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Here we are, nearly three years into the COVID-19 pandemic reflecting on the disparate effects of climate change, as well as ever growing racial injustice, health disparities, and income inequality (all of which were exacerbated by the pandemic). The timing of these two open-access volumes of Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene seems fitting; nearing two years since its release, the first volume has reached over 110,000 downloads. We remain inspired by these critical and imaginative interventions in the field of science education, specifically by the ways in which the authors of both volumes have made us think, rethink, and feel different horizons in education and life in the Anthropocene(s). Each author has created rupture, and together they have made a modest contribution to reconfiguring the landscapes of science and education (like sand bubbler crabs).

For many of us (editors, authors, comrades, compañeras) the field of science education has not always been welcoming. Nor has it always made much sense. As co-editors, we often reflect on our paths in this wild world of academia—and the particular brand of it that is Science EducationTM. How do we know it’s truly worthwhile? How do we do it with integrity and love? Along the way we have found others, kindred spirits, many of whom have been “disciplined” out or simply bewildered by the field and its insidious positionings and strange loyalties. As editors, we set out to make a space for a community of misfits (at least we describe ourselves this way), to write, and thrive, in our peculiarity.

On a very general level the effects of a discipline can be seen multiple ways, and science education researchers and pedagogues should acknowledge that science education operates as a discipline. First, a discipline exercises discipline. This is helpful and productive in some ways. It allows a differentiation of some ways of knowing and being and produces something new in the world. The disciplines of chemistry and wine making are good examples of this. However, there’s also a concomitant curtailing of difference, experimentation, and movement. As Shelia Jasanoff has written, “Disciplines cling tightly to their paradigmatic boundaries, reluctant to reflect too deeply on whether they are asking the right questions. … Disciplinary discourses come with their own tacit claims to sovereignty in the definition of problems and the crafting of solutions” (2021, p. 850).

This discipline of science education operates through specific affordances and limitations, some of which produce something worth having (e.g., justice-focused, inquiry-based learning) and some of which are violent and dangerous (excluding Indigenous ways of knowing and living). While there is much more to be said here, we contend that science education as a discipline has oftentimes veered too close to things violent and dangerous—not with malice, but rather through ignorance, self-interest, and tacit complicity with things like colonization, white supremacy, capitalism, and gender-based violence.

This book attempts to offer some relief by going in the other direction, by offering a transdisciplinary, exploratory, and justice-oriented approach that might open up the (perhaps unavoidable) limiting aspects of a discipline. With the threats posed by the many calamities of the Anthropocene, strict adherence to disciplines today might be seen as deliberately harmful and pathological, in part because “how we acquire and organize our knowledge of the world is always entangled with ideas of how we should govern it” (Jasanoff, 2021, p. 841).

We have been humbled by the responses to the call for chapters for Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene, not only because the research and scholarship shared in Volumes 1 and 2 comprise a critical transdisciplinary intervention, but also because the overwhelmingly positive response by the education community represents the growing numbers of us who are “going in the other direction.” In Volume 2, we share work from around the world that interrogates the status quo of the science education field, while also rendering it “less relevant.” It is making the “older” discipline of science education less relevant that is paradoxically important. While most of what has been taught, theorized, and practiced in science education is not so problematic, it is the prescriptive and walled-in aspects of both science and science education that prevent broad pedagogical, methodological, and ethical connection. So, in a sense, the way science education becomes more important, larger if you will, is precisely by diminishing its boundaries and restrictions. There are numerous examples of this in our second volume. From elder practices to science fiction/(re)storying pedagogies, we have encouraged authors to not hold back and/or feel like they need to pay homage to a field of science education that has already described for them—when their inspiration comes from elsewhere (as it should). As in the last volume, we also have a stellar list of interviewees that discuss things as diverse as sorrow, time, colonialism, and what it takes to place matters of care at the heart of science education!

This volume, similar to Volume 1, is divided into five parts. The first is “Kinship, Magic, and the Unthinkable.” The chapters in this section focus specifically on topics of kinship and futurity. The chapters falling under this heading in the second volume introduce pedagogical concepts like eroticism and flow in order to have us think about our cultural-geologic location in the times of ecological collapse. Lars Bang Jensen’s chapter works against the ‘dogmatic image of thought’ in science and education: a stifling image that obscures multiplicities, possibilities, and uncertainties. Jane Gilbert argues for a reset of science education based on the undeniable social and ecological transformations of the Anthropocene(s). Rachel Gisewhite’s chapter advocates for pedagogies that facilitate intimate encounters with things like oceans and geese and the very sand beneath our feet. Laura Barraza’s work explores futurity with students in Mozambique in order to make questions of uncertainty and precarity a part of everyday pedagogy and research.

The second part is entitled “Anti-colonial Anthropocene(s),” and recognizes that the Anthropocene as an overarching geological label is largely uneven and “plural” in its manifestations. Colonization, extinction, genocides, and systemic racisms all contribute to proliferation of different Anthropocenic worlds. Chapters in this section challenge taken-for-granted pedagogies and their colonial underpinnings and attempt to chart a different anti-colonial path. Carrrara and Chakraborty outline the hegemonic underpinnings of mainstream environmentalism and discuss critical challenges to it from subaltern communities. Mohawk scholar Amanda Holmes reflects on Lakota Elder Rosalie Little Thunder’s provocation, “What does it mean to be a good relative?” Holmes draws from Little Thunder’s wisdom and Indigenous spiritual geographies to imagine a different way of being in the world that centers connection, relationality, and spiritual interdependences. Anastasia Sanchez articulates a pedagogical framework that brings together presencing with concern and anticolonial critical consciousness to guide liberatory approaches to science and engineering learning. Vandana Singh offers a counterhegemonic approach to climate change education: She discusses how dominant thinking and acting is maintained through stories, which can be challenged by nondominant stories from marginalized communities, stories that act as boundary objects which allow more fluid articulations of possibility in a changing climate, derived from transcending boundaries across disciplines, perspectives, and paradigms.

The third part is called: “Politics and Political Reverberations,” which attempts to introduce questions of solidarity and collectivity into science education. Chapters in this section ignite our critical imaginations for a science education driven by hope, love, and collective thriving: Sara Tolbert, Alejandra Frausto Aceves, and Betzabé Torres Olave explore how Freire’s notion of ‘true generosity’ can provide political clarity for science education communities. Mahdis Azarmandi and colleagues share personal experiences to construct a collective and transformative vision for anti-racist science and education. Kurt Love illustrates possibilities for a science education driven not by greed and power but rather by an ideology of thriving, where well-being, sociocultural solidarity, ecological restoration, and societal regeneration are intended outcomes. Susan Nordstrom, reflecting on the Nebraska floods of 2019, reminds us of the importance of affective thinking and everyday caring practices that are so integral to non-human and human ongoing-ness in the Anthropocene.

The fourth section is titled “Science Education for a World Yet to Come,” which takes us on speculative journeys into the near and distant future. Chapters in this section illustrate playful transdisciplinary alternatives to the status quo and ways to grow toward justice together. Brittany Tomin’s chapter explores speculative pedagogies emerging from science fictions and world building in ways that accentuate the openness of education, but more importantly the various futures students and teachers might create together writ large. Science fiction is also employed in Matthew Weinstein’s chapter that examines sociotechnical imaginaries and political possibilities in the face of the climate crisis. Can we indeed arrive at a ‘New Deal’ with capitalist, colonial powers? Michelle Wooten’s chapter takes up the specific need for transdisciplinarity and the way educators move across disciplines and disciplinary knowledges. How is formalized education meant to contend with the perplexing problems of the Anthropocene without epistemic and pedagogical translations that traverse modes of knowing and being? Finally, Rachel Askew’s chapter explores what it might mean for teachers to create something less structured and more connective together. How often do students create classes with their teachers based on what they view as pressing and urgent? All the chapters in this section challenge the way we’ve come to embody our work as science educators; and all of them attempt to make room for pedagogies and ways of being yet to come.

The last section contains interviews the editors conducted over the past two years or so. We are very grateful to have contributions from Sharon Todd, Max Liboiron, Isabel Stengers, and Steven Khan. Overall, we leave it to the reader to choose which sections speak to their needs as educators, students, and scholars. In Volume 2, like Volume 1, chapter authors and interviewees communicate heart-felt, radical, and honest accounts of education, nature, science, living, history, politics, art, and more. And they don’t always “agree” with each other. But their nuanced perspectives, experiences, and wisdom all contribute to a vibrant pluralistic vision for science and education in ways that can nourish and sustain us. We hope you feel something, or see room for eccentric movement, when you read these chapters.

With love,

Sara and Jesse