Teaching Science for Social Justice, and: Connecting Girls and Science: Constructivism, Feminism, and Science Education Reform (review)

Nearly two decades have passed since Sandra Harding (1986) and Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) first challenged scientific research and the teaching of science. From their pivotal writings emerged a significant movement in feminist philosophy. Science was exposed as a political process, male-centered, and subject to human bias. Even with this early, incisive criticism, science education has been slow to change. Science pedagogy is still promoted in much the same way as it was in the post-Sputnik era: a privileged endeavor, objective, content-laden, and value-free. After 20 years of prolific writing by feminist philosophers, why do we have so few new models of science teaching in our elementary and secondary schools? How can feminist science education transform the relationship between knowledge and power in school classrooms? What kind of science is responsive to the lives of girls and students of color? Two recent publications address these questions and provide welcome examples of feminist science education. Connecting Girls and Science: Constructivism, Feminism, and Science Education Reform by Elaine V. Howes and Teaching Science for Social Justice by Angela Calabrese Barton offer salient case studies of a feminist approach to science education.

Howes and Barton, both faculty at Teachers College University, have dedicated their teaching and research to a liberatory agenda, whereby students and teachers are actively engaged in understanding the social embeddedness of science, and work toward making science meaningful and reflective of their lives. While the contexts of their research and teaching are very different, both authors listen carefully as children and youth make sense of science in their lives; the authors value students' ideas and become familiar with the many cultural and historical voices among children and adolescents.

In Connecting Girls and Science, Elaine Howes acknowledges the need for bringing together feminist theory and science education to address the progressive imperative of "Science for All" promoted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1993). Readers new to feminism will find a clear description of how she links her teaching and research method to feminist thought. Howes' research is situated in a high school human genetics class in a white working-class community. Here she introduces the social construction of science to her class by emphasizing prenatal testing in her human genetics course and later through bio-ethical dilemmas. Most of the students in her class are white girls (13), with one African American girl, and three white boys. For Howes, allowing space for student conversation and listening to student talk are critical components of her pedagogy and research.

In the human genetics class, Howes takes the approach of "difference feminism" emphasizing the biological differences between male and female bodies, and intentionally focusing on female reproduction. By using prenatal testing, Howes wants to connect girls in the class with science and actively engage them in the relational aspects of scientific knowledge as they interpret medical tests. In addition to using data from specific kinds of genetic tests, she asks the students in her class to role-play the interactions among a doctor, a pregnant woman, her husband, and a concerned friend. As students "perform" their knowledge in different roles, they find that empathy rather than objectivity is a vital resource in their assessment. Not surprisingly, girls slip into the dialogue of personalizing pregnancy, and care for "babies" rather than fetuses.

Here, Howes could expand her analysis by bringing a poststructural feminist approach to her teaching and research where "embodied" knowledge is truly recognized, rather than reduced to reproduction only. Despite a warning against essentialism in the introductory chapter, the emphasis on the reproductive, heterosexual body reinforces those binaries that frame (and often limit) girls' lives...