Creating reflexive and critical spaces: International perspectives on working with teachers towards equitable science education

This symposium brought together a group of international scholars to explore spaces for teachers and teacher educators to reflexively and critically examine their praxis with a goal of highlighting approaches that work towards equity and social justice in science education. Grounded in perspectives that situate science as cultural enactment, schools are framed as sites of social (re)production, and as such, teachers are the
enactors of systems and practices playing a pivotal role in upholding, or dismantling, systems that seek to standardize, normalize, and generalize. The authors seek to push-back on pressures to standardize science teaching and learning, and in doing so, to expand the boundaries of possibilities for science education. Collectively the international panelists from five research groups will share how they carve out and hold space to critically examining with teachers what is being enacted throughout all aspects of our work with children, students, and families. Panelists presented from their research around two central questions: i) What is the nature of
critical and reflexive spaces in our work? ii) What do these spaces afford teachers and teacher educators? This provided groundwork for discussion among symposium attendees and panelists around lessons learned and future steps to make space for reflexivity and criticality. Collectively our research projects that we engage in across various international contexts seek to carve out spaces for teachers and teacher
educators to come together to stop, look around, reflect, and critically examine what is being put into place and enacted in our systems of education, in classrooms, and throughout all aspects of our work with children, students, and families. In creating such spaces, the authors seek to develop possibilities for uncovering, unpacking, and working to transform structures in ways that work towards equity and justice across our contexts.