Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has touched almost every corner of the planet and continues to impact on lives, livelihoods, economies and cultures. It is both a human and a global phenomenon. Making sense of what is happening requires an understanding of a number of scientific ideas including viruses, transmission, incubation and vaccination. These are life and death issues and yet the public and their political leaders often display a deliberate mistrust of the science and scientists. How might the science education community respond? We pose a series of questions designed to provoke a strong response to COVID-19 from our community and our colleagues: “How well has the science curriculum prepared the world’s public for COVID-19?”; “How much science education should be online from now on?”; “Are we learning from the current situation?”; “Is science education research producing knowledge that protects society from catastrophic events?”; “How should our working practices change to make science education more resilient, more useful and more transparent?”; “What are the ethics and politics of social distancing and how do they affect science education?”; “What pedagogies might we need to turn to in the future?”; and, “What role should business and industry play in funding science education research and development?” In our attempt to stimulate the development of a vision for science education in the post-pandemic era, we offer initial thoughts about moving forward. What we offer is a departure point, an invitation for the community to engage with pressing issues in science education. The main question we pose is the following: What can be done, and what can be done differently? We envision that this paper will provide some guidance to the readers to re-think the complex systems and socio-political contexts within which people come to learn and practice science and to conceptualize these processes through a social justice lens. We argue that a social justice informed approach towards shaping a vision for science education in the post-pandemic era is of paramount importance and that failure to do so will only serve as a way of perpetuating existing inequalities.
Highlights
COVID-19; Coronavirus disease 2019; virus; SARS; pandemic; outbreak; herd immunity; the curve; flatten the curve; asymptomatic; underlying conditions; incubation period; physical distancing; social distancing; self-isolation; isolation; quarantine; lockdown; R-number; behavioural science; personal responsibility; social responsibility; political responsibility; Chinese hoax; fake news; vaccination; anti-vaccination; public engagement with science; distance education; online; virtual learning; video-conferencing; teleconferencing; personal; social; political; national; global
Technical and often unclear terms make up this glossary, which is currently used by politicians, scientists, journalists, educators, and the general public, to engage in discourses associated with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
In this paper, we offer an initial reflection on what all this might mean for the science education community
Summary
COVID-19; Coronavirus disease 2019; virus; SARS; pandemic; outbreak; herd immunity; the curve; flatten the curve; asymptomatic; underlying conditions; incubation period; physical distancing; social distancing; self-isolation; isolation; quarantine; lockdown; R-number; behavioural science; personal responsibility; social responsibility; political responsibility; Chinese hoax; fake news; vaccination; anti-vaccination; public engagement with science; distance education; online; virtual learning; video-conferencing; teleconferencing; personal; social; political; national; global These terms have dominated the media over the past few months. The Pew Research Center survey last year found that ‘35% of [US] Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists, up 14 percentage points from 2016’ (Funk et al, 2019) Another 51% had ‘a fair amount’ of Journal for Activist Science & Technology Education, Volume 11, Issue 2 (2020) [jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/jaste]. There are some obvious questions that the science education community might benefit from addressing
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