also able to morph identities, forming new identities that transcend modernist notions of time and space. Rather than stationed into fixed categories such as male or female, past or present, post-modern students move between them, constructing new markers that better capture complexity, ambiguity and contradictions.

Ms. Loella enters a unit on "ratio" with her class. She starts by saying, "O.K., we're going to start our unit on ratio, which is part of the 5th grade curriculum. I've laid out for you around the room different textbooks and activities that different companies and schools have used -- they're all designed to teach you about ratio. My minimum expectation is that you explore several of the options and think about how they are similar and different. How do they differ in what they want you to think about? Later, I will ask you to develop a project of your own interest that can help you extend your knowledge. At that point, you'll be asked to represent what you've done and learned to three different audiences..." The students are used to these long introductions to a unit, and know that they will be asked to either make a presentation to an audience outside of their class or somehow communicate the importance of their activities to others. "… Your third-grade reading buddies, your parents and me, and a panel of three teachers that will help you judge the quality of your work."

Community of a nonhierarchical sort is acceptable, but the rest of Merton's norms must go: a humane community would be based on trust, not skepticism; universalism should be replaced by standpoint theory, which says that reports are always to be understood as a product of the culture, gender, ethnicity, class of the observer who made them; no activity can be or should be disinterested. Quite the contrary, a commitment to correct political and social goals is to be encouraged. (Koertge: 417)Indeed the most vibrant pedagogical strategies are consistent with the "feminist" approach; the teacher and students trust each other and 'go with' a student's idea, regardless of logic, initial acceptance or correctness. Karen Gallas (1995) describes a child that writes about liking rap music in his science journal -- the teacher and student teacher do not see this as science. Gallas realizes she needs a new tack and asks him why rap is science. He says because it is "exciting." Throughout the year, he gets excited about all sorts of things and writes about them in his journal. By the later third of the year he is writing about ‘exciting’ animals and nature things and what he knows and conjectures about them, which looks like science to us. Bob Strachota (1996) takes a student's pseudo-conception or misconception and asks the class to take it as seriously as he does: if this is an explanation, if we begin with this theory, then what does it suggest to us, where does it take us? Ellie declares that an abalone is not a creature, because, "…if it was a creature, it would always be attacked because it would have to be like this (she held her hand with the open side up). It couldn't live the other way around because if a creature was in there it would fall out. Anything could easily kill it if it was like this (open side up)." Julius, reporting from a book, suggests the holes are where it goes to the bathroom. Ellie insists, "The holes must happen from the barnacles falling off." A series of ideas about the abalone shell are offered, all to be refuted by Ellie's consistent interpretation. Strachota reflects: … misinformation rather than correct information stimulated the vigor and depth of the inquiry and, ultimately, led to a high level of understanding. Without Ellie's notion that the abalone wasn't a creature at all, we wouldn't have wondered how it could move with such a heavy shell, how it could stay in that shell, how it could stay safe, or what purpose those holes really served. Since I began working this way I have found that productive discussions often spring from misguided notions. (Strachota 1996, 52)These classrooms are based on building a community of inquiry and demonstrate the importance of the social and cultural for all learning.

Students in Pat Xave's class are told they have to use mathematics and science to learn how to juggle, or do magic tricks, or mix glazes for ceramics, or quilt (a) well enough to perform or display their work at the town library; and (b) well enough to help another person learn how. Students photograph themselves and their work at routine intervals of time with a digital camera, and using Kidpix Studio, create animations that represent their efforts over time.

The lesson for science education is that Parsons/Merton/Koertge is not to be applied until, in a certain context, a student develops a need for these norms … as a practicing scientist. When learning science, doing science, the feminist critique is apt, and may even lead to scientists aware of the critique, who are part of a cultural shift in the doing of science. But these people would not abandon science: they would still be doing (post-modern) science.

Students are studying the work of Alexander Calder in art in fourth grade this year, and simple machines in science. So the art specialist teacher and the classroom teacher plan a team-teaching unit. Students form groups and use simple machines to create an "Energy Circus" exhibition inspired by Rube Goldberg contraptions. The exhibit is set up for a month in the lobby of the school, where every student in the school can participate on their way to something else.
 
 
 
 

Doing Science in School

How do we do (post) modern (science) education? The following chapters suggest important strategies. They take further the crucial features of a classroom that I have begun to articulate:

In our first chapter, "Science Education as Situated Knowledge," Matthew Weinstein explores the possibilities of using the sociology and anthropology of science as a curricular basis for science education. He starts with the thought experiment of what a possible science education could speak to the needs of both the kin of the scientists and the kin of the subjects of the infamous Tuskegee Experiment. He draws on the idea of "situated knowledge" to talk about a multipositioned science education. A key feature of post-modern educational approaches to classroom practice, multipositionality can become a basic structure of lesson planning and classroom orchestration. And, as Weinstein notes, situated knowledge may therefore be a realization of a central goal in mainstream science education: a science for all.

Genre theory is another useful tool, as we search for ways to utilize the existing curricular materials available in our classrooms. Susan Gerofsky demonstrates the effectiveness of genre theory as she reflects on the teaching and learning of mathematics word problems. In doing so, she responds to a fundamental issue in the cultural studies of science, well articulated by Norman Levitt (1996). Levitt thinks "the problem" is really that some of us are afraid of the mathematics in both math and science. He thinks cultural studies of science and post-modern pedagogies of science and mathematics are really all about expressing resentment against mathematics and the reasoning and ideas it employs, because people can't understand it. In pop-psyche interpretations of postmodern critiques of 'science,' the wistful dream becomes, "if only more people, especially the 'well-educated' -- had a different relationship with mathematics" -- of course, upholding the privileging of "the" mathematics. Gerofsky understands both mathematics and genre theory, and asks us to construct word problems in school as parables or riddles rather than as disposable exercises (as they usually are). As parables worthy of longer and deeper contemplation, we might spend a week considering a single word problem in all its considerations and implications. As riddles, a playful and perhaps competitive spirit would be invoked; a pleasurable, oral culture approach to a recreational use of word problems would take the place of our present, very serious approach to evaluation of student written knowledge. As she writes, the simple suggestion that mathematical word problems be considered as parables or as riddles -- the shift to the "as if" point of view that characterizes play and drama -- may engender a shift in thinking and in educational practice.

Elaine Howes and Bill Rosenthal confront the issue of mathematics content and people's relationships with it. Lamenting the loss of "the infinite" in school science, school mathematics and teacher education, they frame their desire to revive such study "postmodern." Modernism, they note, has made the infinite part of both mathematics and science a topic non grata in the face of the "empirical truth" that the infinite is the one (and only) mathematical topic with which just about everyone seems to be enthralled. Inherently paradoxical and contradictory, the infinite is the ultimate postmodern subject-object. They interrogate mathematics as a science of the infinite, mathematics as the language of science, the gendering of the infinite in mathematics-science, and the normalizing role of mathematics and science in "taming" the infinite via monotheism and patriarchy. The direction is not toward a conservative mathematics that saves or recreates science as postmodern, but a postmodern conception of postmodern science.

In "Cookbook Classrooms; Cognitive Capitulation," Dave Pushkin points our attention to undergraduate education in science courses and its implication for pedagogy beyond these courses. What exactly could or should prospective teachers of science experience, whether in preparation for college level teaching, secondary, middle or elementary and early childhood? Pushkin articulates a concern for science education, and prompts a response that is aware of our postmodern condition. Why are students losing interest in the teaching and learning of science? How might the pedagogy of science be undermining the potential for a vibrant science education? As Pushkin describes college science, students are forced to move "backward" from multiplistic thinking to a dualism that demands submission to a higher, unquestioned authority, and teachers are forced to limit access to knowledge in order to preserve students' apprenticeship.

As we consider the possibilities for a (post) modern (science) education, we need to examine the nature of supervision and administration of educational programs. Curriculum supervisors and principals need to understand the controversies and dilemmas in the teaching and learning of science, the role of culture in science pedagogy, and the relationships among popular culture, everyday life and school science. Indeed, the very structures of supervision must support those aspects of classroom practice that are valuable. Jeffrey Glanz reminds us of the long history of supervision as striving to become a science itself, and offers a metaphor that has led him to understand supervision in a postmodern society. He makes the case for supervision as tofu -- as a permeable and adaptable substance that takes on the flavor of the foods that surround it. As tofu, unassuming yet nutritious, makes an ideal substitute for high calorie foods, supervision as tofu also blends into the educational landscape to help provide needed services and assistance to teachers.

As refractor, I ask, "If current science education practices are simulacra (Baudrillard 1990) of Nineteenth Century science, while Cyberpunk art forms and popular culture more effectively communicate concepts of modern science (Gough 1993), what does this mean for the science education of emerging teachers, for ongoing professional development, and for the pedagogies of educational studies? How might a conversation among scientists, colleagues who teach science methods, and those in curriculum theory unfold?" Treating both school science and educational studies as "theaters of representation" (Gough 1998), these chapters could be refracted through the notion of "pastiche," at once a fragrant potpourri and cacophonous jumble of images, practices and contexts of science and the pedagogies in and out of science. Common motifs include:

These chapters should be read in the context of two important directions for mathematics and science education: the rise of virtual reality and dynamic software environments, and the need for an educational practice that exhibits critical multiculturalism (Oakes and Lipton 1999). In virtual reality environments, the goal is not to represent "reality" in a modernist sense, but to create a way of experiencing alternate realities. Commercial software packages such as SIM products or pinball construction programs, simulations of real-world phenomena, shift into an experimental mode that encourages explorations involving a change in the fundamental properties of a system -- for example the ecosystem of a natural habitat, or the gravity and elasticity of materials in a pinball game. In prevalent dynamic software environments, such as Starlogo and Geometer's Sketchpad, users fabricate a world of their own, and then play around within it; concepts and models of worlds emerge in the context of exploration and invention. In both simulation and open environments, teachers and students have the opportunity to reflect on the metaphors that are the basis of their model of reality or new reality. Yet educational questions arise regarding the relationship that is constructed with the knowledge: are people who use simulations, metaphorical worlds, and new realities detached from the natural world, or are they more importantly able to critique how these relationships are constructed through the metaphors and analogies that they explore in the virtual reality environments?

In critical multiculturalism, I ask for critique of the narratives that are presented in school science. Any particular practice illustrated or fantasy posited in this and the following chapters should presume that the educators involved have asked, and will continue to ask, key questions:

As teachers and students begin to articulate these issues and examine their participation in the conflicts present within and around the cultural studies of science and science education, they may at times experience a modernist pedagogy of modernist science. And indeed I believe one should not study science without understanding its modernist "family of origins." However, they may experience at other times a postmodern pedagogy of science, or a modernist pedagogy of postmodern science, or, finally, a postmodern pedagogy of postmodern science. And in schools where the teachers and students are open to any of these, there will be in place the multiplicity of possibilities that is in itself a (post)modern (science) education. What does this mean for "science"? I believe it means that the pedagogy of science is as important, if not more so, than science education; that (post) modern (science) education needs to inform both the doing of science and the teaching and learning of science as much as the work of scientists has, in modernist education, informed science education. The post modern "reality" of (post) modern (science) education is that it is in itself a field of emerging virtual realities; it is itself a pastiche of postmodern modernity, modern postmodernity, and postmodern postmodernity, and requires of us the same refraction and critical multicultural attention as science studies has had the fortune to have lived through in the last couple of decades.
 
 
 
 

References

Appelbaum, Peter (1995) Popular Culture, Educational Discourse, and Mathematics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Appelbaum, Peter (1999) Target: Number. In Kincheloe, J. et al. (eds.) The Post-Formal Reader: Cognition and Education. NY: Falmer Press, 423-448.

Appelbaum, Peter and Stella Clark (in press) Science! Fun? A Critical Analysis of Design/Content/Evaluation. Journal of Curriculum Studies.

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Seduction. NY: St. Martins Press.

Bash, Barbara (1989) Desert Giant: The World of the Saguaro Cactus. Boston: Little, Brown.

Belenky, Mary Field, Clinchy, Blythe McVicker, Goldberger, Nancy Rule, & Tarule, Jill Mattuck (1986) Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. NY: basic Books.

Collins, Harry & Pinch, Trevor (1993) The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gallas, Karen (1994) Languages of Learning: How Children Talk, Write, Dance, Draw, and Sing Their Understanding of the World. NY: Teachers College Press.

Gough, N. (1993) Laboratories in Fiction: Science Education and Popular Media. Geelong, Victoria, Australia: Deakin Univ. Press.

Gough, N. (1998) 'If This Were Played Upon a Stage': School laboratory work as a theatre of representation. In J. Wellington (ed.) Practical Work in School Science: Which Way Now? London: Routledge.

Gross, P. & N. Levitt (1997) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.

Gross, P., Levitt, N., and M. Lewis (Eds.) (1996) The Flight From Science and Reason. NY: The New York Academy of Sciences.

Haraway, D. (1997) Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse : Feminism and Technoscience. NY: Routledge.

Holton, G. (1996) Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. NY: Addison-Wesley.

Kincheloe, Joe, Shirley Steinberg and Patricia Hinchey (eds.) (1999) The Post-Formal Reader: Cognition and Education. NY: Falmer Press.

Koertge, Noretta (1996) Feminist Epistemology: Stalking an Un-Dead Horse. In Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, The Flight from Science and Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 413-419.

Koertge, Noretta (1998) A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science. NY: Oxford university Press.

Latour, B. (1996) Aramis or the Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Levitt, Norman (1996) Mathematics as the Step-Child of Culture. In Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, The Flight from Science and Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 39-53.

Oakes, Jeannie and Martin Lipton (1999) Teaching to Change the World. NY: McGraw-Hill

Ross, A. (1991) Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits. NY: Verso.

Ross, A. (1994) The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society. NY: Verso.

Rosser, Sue (1990) Female-Friendly Science: Applying Women’s Studies and Theories to Attract Students. NY: Teachers College Press.

Rosser, Sue (1995) Teaching the Majority: Breaking the Gender Barrier in Science, Mathematics, & Engineering. NY: Teachers College Press.

Serres, M. with B. Latour (1995) Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Sokal, Alan (1997) Impostures Intellectuelle. Paris: Editions Odile.

Strachota, Bob (1996) On Their Side: Helping Children Take Charge of Their Learning. Greenfield, MA: Northeast Foundation for Children.

Walter, Marion (1996) Curriculum Topics Through Problem Posing. In Rebecca Corwin et al. (eds) Talking Mathematics: Supporting Children's Voices. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 141-147.

Weaver, John and Karen Grindall (1998) Surfing and Getting Wired in a Fifth Grade Classroom: Critical Pedagogical Methods and Techno-Culture. In Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg (eds) Unauthorized Methods: Strategies for Critical Teaching. NY: Routledge, 231-251.

Weinstein, Matthew (1996) Towards a Cultural and Critical Science Education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. New York, NY, April.