Science education needs manifestos

Abstract

As a science teacher educator, manifestos are usually something I have students write. Manifestos are bold forms of expression that help earnest people formulate a focussed or principled stance on important issues. This special issue has provided an opportunity to write a short manifesto of my own; and it is good practice to do the things you want your students to do. In times of increasing environmental and social precarity, science and science education can no longer deny the moral and ethical imperative to be relevant to the survival of both human and nonhuman life. What follows is a manifesto that addresses some of what science education needs to grapple with in times of right-wing populism, pandemic, pollution, and political need. It’s not intended to be a platform, because science education needs many manifestos of desire and intent. The best this manifesto can do is encourage teachers and students to write more inspiring ones. The language of manifestos is highly variable, but generally it take things like declaration and affect more seriously, and leaves the important tasks of elaboration and consensus for another day. This manifesto has been organized into eight parts that together maintain that science, education, environment, and politics are necessarily entangled, such that the time where one could pretend that the sciences are separate from, and/or superior to, everything else has passed. Second, that boundaries separating things like disciplines, different species, and different ways of knowing the world are proving to be more arbitrary and less useful than ever. Manifestos, which are unabashedly political and morally invested, are just one of a multitude of unorthodox transdisciplinary manifestations coming to science educational communities everywhere!