‘Enculturation’: Acquisition of conceptual blind spots and epistemological prejudices

Abstract

Abstract Traditional science teaching has relied on ‘chalk and talk’. In recent years, ‘authentic science’ has become an alternative slogan that many educators easily adopted into their pedagogic discourses, for it was associated with ‘getting students to do the real stuff’. However, authentic science when it is not accompanied by reflection on representations of knowledge more generally, can also mean to enculturate (and worse, indoctrinate) students to a particular epistemology. In this article, the author provides two examples of invisible ways in which students of ecology are enculturated to particular ideologies. The unreflected matter‐of‐factness of the discursive and mathematical representations in lectures and textbooks makes the world appear to be typologically decomposable (into variables) which have clear, mathematically fully determined relationships (topologies). In this way, school science has a certain likeness with indoctrination. The author concludes by suggesting that science (or mathematics, history etc.) courses need to have built in moments in which students can critically examine disciplinary knowledge representations and the way these are constituted.