“Act locally, publish globally”: international/multi-disciplinary research efforts needed to understand the impact of globalization on science education

Abstract

As I sit to write this editorial, I cannot help but reflect on my experiences over the last year serving as Lead Editor for this issue. Inviting different members of the editorial Review Board to serve as Lead Editors for upcoming issues is a new way CSSE is seeking to expand participation to a greater number of scholars in science education and to expand readership of the journal to a wider network of social scientists. By way of introduction to this issue, I describe what I have learned about the editorial process that is unique to this journal—as well I share how this experience has helped me to recognize the critical need for more international and multi-disciplinary research efforts, if we, as science educators are to both understand and actively inform/reform the ways in which globalization is shaping science education around the world. For the past 4 years, the Editors and Board Members of the journal have invited other science educators to meet and discuss sociocultural issues and research in science education. Each year there is a theme for the meeting and several of the manuscripts for this issue originated from research presented in 2007 at the inaugural Springer Forum held in Chicago. This issue contains four sets of papers organized around four original manuscripts that are loosely developed around the theme of Glocalization and is the second of three special issues to focus on science education in a global context. The first paper, co-authored by Lyn Carter and Ranjith Dediwalage, examined a school-based project entitled Sustainable Living by the Bay through the lens of globalization and offered a critical analysis of how neoliberal and neoconservative agendas in Australia are being expressed through government funding policies, which in turn, informed the development and implementation of K-12 science curricula that (re)produced Western canonical scientific knowledge at the expense of all other ways of knowing and doing science. Tali Tal and Iris Alkaher, in the second paper, examined the experiences of Bedouin and Israeli students who participated in an education for sustainability (EfS) project designed to bring together Arabic and Jewish youth and their teachers to engage in a cross-cultural exchange about a socio-environmental conflict related to the disputed use of a local creek and