Explorations of the structure-agency dialectic as a tool for framing equity in science education

Abstract

Science education researchers have progressively engaged in questions that seek to understand relationships between: (a) accessing, learning, and engaging in science and (b) the processes of being and becoming in the sociocultural milieu of classrooms, schools, free-choice learning environments, work settings, and everyday life relative to science.By moving beyond the treatment of learning as improving knowledge of science content, practices, and paradigms, science education scholars have been investigating the to-and-fro by which various actors (e.g., learners, teachers, administrators, parents, institutions, and communities) position themselves and are positioned by others in the context of science education.Within such research, investigators employ various psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives.Quite often, such work emphasizes the junctures of structure and agency.Those constructs are also deeply implicated in considerations about equity and social justice within science education.Structures are considered to be the cultural rules, or schemas, that shape and are shaped by social practices in a domain, and are in a dialectical relationship with resources, the sources of power within the domain and its social interactions (Sewell, 1992).Agency is seen as a person's capacity to engage with cultural schemas and mobilize resources in ways that did not exist before, creating new contexts and practices.Agency involves "semiotic mediation. ..[so that] one modifies one's environment with the aim, but not the certainty, of affecting one's own behavior" (Holland, Skinner, William, & Cain, 1998, p. 38).Science education research in this realm considers the ways in which structures (physical, material, symbolic, discursive, social, curricular, etc.) influence the learning and teaching of science and often contribute to inequities.Moreover much of this research highlights how learners, teachers, administrators, and community members exercise agency in various contexts that lead to empowering individuals and collectives to function, make sense, and thrive.However, the dialectical nature of structure and agency is complex and muddled, and necessitates systematic exploration.This is what this special issue aims to facilitate and promote.In what ways do structure and agency interact?What is their constitutive relationship like?And how does the structure-agency dialectic shape science education in and out of classrooms?

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