globalisation and science education: rethinking science education reforms

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 42, NO. 5, PP. 561–580 (2005)

Globalisation and Science Education: Rethinking Science Education Reforms

Lyn Carter

Trescowthick School of Education, Australian Catholic University, St. Patrick’s Campus,

Locked Bag No. 4115, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria 3065, Australia

Received 10 December 2003; Accepted 14 September 2004

Abstract: Like Lemke (J Res Sci Teach 38:296–316, 2001), I believe that science education has not

looked enough at the impact of the changing theoretical and global landscape by which it is produced and

shaped. Lemke makes a sound argument for science education to look beyond its own discourses toward

those like cultural studies and politics, and to which I would add globalisation theory and relevant

educational studies. Hence, in this study I draw together a range of investigations to argue that globalisation

is indeed implicated in the discourses of science education, even if it remains underacknowledged and

undertheorized. Establishing this relationship is important because it provides different frames of reference

from which to investigate many of science education’s current concerns, including those new forces that

now have a direct impact on science classrooms. For example, one important question to investigate is the

degree to which current science education improvement discourses are the consequences of quality research

into science teaching and learning, or represent national and local responses to global economic

restructuring and the imperatives of the supranational institutions that are largely beyond the control of

science education. Developing globalisation as a theoretical construct to help formulate new questions and

methods to examine these questions can provide science education with opportunities to expand the

conceptual and analytical frameworks of much of its present and future scholarship.

� 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 561–580, 2005

The term ‘‘globalisation’’ has come to depict the recent global economic, political, and social

transformations that have profoundly reorganized capitalism in the West, and developed new

modes by which we interpret our world (Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002; Delanty, 2000). Jameson

(1998) is one of many social theorists who group the various characterizations of globalisation into

the ‘‘twin, and not altogether commensurate, faces’’ (p. 56) of hegemonic and universalizing

economic–political globalism, and the fragmented, diverse, and opening cultural form (see also

Beck, 2000; Tomlinson, 1999). Within the former, the processes of convergence inherent in

modernity’s push toward global order fosters an increasingly universalized homogenization,

embodied in the structural and economic reforms of neoliberalism, the expansion of Western

culture, and the growth of supranational regulation. Sociocultural theorizations, on the other hand,

Correspondence to: L. Carter; E-mail: [email protected]

DOI 10.1002/tea.20066

Published online 24 March 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

� 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

emphasize the divergence in local adaptations of larger global forces so that diversity, identity, and

fragmentation become the leitmotifs of the global age (Paolini, 1999). Thus, globalisation can be

thought of as a complex dialectic of both political–economic and sociocultural transformations,

which is as likely to enhance the local as it is the universal or global. These new systems of

governance and control have unleashed a whole range of forces that are still to be fully configured

even as they work themselves into the materiality of the everyday (Jameson, 1998).

As education proceeds within the larger historical, social, and political apparatus to which it

responds (Britzman, 1998), it is increasingly clear that contemporary education, including science

education, needs to be considered in tandem with globalisation as the dominant logic at work,

rethinking and reconfiguring the social and cultural landscape in which it is embedded.

Globalisation and education become mutually implicative categories with knowledge globalisa-

tion’s fundamental resource, and education as a major player in its production, rationalization,

distribution, and transmission. Not surprisingly many educational studies are rapidly expanding as

they begin to investigate these relationships. Educational policy studies, for example, are

increasingly inquiring into the knowledge/power implications of global economic and political

restructuring manifest in various educational reform agendas (see Apple, 2001; Astiz, Wiseman,

& Baker, 2002; Carnoy, 2000; Daun, 2002; Levin, 1998; Li, 2003; Lingard & Rizvi, 1998; Morrow

& Torres, 2000; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000; Torres, 2002; Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002),

while globalised cultural flows and diversity have begun to be explored within comparative and

multicultural education discourses (e.g., McCarthy & Dimitriadis, 2000; McCarthy, Giardina,

Harewood, & Park, 2003; Stoer & Cortesao, 2000).

Other educational studies, however, have remained relatively silent on the whole question of their

relationship to globalisation (see Gough, 1999; McLaren & Fischman, 1998). Science education is one

such area evident from the few references to globalisation in its literature (exceptions include Drori,

2000; Gough, 1999, 2003; McKinley, Scantlebury, & Jesson, 2001). A brief review of the types of

manuscripts submitted to this journal for publication illustrates this point. As a leading science

education research journal, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) can be regarded as

representative of much science education scholarship, attracting a broad range of research from those

who aspire to international recognition for their work. In the period January to December 2001,

the editors considered 139 articles and grouped them into the categories summarized in Figure 1 (see

Lemanowski, Baker, & Piburn [2002], ‘‘Editorial: Report From the Editors’’).

Figure 1. Current research ‘‘Hot Topics.’’ (Adapted from Editorial [Lemanowski et al., 2002], National

Association for Research in Science Teaching. Reprinted with permission of Wiley-Liss, Inc., a subsidiary of

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

562 CARTER

Research on teachers, their education, and their knowledge and beliefs, and investigations

into learning and learning theories accounted for about 45% of all the submissions. Studies

designed to investigate science education’s relationships with its broader social, cultural, political,

or global context were few in number. Other submissions included studies on curriculum

development, achievement, attitudes, and so on, indicating that the traditional trajectories of

science education continue to hold a great deal of sway in its research agenda. Similarly, a review

of the contents of other prominent science education journals, including Science Education,

International Journal of Science Education, Research in Science and Technological Education,

Research in Science Education, and Journal of Science Teacher Education, reveals comparable

trends (Carter, 2002). Even within the large scientific literacy literature that situates science in its

social contexts and argues for students to better understand and make critical judgments about

science as a cultural, and now global force, the complexities of our increasingly globalised world

and technoscientific society are not well elaborated (this is obvious in accounts by De Boar, 2000;

Goodrum, Hackling, & Rennie, 2001; Hurd, 2002; Millar & Osborne, 1998).

Like Lemke (2001), I believe that science education has not looked enough at the impact of

the changing theoretical and global landscape by which it is produced and shaped. Lemke (2001)

makes a sound argument for science education to look beyond its own discourses toward those like

cultural studies and politics, and to which I would add globalisation theory and relevant

educational studies. Hence, in this study I draw together a range of studies to argue that

globalisation is indeed implicated in the discourses of science education, even if it remains

underacknowledged and undertheorized. Establishing this relationship is important because it

provides different frames of reference from which to investigate many of science education’s

current concerns, including those new forces that now have a direct impact on science classrooms.

For example, one important question to investigate is the degree to which current science

education improvement discourses are the consequences of quality research into science teaching

and learning, or represent national and local responses to global economic restructuring and the

imperatives of the supranational institutions that are largely beyond the control of science

education. Developing globalisation as a theoretical construct to help formulate new questions and

methods to examine these questions can provide science education with opportunities to expand

the conceptual and analytical frameworks of much of its present and future scholarship.

Methodological Approach

I approach this study in the manner of an interpretative review as described by Eisenhart

(1998) and others (see Livingston, 1999; Meacham, 1998; Schwandt, 1998) as a fluid and dynamic

discussion consistent with the spirit of interpretative scholarship. Conventionally, literature

reviews have sought to synthesize ideas as overviews of knowledge to date in order to prefigure

further research (Murray & Raths, 1994). Eisenhart (1998), however, describes interpretative

reviews as tools to ‘‘inform particular meanings and reveal alternative ways of making sense’’

(p. 397). This is consistent with Haggerson’s (1991) description of critical philosophical inquiry

that attempts to give meaning and enhance understanding of activities or institutions, bring their

norms of governance to consciousness, and find criteria by which to make appropriate judgments.

This type of philosophical criticism is ‘‘concerned with histories, contexts, specifics, contingen-

cies, and constructions’’ (p. 47), and focuses on ‘‘written texts (as) texts of thoughts and actions’’

(p. 54). It is achieved, Haggerson (1991) argues, by identifying, informing and explicating the

methodological and ontological assumptions in the field under inquiry, and making comparison

with other traditions for more insightful analyses. Thus, in this study I follow Eisenhart (1998) and

Haggerson (1991), and review texts from educational policy literature interested in the impact of

GLOBALISATION AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 563

globalisation, and of science education, to ‘‘bring their norms to consciousness’’ in order to make

comparisons that can elucidate more insightful analyses of science education. Its worth noting that

these types of textual approaches to research are not common within science education

scholarship despite having long traditions within the humanities, and having been utilized by

prominent scholars within education and qualitative methodologies more generally (see, e.g.,

Britzman, 1998; Cherryholmes, 1999; Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Tierney & Lincoln, 1997). They

have the potential to extend the types of analyses of interest to science education.

In the limited space available I concentrate on economic–political globalisation, leaving the

sociocultural characterization for another discussion. Even so, it is a large task that only becomes

possible by reviewing representative investigations in these fields. For instance, I surveyed the

abstracts or full articles over the last 5 years of prominent science education research journals such

as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, International Journal of

Science Education, Studies in Science Education, Research in Science and Technological

Education, Research in Science Education, and Journal of Science Teacher Education. Texts were

also selected from various national and state science education policy documents and reports,

selected monographs, conference papers, and the like, either known to me or other experts in the

field. Finally, I completed key word searches of databases including ERIC, UNCOVER,

PROQUEST, and so on, and tracked recent publications in university libraries and

www.amazon.com. I used a similar approach to review educational policy literature and

globalisation theory field. Although obviously not an exhaustive review, it is nonetheless sufficient

to sketch out some aspects of the relationship between globalisation and science education, and to

suggest directions for further research.

At the same time, however, there are many conceptual and methodological difficulties

involved in grappling with the intricacies of a macro discourse like globalisation that is itself

rapidly changing, and a complex field like science education. Harvey’s (2000) notion of scales as

the different geographical, discursive, temporal, and communitarian sites at the level of the global,

national, community, and household/personal can be useful in conceptualizing these difficulties.

Harvey (2002) argues that we simultaneously inhabit and relationally translate across these

spatiotemporal scales in changing and flexible ways. Within this frame, science education occurs

in all these sites concurrently, not in the sense of nested hierarchies, but as overlapping fields that

interact and focus our attention on relational processes (Swyngedouw, 1997). In other words,

science education is an overlapping and relational array of all its constituent parts operating on all

levels simultaneously. As our material embodiedness in the circumstances of a localized life

inevitably privileges local scales, science education becomes a local everyday practice with all

the confluence of influences pertinent there, as well as being of, within, and translated across the

broader spatial scales. Hence, Harvey’s (2000) thinking allows for local situations to be explored

in science education at the same time that broader trends and contexts are conflated to develop

generalized patterns theorizing the effects of globalisation on science education. Consequently,

I can use examples both from my own local circumstances or other local situations to illustrate

some of the broader scale trends developed from conflating contexts, perspectives, and sites more

globally. Moreover, Harvey’s (2000) approach allows for aspects of science education such as

science curriculum to exemplify the broader trends within science education even though they are

clearly not isomorphic concepts. Finally, my use of the Australian colloquial spelling of

‘‘globalisation’’ with a ‘‘s,’’ rather than a ‘‘z,’’ is one more way of indicating the simultaneity of

Harvey’s (2000) scales.

The next section begins with an overview of some of the important educational policy

literature to articulate key ideas or ‘‘norms of governance’’ (after Haggerson, 1991) that are

subsequently available for comparison with science education discourses. I then briefly describe

564 CARTER

some of the salient features of science education’s current reform agendas and, by identifying

assumptions and making comparisons, go on to establish that globalisation is clearly at work in the

conceptual language science education uses, as well as in the ‘‘Science for All’’ reform movement

and its development of scientific literacy as the universalized goal of science education.

Impact of Globalisation on Education: Reviewing the Educational Policy Literature

There is a growing body of research in Australian and international educational policy

literature inquiring into the relationships between educational restructuring and economic and

political globalisation (see, e.g., Apple, 1999, 2001, 2000; Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Ball,

1998; Blackmore, 2000; Carnoy, 2000; Daun, 2002; Gerwirtz & Ball, 2000; Gillbourne &

Youdell, 2000; Levin, 1998; Li, 2003; Lingard & Rizvi, 1998; McNeil, 2000; Morrow & Torres,

2000; Ozga, 2000; Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2000; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000; Torres, 2002;

Wells, Slayton, & Scott, 2002; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998). Most scholars acknowledge the

impact on education of the reformed relationship between the nation state, capital, and individuals

precipitated by globalisation (see Brown & Lauder, 1996). Furthermore, most argue that the

discourses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism are the salient influences here, reforming

education along new ideological lines (see, e.g., Apple, 2001; Ball, 2000; Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002;

de Alba, 2000; Hickey, 2000; Peters, Marshall, & Fitzsimmons, 2000; Wells et al., 2002).

Neoliberal and Neoconservative Reforms

Neoliberalism is an economic and political fundamentalism that generalizes the economic

form to all human conduct (Burchell, 1993). Although neoliberalism and globalisation are distinct

phenomena, their intimate intertwining that sees neoliberalism open economic and political

entities to globalisation, and globalisation foster neoliberalism, ensures that neoliberalism is

generally regarded as the ideology of globalisation (Monkman & Baird, 2002). Applied to

education, the powerful ideologies restructuring the global economy, in concert with

supranational institutions like the World Bank, both discursively and structurally determine the

ways in which education can exist worldwide. For Carnoy and Rhoten (2002), the heart of the

relationship between education and globalisation centers on the nation state, reformed by

neoliberalism’s imperatives of reduced governance and the rule of markets. This has commonly

meant that national/state public sectors are required to minimize costs as they simultaneously

expand their educational systems for increased economic potential, and have employed the twin

reform tendencies of decentralization and centralization. Decentralization devolves adminis-

trative and other structures to local sites, whereas centralization reconstitutes selected areas of

strategic and federal control with procedures for increased regulation, surveillance, and

accountability. Drawing on a combination of new institutional economics, new managerialism,

and performativity (Ball, 1998, 2000), both tendencies involve incentives for institutional change,

the adoption of business practices such as privatization, strategic planning and quality assurance,

and the construction of performance within a flow of indicators or standards.

Neoliberalism sits closely with neoconservatism aimed at reasserting Eurocentric cultural

control, despite these global transformations. Neoliberal and neoconservative forces work in

tandem to marketize and reform and, as reform proceeds, to (re)distribute power back to

traditional elites, effectively rejecting recent progressive liberal moves to increase equality and

social redress. Neoconservatism seeks to protect the ‘‘Canon’’ from the contamination of com-

peting narratives and practices newly available in the globalising world. It has also helped redefine

democracy as largely synonymous with capitalism, so that consumption becomes the new form of


democratic participation, and equity becomes isomorphic with increased choice (Apple, 2001;

Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000). As the defining ideologies of the global age, neoliberalism and neo-

conservatism have become sedimented into a type of common sense that not only evades specific

political control, but sees their further advance as both essential and inevitable (Bennett, 2001).

The forces of decentralization and centralization have worked to reshape national education

in Australia, and even within countries like the United States that have traditionally been highly

decentralized and autonomous (Daun, 2002). Decentralization pressures have restructured public

education through systems-level reforms that include privatization, corporatization, managerial

intensification, increased accountability, internal competition, and devolved responsibility, as

well as fewer restrictions on institutional infrastructures. These changes aim to overcome

perceived inefficiencies of public education, thereby achieving large gains with fiscal restraint.

Clothed in the rhetoric of ‘‘Education for All’’ and ‘‘Life Long Learning,’’ these changes claim

wider choice, flexibility, competition, democracy, equity for all, and higher standards to improve

performance and efficiency as part of the national goals of education. Educational centralization,

manifest in the more micro practices of curricular and teacher reforms, has involved the

centralization and control of higher education performance and achievement standards. Control

can be exerted through curriculum prescription, standardized testing, and other auditing

procedures across a range of performance indicators that constitute both schools and systems as

performative spaces providing increasing amounts of feedback upwards. Whereas Hickey (2000)

identifies decentralization and centralization tendencies as somewhat inconsistent, Apple (1999)

sees them as also complementary with information supplied through increased surveillance

enabling markets to make choices between options and thus work better as markets.

Educational Standards

For Apple (1999, 2000), educational standards embody both neoliberal needs for increased

accountability, surveillance, and regulation as well neoconservative desires for a return to ‘‘real

knowledge.’’ Similarly, for Carnoy and Rhoten (2000), they are part of broader efforts to measure

national knowledge production and hold education workers (usually teachers) accountable. Levin

(1998) traces the call for higher educational standards to the publication, A Nation at Risk (1983),

implicating education in the United States’ declining economic fortunes at that time. Although he

argues that there is little evidence to support the link between economic outcomes and educational

standards, the continuing belief in a causal association has provided a pervasive rationale for their

adoption. Meadmore (2001) elaborates the surveillance and regulation mechanisms of these

standards, drawing on theoretical positions of Foucault and Lyotard. Using a Foucauldian view of

the productive nature of power, Meadmore (2001) argues that central governments deploy tests of

standards as legitimate tactics in a panopticon technology that monitors and positions all students,

teachers, classes, and schools. Better results are always credited to appropriate government or

centralized policy, whereas problems become the consequences of poor implementation and

performance. ‘‘(T)he onus is squarely on schools, teachers and students to lift their game’’

(Meadmore, 2001, p. 27). Governments and power brokers can claim to be efficient managers of

the educational resources shifting the discourse away from better and more equitable educational

provision, and the endemic sociocultural and structural factors responsible for educational

inequities. Consistent with Lyotard (1979), Meadmore (2001) goes on to argue that knowledge

must be commodified to be available and manageable in globalised information economies. The

standards and testing regimes can ‘‘slice and dice’’ knowledge into useful fragments for easier

comparison, regulation, and delivery. Good test results become the evidence of value-added

educational productivity.

566 CARTER

New curriculum standards, for example, have come to define both ‘‘official’’ knowledge

within disciplines, and the learner’s disciplinary needs. Although competing interests vie to

influence curriculum standards, Apple (1999) argues that, as more flexible and audacious

innovations have been difficult to implement, traditional neoconservatives agendas seeking

canonical knowledge, as a way of reasserting cultural control, have prevailed. Consequently, many

curricula have a ‘‘back-to-the-future’’ feel about them with an oversimplistic 1950s sensibility,

rather than an orientation toward the complex realities of educating in/for the postmodern global

world. Taken together, the centralizing tendencies of the curricular reforms and standardized

testing frame the issues and discursively construct our thinking about what educational progress

should look like, effectively precluding other perspectives and possibilities (Monkman & Baird,

2002).

Reviewing Relevant Science Education Literature

Current Science Education Reforms

Although many would regard science education as having been in reform one way or another

since its emergence as a separate field in the 1960s (see Fensham, 1992), in common with most

other areas of education, science education has recently undergone a contemporary phase of

pervasive reform. In many parts of the world, this reform has been consistent with the

decentralizing and centralizing tendencies just described. A powerful influence on this latest phase

of reform has been the American reports, Project 2061: Science for All Americans (American

Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989) and the National Academy of Science’s

National Science Education Standards (National Science Council, 1996). These documents were

produced in response to the perceived crisis in science education, and its implicated role in

international challenges to the technoscientific supremacy, and the subsequent declining

economic fortunes, of the United States identified in A Nation at Risk (1983). Together with

other similar reports, Project 2061 and the National Science Education Standards reiterated the

prevailing orthodoxy in place since the Second World War in national policies of many countries,

that of ‘‘science, and by extension science education, for economic development’’ (see Drori,

2000). This model established the causal link between the amount and type of science taught, the

objectives of national economic development, and international competitiveness. It took a

utilitarian view of science, and assumed that a systematic program for the development of a

scientifically and technologically skilled workforce would lead to greater economic progress.

Despite the dominance of this developmental model, Drori (2000) has shown that its policy

assumptions have been tested rarely, and any evidence provided by the small number of studies

investigating the connection between science education and economic development are, at best,

inconclusive. Nonetheless, Project 2061 and the National Science Education Standards have been

highly influential within this conceptual model and, through their international dissemination,

have, in effect, crystallized the directions for the curricula and teaching reform agendas for science

education globally.

Like many countries, Australia was influenced by Project 2061 and comparable British

reports into science, technology, economic development, and education. Consequently,

Australian science education developed national standards very similar to those produced by

the American National Science Council on the substantive content of science education (Dekkars

& de Laeter, 2001). In general terms, these standards identify suitable scientific knowledge, and

promote changes in teaching and learning practices. For example, in the Australian state of

Victoria, from which I write, the official school curriculum now comprises standards-based,


planning documents known as the Curriculum and Standards Framework (CSF) (Board of Studies,

1995, 2000), organized into eight key learning areas (KLA), two of which are science and

technology. They are the basis for curriculum planning and implementation, and student reporting,

for the compulsory years of schooling (Preparatory–Year 10).

Science standards like those of the CSF and the American National Science Council can be

expressed in a rhetoric of access, equity, and diversity, or conceptualized in precise and predictive

terms. They are frequently benchmarked against international ‘‘best practice’’ and performance

through state, national, and international testing regimes. Hence, not only have we seen regular

standardized testing in Victoria through the Assessment Improvement Monitor (AIM) that

attempts to use testing as a mechanism to improve student performance, the National Education

Performance Monitoring Taskforce (NEPMT), established in 1999, is planning to implement a

national monitoring of primary science achievement (Goodrum et al., 2001). In addition, like the

other Australian states, we have also participated in the recent Third International Math and

Science Study (TIMSS), and will participate in 2006 in the OECD’s Programme for International

Student Assessment (OECD/PISA) evaluation of scientific literacy in the 15-year-old cohort.

Goodrum et al. (2001) suggest that the OECD/PISA assessments represent a new commitment by

OECD countries to monitor outcomes of education systems in terms of the functional knowledge

and skills. Participation in these assessments indicates the increasing acceptance of tests of student

knowledge as a means of providing information for a range of purposes, including surveillance,

auditing, and accountability.

Importance of Scientific Literacy

Project 2061, the Victorian CSF, the National Science Education Standards, and other

similar, usually state-based, science education reform documents aim to achieve their purposes

through the development of scientific literacy as the main goal of science education. Embodied

within the slogan of ‘‘Science for All,’’ by which these reforms have become known, scientific

literacy is regarded as an essential characteristic for living in a world increasingly shaped by

science and technoscience. It argues equity considerations demand all should have available to

them an education in science of an appropriate type and standard. First coined as a term in the

1950s, scientific literacy has not always been regarded as an important goal for science education.

Earlier science curricula and practices contextualized within the political and economic agendas

of the Cold War, and an unbridled confidence in the social benefits and utility of science, were

explicitly aimed at training the small and elite group of vocational scientists and engineers. Over

the decades, however, this approach proved to be in tension with a more general education required

by the diverse learners staying on longer at school (Fensham, 1992, 1997). Consequently,

scientific literacy was among those ideas that gradually grew in prominence as more suitable goals

for science education.

De Boar (2000) argues that, despite its widespread endorsement, the meaning of scientific

literacy has remained highly contested, and can be interpreted across a range of complex

conceptualizations. He has traced its historical pathway through a number of significant

government position papers, policies, reports, scholarship, and calls for reform. He concludes

there are up to nine meanings of scientific literacy that include scientific literacy as a goal for

science education, including understanding science as a particular way of examining the natural

world; exploring science as a culture force; learning science as part of a liberal, humanist

education; being able to apply science to socially just and redistributive ends; learning science as

preparation for work; teaching students to be informed citizens who are able to utilize scientific

and technological everyday applications; and so on. De Boar’s (2000) overview of scientific

568 CARTER

literacy is important because he uses it to argue that the vision of scientific literacy adopted within

Project 2061 and the National Science Education Standards was particularly narrow. He draws

from the documents themselves to show that this version of scientific literacy is based on the

achievement of sets of content standards of scientific knowledge, with scientifically literate

students becoming those able to meet these standards.

Some indication of the extent to which this narrower meaning of scientific literacy has grown

to become the overall goal of science education comes from its inclusion as one of three domains in

the OECD/PISA program of international testing scheduled for 2006 (the other domains are

mathematics and language literacy). Goodrum et al. (2001) comment on the similarities between

OECD/PISA’s version of scientific literacy and that of Project 2061 and the National Science

Education Standards, arguing it represents strong international agreement about the nature and

importance of scientific literacy as an outcome of schooling. OECD/PISA defines scientific

literacy in a way that allows it to be easily testable internationally. It will require students to

demonstrate understanding of 13 major scientific concepts, and scientific processes including

recognizing scientifically investigable questions, identifying evidence needed in a scientific

investigation, drawing or evaluating conclusions, and communicating valid conclusions. In this

context, it is hardly surprising that Australia has also adopted this narrower version of scientific

literacy as its overall goal of science education. The recent report for the Department of Education,

Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA), entitled The Status and Quality of Teaching and Learning in

Australian Schools (Goodrum et al., 2001), argues that scientific literacy ‘‘is fundamental to

quality teaching and learning in science’’ (p. 11), and of national importance in the promotion of

public acceptance of scientific and technological change, flexibility, and competition in the global

marketplace. Goodrum et al.’s (2001) report is significant in the Australian context because it

outlines future directions for science education in the country.

Reach of Reform Discourses

Perhaps paradoxically, although the current phase of reform is an important feature of

contemporary science education internationally, and is at the core of many government reports,

policy documents, and other scholarship, there is only a small amount of science education

research directly interested in its documentation and analysis (Lemke, 2001). Lemanowski et al.’s

(2002) manuscript classification noted earlier indicates, for example, that only 6 of the 139

manuscripts considered for publication in JRST in 2001 were devoted to reform and policy issues.

Moreover, as editors of JRST, Gallagher and Richmond (1999) identified the lack of formal, long-

term scholarship on reform and called for more research around teacher education and policy

development (see also Gallagher, 2000, 2001). Similarly, Flick and Lederman (2002), as editors of

the journal School Science and Mathematics, have recently called for more studies on reform.

Consequently, analyses within science education research of the decentralizing tendencies

recognized within the educational policy literature as indicative of neoliberal reform, are rare.

Drori (2000) is one of a handful of researchers investigating the implications of decentralizing and

macro systems–level reforms on science education. Although there are more analyses of the

centralizing standards and testing regimes, these too are relatively scarce. Some examples include

the discussion of standards-based curricula in various Australian states (Cross, 1997; Ninnes,

2001; Plant, 2000), within Canada (McNay, 2000), the United States (Bianchini & Kelly, 2003;

Rodriguez, 1997), and in England and Wales (Donnelly, 2001; Jenkins, 2000); calls for

professional development (Ehlers, 2002; Goldsmith & Pasquale, 2002; Luft, 2001; van Driel,

Beijaard, & Verloop, 2001); reform dimensions and further research (Anderson & Helms, 2001);

investigations of inquiry-based pedagogies (Keys & Bryan, 2001); changing teachers’ beliefs


(Weiseman & Padilla, 1999); comparative international testing (Harlen, 2001), TIMSS (Olson,

1999); classroom assessment (Atkin, Black, & Coffey, 2001; Settlage & Meadows, 2002; Stern &

Ahlgren, 2002); and teacher education (Abell, 2001). Although these and similar studies are

variously positioned, most reform-centered scholarship tends to be noncritical accounts interested

in the various issues of better implementation (exceptions include Bianchini & Kelly, 2003; Cross,

1997; McNay, 2000; Rodriguez, 1997; Settlage & Meadows, 2002). In this vein, Anderson and

Helms (2001) isolate the aspects of needed research necessary for reform agendas to be forwarded,

whereas Flick and Lederman (2002) argue the importance of closer scrutiny of classroom

implementation. A few of the studies tie the reforms to continuing economic prosperity and

competiveness (see, e.g., Ehlers, 2002; Goldsmith & Pasquale, 2002), but none identify

globalisation as the macro sets of conditions ultimately responsible for generating these reforms.

More commonly, the contemporary reforms are mentioned in the science education research

literature almost in passing, their antecedents glossed over, as a taken-for-granted contextualizing

backdrop or raison d’etre to whatever aspect of science education is being elaborated in the

particular study at the time. Typical here would be Gallagher and Richmond’s (1999) uncritical

observation that ‘‘(s)ignificantly, interest in such reforms emerged virtually simultaneously

around the globe, and its language is now part of prominent rhetoric used by scientists, educators,

and policy makers in many parts of the world’’ (p. 753). Similarly, Plant (2000) in less than a

sentence, comments on the perceived inadequacy of the science taught in Australian schools that

‘‘led to the implementation of the National Curriculum Profiles’’ (p. 164). It is also apparent from

the science education literature I have reviewed that the reform agendas are just as often not

mentioned, and many strands of science education research proceed as they always have done,

focused on the micro practices of one sort or another around teaching, learning, and the classroom.

Yet, whether or not the reforms are acknowledged, they are nonetheless embedded within/

behind much science education scholarship. They are present, for example, within the promotion

of scientific literacy as the universally generalized goal of science education that many research

studies invoke within their opening paragraphs as a taken-for-granted point from which their work

proceeds. The recent tendencies identified by De Boar (2000) and Laugksch (2000), which

conflate scientific literacy with the mastery of content standards and measurable outcomes of all

types, refigures scientific literacy as a type of shorthand for the progression and sedimentation of

reform agendas. It shifts the broad, albeit problematic conceptualization of scientific literacy with

the potential to meet learners’ diverse needs, to a narrow and instrumental construct, universally

able to be implemented and tested and, consequently, able to meet the requirements of

neoliberalism’s strategic control through procedures of surveillance and accountability. Also, it

ignores the considerable scholarship that has explored other tendencies in the scientific literacy of

the general public (see, e.g., Fensham, Law, Li, & Wei, 2000; Irwin & Wynne, 1996). From within

this frame, Laugksch’s (2000) observation that many believe scientific literacy to be so pervasive

that it now encompasses everything to do with science education, suggests the reach of the reform

agendas is extensive indeed. The reform agendas are also embedded behind the ‘‘Science for All’’

rhetoric of the equity and cultural diversity literature, blossoming as a consequence of increased

global flows (Lee, 2001; Lynch, 2001; Stanley & Brickhouse, 2001). As a case in point, by arguing

that ‘‘Science for All’’ demands equity issues be addressed so ‘‘all students (can) achieve high

academic standards’’ (p. 499), Lee (2001) gives as much currency to the standards agenda as she

does to the cultural equity issues upon which her article is focused.

Hence, although the research literature on the contemporary phase of science education

reform itself is small, reform agendas nonetheless permeate a much broader range of science

education and its scholarship, through the conceptual language it uses as well as the vastly

refigured agendas of scientific literacy and ‘‘Science for All.’’ That these tendencies remain

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largely unacknowledged within science education research exemplifies Britzman’s (1998, p. 80)

‘‘passion for ignorance.’’ Derived from psychoanalytic theories of education, Britzman’s (1998)

formulation of a subject’s capacity to be unencumbered by what it need not know, by its ‘‘passion

for ignorance,’’ act to construct normalcy, she argues, as the great unmarked within educational

sites. The collective ‘‘passion for ignorance,’’ displayed by the paucity of particularly critical

science education scholarship on reform, acts to normalize the reform agendas and discourses

within/of science education, ensuring they become the ‘‘great unmarked’’ and, consequently, are

underacknowledged and undertheorized. In this way, the reform discourses come to be the

sanctioned discursive structures of science education, able to determine what science education

should look like, and effectively precluding other perspectives and possibilities as they

consolidate their grasp on our collective imaginations (see Monkman & Baird, 2002).

Linking the Educational Policy Literature to Science Education Discourses

The educational policy literature has shown that interpreting the relationships between

education and globalisation in terms of neoliberal and neoconservative decentralized and

centralized reform tendencies has enabled useful perspectives on many current educational

developments. When this thinking, or ‘‘norms of governance,’’ becomes available for comparison

with science education discourses in the manner of Haggerson’s (1991) critical philosophical

inquiry, more insightful analyses of science education are possible, and the relationship between

globalisation and science education can be elucidated.

Establishing the Impact of Globalisation on Science Education

Through the Reform Discourses

Although an overt acknowledgment of the relationship between globalisation and science

education is mostly absent from the science education literature, the clearest manifestation of

globalisation within science education is in the pervasive reach of the recent science education

reform agendas embodied within the movements of ‘‘Science for All’’ and scientific literacy.

These reforms can be viewed as part of the centralizing tendencies derived from the larger

discourses of neoliberal and neoconservative national/state public sector reform that has sought to

minimize costs as educational systems are simultaneously expanded for increased economic

potential and the reassertion of Eurocentric cultural control. This has resulted in the widespread

adoption of the hegemonic and homogenizing educational model favoring self-regulation through

curriculum and teaching standards coupled to sophisticated regimes of surveillance. This model

has been comprehensively described in the educational policy literature as a consequence of

globalisation’s extension of the enterprise form to education. As knowledge is globalisation’s

fundamental resource and education is essential to its production and distribution, the imperatives

for education reform, including science education reform, have been largely generated beyond

national borders, ideologically conceived, discursively structured, and ultimately regulated by

supranational institutions without consultation with the broader educational research community.

Although economic imperatives for science education are not new, what is new is the unique

combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism ideologies in which they are now embedded.

Neoliberalism ‘‘marketizes’’ everything, even notions of subjectivity, desire, success, democracy,

and citizenship, in economic terms at the same time neoconservatism works to preserve traditional

forms of privilege and marginalize authentic democratic and social justice agendas. More sinister

still is the success with which both ideologies have colonized the rhetoric so at the very time

reforms appear to be more just and equitable, they actually work in opaque ways against those they


purport to help. The educational policy literature identifies considerable empirical evidence of

increasing inequality where marketization processes increase competition and concentrate

limited resources in affluent schools while the poorest schools continue to be underresourced with

specific racial, ethnic, and/or class needs. Moreover, there is a conservative effect on the

curriculum as market-driven approaches discourage real innovation designed for social redress.

(See discussions on inequality and other issues as education is universally made-over by

globalisation in studies by Apple [2001], Ball [2000], Blackmore [2000], Chitty [1997],

Gillbourne & Youdell [2000], Lauder & Hughes [1999], Louden [2000], McNeil [2000],

Popkewitz [2000], Skria [2001], Thompson [1999], Thrupp [1999], Whitty, Power, & Halpin

[1998].) In much the same way as the reforms have been problematized within the educational

policy literature, science education needs to problematize its reforms so the connections to

globalisation and its ideologies can be fully investigated and elaborated.

Looking at the science curriculum standards exemplifies these trends. In general terms, we can

see in science curriculum standards the same neoconservative desire for ‘‘real knowledge’’ where

legitimated agents, in this case academic scientists and selected science education professionals,

work to reassert canonical control, alongside the neoliberal desires for increased surveillance,

accountability, and regulation. Fensham’s (1992, 1997) critique of Project 2061, for instance, makes

apparent the neoconservative agenda within prominent science education policy and curriculum

documents. He identifies the top-down approach of its academic scientists and their promotion of

conceptually based Western science, and argues that the report recapitulated the reforms of the

1950s/1960s, formulating science as a body of objectified knowledge and methodology. Similarly,

Cross (1997) finds the regressive imprint of some academic scientists keen to reinforce existing

power structures for elite science on the Victorian Science CSF (Board of Studies, 1995, 2000).

Cross (1997) maps the congruence between the science curriculum from the mid-1960s and the

Science CSF’s promotion of ‘‘real science’’ (i.e., modern Western science), exposing the Science

CSF as a highly conservative unconnected collection of facts and concepts. In one of numerous other

examples, Bianchini and Kelly (2003) describe the Californian science curricula standards as a long

list of scientific facts students are expected to master. They note the regressive flavor of ‘‘received

wisdom’’ apparent in the standards that ultimately locates control beyond the classroom as it

marginalizes teachers’ expertise. In these examples, as in many others too numerous to describe

here, neoconservative forces have envisaged school science, yet again, as a steady induction into a

particularized canonical version of science, despite new views emerging from fields like science

studies and multiculturalism that have broadened our understandings of science. They recapitulate

the 1950s/1960s curriculum projects into contemporary standards-based science curricula that Hurd

(2002) observes is simply ‘‘updating the traditional principles and generalizations of science

disciplines and labelling them standards’’ (p. 5).

The science reform agendas also perform the neoliberal desire for increased surveillance,

regulation, and accountability apparent, for instance, in the increasing acceptance of standardized

student tests. In a climate where the need to develop measurable definitions for OECD/PISA

testing has conflated scientific literacy within a narrow range of indicators, the Australian National

Education Performance Monitoring Taskforce is considering using the OECD/PISA framework

to assess scientific literacy as part of a national scheme to monitor science outcomes (Goodrum

et al., 2001). It is clear that if such a scheme were implemented, there would be a further narrowing

of Australian science curricula in directions that would facilitate the achievement of the specific

outcomes. Similarly, many states in the United States, now routinely assess achievement in

science. Meadmore’s (2001) analysis of testing regimes can readily be applied here. Productive of

both power and performativity such that students, classes, schools, or systems must show

quantifiable results, testing regimes monitor scientific outcomes and position everyone so that

572 CARTER

improvements can be claimed and deficiencies blamed. Moreover, Cross’s (1997) description of

the Science CSF as a fragmented collection of unconnected facts and concepts fits closely with

Meadmore’s (2001) Lyotardian view of knowledge as ‘‘sliced-and-diced,’’ readily available, and

easily decoded in the commodified market. Good test results, including the OECD/PISA scientific

literacy indicators, are constructed as the value-added productivity, reiterating Carnoy and

Rhoten’s (2002) point about the global economy’s need to measure national knowledge

production and hold education workers (usually teachers) accountable. The resultant information

allows markets to work as markets, and select between options available in globalised information

economies (Apple, 1999). Seen in this light, Harlen’s (2001) inability to explore the driving

imperatives of globalisation in her review of the OECD/PISA scientific literacy assessments, in a

manner similar to Meadmore’s (2001) analysis of testing regimes, suggests a somewhat limited

perspective.

In summary then, it is clear that neoliberal and neoconservative education reform agendas of

globalisation permeate a broad range of science education. Science education works somewhere

in the spaces between globally influenced nation state policy production, and local sites of

practice, strongly influenced by traditional trajectories of science education. Consequently, there

is a naturalization of globalisation’s shaping forces, influencing and changing science education in

ways that remain largely underacknowledged and opaque. To answer the question posed earlier,

I would argue that the current science education improvement discourses are more representative

of national responses to global economic restructuring and the imperatives of the supranational

institutions than they are of quality research into science teaching and learning. These

relationships have remained unexplored because, I suggest, science education principally inhabits

a realistic paradigm that tends to be interested in its traditional areas rather than contemporary

social and cultural issues prominent in the broader social sciences of which it is a part. (I recognize

the smaller critical and oppositional literature studies within science education are exceptions to

these comments.) These issues include a closer examination of the regulative and productive

aspects of power/knowledge relationships of dominant discourses (see Lemke, 2001). In a similar

vein, Kyle (2001) argues science education needs to question its foundational canons and revise its

existing frameworks. Such perspectives are crucial for moving beyond science education’s

conventional categories of analysis, and recognizing and analyzing the impacts of globalisation on

science education.

Toward a Research Agenda for Investigating

Science Education’s Relationship to Globalisation

The educational policy literature has established the large degree of international

convergence in globalisation’s reforms of education, regardless of a nation’s political inclination

or economic position (see Daun, 2002). However, the degree of implementation and outcomes of

the model vary considerably due to the unique sets of logics, traditions, and teleologies across

educational contexts (Astiz et al., 2002; Carnoy & Rhoten, 2002; Daun, 2002). Consequently, the

educational policy literature calls for more scholarship to elaborate the adoption and adaptation of

these reforms at national, regional, and local levels, so that their influences on and implications for

educational practices at all sites, including the teaching/learning interface, can be better under-

stood. Similarly, science education’s relationship to globalisation needs to be further elaborated to

provide different perspectives and to tease out the implications of the forces that have a direct

impact on science classrooms (Astiz et al., 2002). Such insights are necessary to extend science

education’s conceptual and analytical frameworks of much of its present and future scholarship.

As most of this thinking remains to be done, there is only space here to raise a few possibilities.


First, researching globalisation’s impact on science education could forge some new and

different scholarship directions. For example, there is potential for close analyses of policy

documents, curriculum projects, research studies, and a range of other science education policy

texts using key concepts from globalisation theory and education policy. Bianchini and Kelly’s

(2003) excellent discussion of the California science standards, for instance, would benefit from a

clearer understanding of the links between the standards as neoliberal mechanisms of control and

their driving imperatives generated from beyond California. In Australia, Goodrum et al.’s (2001)

influential report promoting ‘‘scientific literacy for all,’’ could be deconstructively read to examine

and judge the adequacy of the authors’ theoretical discussion against the global imperatives for

change. Also, although research critically examining the increased surveillance and regulation of

standards regimes is just becoming available (see, e.g., Pushkin, 2002; Settlage & Meadows,

2002), their relationship to globalisation still needs to be elaborated. Moreover, there is scope to

investigate decentralizing tendencies and related policy issues, such as Drori’s (2000) work on

science education and global policy. Studies like these and others still to be developed may

contribute to explaining the inherent difficulties and range of issues involved when centralized

reform agendas are devolved to decentralized agents responsible for their implementation.

Beyond the policy arena and conscious of Harvey’s (2000) spatialized scales, case study

research on the relationship between globalisation and specific local sites of science education

needs to be completed. Such scholarship should focus on the nature of the interactions between the

global and the local, and how their interpenetration becomes a mediating influence to what

constitutes science education at any given site (after Monkman & Baird, 2002). This information

would provide a fuller picture of science education important for both local stakeholders and the

broader science education community to make better decisions about ways they wish to proceed.

Second, researching the relationship between science education and globalisation’s

neoliberal and neoconservative reform agendas gives us alternative frameworks for reviewing

some of science education’s current tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes. One such tension is the

apparent contradiction between the promotion of constructivist-based inquiry approaches, and

direct modes of instruction to narrow content-based standards (see Windschitl, 2002). Student-

centered constructivism is neoliberalism’s pedagogy of choice as it can produce creative and

flexible problem-solvers well adapted for the new knowledge economies of the global

marketplace (Bowers, 2003; Daun, 2002). (This relationship is only just becoming apparent in

the literature, and should in itself be of profound interest to science education.) Paradoxically, at

the same time, neoliberalism’s surveillance requirements impose auditing mechanisms like the

universalized testing of standards that encourages direct teacher instruction.

Another paradox can be seen in conceptualization of science standards, where neoliberal

demands for flexible practices appear in tension with neoconservative desires for traditional

curricula. Hurd (2002) is one of the few science education scholars to recognize that

globalisation’s massive changes to science itself ‘‘has created the demand for a reinvention

of school science’’ (p. 7). Hurd’s (2002) view is supported by Duggan and Gott’s (2002)

investigation of the science competencies required by current employees in science-based

industries. They note that, although procedural understanding was vital, conceptual understanding

was so specific that it was acquired only on a need-to-know basis, with obvious implications

for neoconservative conceptually based science curricula. Notwithstanding these developments,

investigators such as Goldsmith and Pasquale (2002) continue to call for more rigorous

conceptual understanding as part of science education reform. Similar tensions are also apparent

in the ways knowledge is constructed in the Victorian CSF. The science curriculum has

been developed as largely 19th century, canonical scientific knowledge with its few applications

presented in the postwar linear model of ‘‘pure’’ research and ‘‘applied’’ technology. By contrast,

574 CARTER

the technology curricula has been constructed as a type of post-Fordist vocationalism that

promotes generic design and problem-solving skills, intertwined research and application,

just-in-time learning, and flexible specialization, rather than the transmission of nontransferable

knowledge and skills.

These examples represent various aspects of neoliberalism and of neoconservatism that,

when considered from within a frame that understands globalisation, while clearly contradictory,

they are at the same time, complementary. This view embodies the very nature of globalisation

itself as simultaneously able to maneuver between/within/around, colonizing all contexts, and

consummate at creating the conditions for its own success. In other words, as the most macro of all

discourses, globalisation is large enough to tolerate, accommodate, and even encourage, compet-

ing and opposing tendencies, so that all bases are covered in order to maximize its success. As we

have already seen, Apple (1999) regards these tensions and contradictions as compatible with

information supplied through increased surveillance, enabling markets to make choices between

options and so work better as markets. These competing tendencies in science education conse-

quently represent different aspects of the larger discourse, and are integral to the reform processes

themselves. It becomes a moot point as to whether they should, or even could, be resolved.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, elaborating the relationship between globalisation and

science education and laying bare its core assumptions or, in Haggerson’s terms (1991), its ‘‘norms

of governance,’’ forces us to ask some hard questions of the science education reforms. To what

extent must they represent national responses to neoliberal and neoconservative global economic

restructuring and the imperatives of the supranational institutions, or can spaces be forged for

other types of reforms? It also forces us to confront again what type of science education we wish

to work toward. This remains an intensely difficult and enduring dilemma. Personally, I want to

work toward developing science education that values noncommodified forms of knowledge,

relationships, activities, and aspects of life, and that includes sustainability science, cultural

recognition, and social redistribution in its agenda. Although the form this may take is yet to be

configured, an important part of its development is elaborating the relationship between

globalisation and science education.

In conclusion, despite its widespread adoption, Daun (2002) reminds us that no firm

conclusions have yet been drawn from research into the efficacy and success of the neoliberal and

neoconservative reform model of education. It nevertheless proceeds in the same direction,

essentially ideologically driven and largely without consultation with the broader educational

research community. This does not surprise Bennett (2001) who summarizes the impasse reached

by most industrialized nation states faced with the difficult choice between quitting the

competitive world economy and risking progressive impoverishment, or participation with its

attendant risks of accelerating social disintegration. Adopting neoliberal decentralized/

centralized educational reforms among reform agendas more generally, at an ever-increasing

rate in the hope faster economic growth would remedy all shortcomings, seems to be the solution

for which most nations have opted. It is a hard place for us all to be!

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