Chapter 2: Contextual Issues Surrounding Science Education

There have been a number of classroom-based studies that have depicted how science education and its special discourse expectations have traditionally been utilized to frame science as a gate-keeping activity that is reserved for those with access to cultural and social capital (Brown, Reveles, & Kelly, 2005; Gilbert & Yerrick, 2001, Lemke, 2001; Yerrick & Gilbert, 2011). These science education studies have paralleled earlier work in social reproduction that argued schools work to launch students into academic and economic trajectories throughout their lives based on unequal access to particular cultural and discursive understandings (Calabrese-Barton & Yang, 2000; Eckert, 1989; Oakes, 1985; Page, 1991). Schools, in this sense, work within a hegemonic state to solidify the economic and power relations between dominant and subordinate groups within society (Pruyn, 2003). The question becomes what are these discursive expectations and what makes them unique to science?