Is critical science education possible in times of scientific denialism?

• Autor(a) principal: Vilela, Mariana Lima
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Selles, Sandra Escovedo
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Caderno Brasileiro de Ensino de Física (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/fisica/article/view/74999

In this article, we discuss scientific denialism as a current reframing for old rejections of the role of science, indicating its ideological rootedness in a broad conservative movement that plagues contemporaneity and is moved quickly by social networks. Throughout the text, we build our argument by accepting Bruno Latour's (2020) perception that we could have “missed the mark” in our criticisms of science and disfigured the critique of a positivist and empiricist science by disclosing the intricacies of science. To this end, this paper revisits some of the significant contributions in the field of science education to find clues that could lead to inquiring more strongly as to what extent reinforcing such criticism would have contributed to disseminating a view that would have weakened confidence in science. In particular, this paper questions whether or not the efforts to affirm doubt as constitutive of the process of producing scientific knowledge would have generated a construct by which the validity of knowledge would be questionable. The discussion developed in the text points to the need to reaffirm the subjects' non-alienation in the educational dynamics, in order to make them more aware of the limits of science and more alert about the complexity of the social pressures that produce denialism. For that purpose, the article argues for the possibilities of the narrative curriculum (GOODSON, 2006) as a way of coping with the weaknesses of the educational processes that separate the students’ lives from learning. By demeaning the integration between scientific content with other knowledge and forms of human expression, educational purposes run the risk of reinforcing performative actions that continue to produce exclusion.