Procedures of power and possibilities for change in science education curriculum-discourse

Concerns about planetary environmental degradation and a general drift from positive attitudes towards science in the West, at a time when children are finding their school science experiences not relevant, has led educators to declare for the second time since World War II a crisis in school science education. The rise of STS science education may be a valid response to this crisis but curriculum change is hindered by the modernistic tradition of approaching curriculum change as a technical-rational problem. The continued barrenness of this technical-rational approach is revealed in this thesis through an interpretive study of the attempt from 1980-1990 in the Canadian province of Alberta to change secondary school science education towards STS science education. The failure of this reform suggests possibilities for change in science education curriculum-discourse urgently demands a post-modern response, a search for freedom from the defining enframement of modernity. To embark on this search, this thesis explores the implications of the concept of power in the works of the philosopher Michel Foucault to understanding the nature and activity of this enframement. A Foucauldian examination of the Alberta science education curriculum-discourse reveals procedures of power that prevented change in the curriculum-discourse by defining who may speak and what may be said, thus ensuring the continuation of a curriculum-discourse no longer relevant to the situation of our present age. To avoid contributing to technical-rational approaches to change, this thesis does not present a meta-theory for analyzing procedures of power in every curriculum-discourse or a formula of how to find possibilities for change. Instead, post-modern approaches to curriculum change are explored through a presentation that weaves personal, historical, and critical narratives and uses metaphors and an allegorical retelling of the procedures of power operating in the science education curriculum-discourse of Alberta. The post-modern presentation of this thesis invites readers to enter into a conversation of critique with the text in the hope that initiating such conversations of critique on the procedures of power in a curriculum-discourse opens the discourse to new, post-modern ways of thinking that may reveal possibilities for change in science education.