Gesturing in plain sight: dialogical enactments of sustainable futures as being and doing in the world

Abstract

Addressing the critical question posed by Gudrun Jonsdottir and Anne Kristine Byhring who are asking what place for a common future in the science classroom, this paper focuses on and expands on the construct of dialogical space. Not simply as an abstract concept to describe the presence of divergent ideas or the exchange of idioms, but a space filled with metaphors and material artefacts that exist in the world. On this basis, science education takes seriously the affordances of sensorial perception in space, as physical and material doings, arising from and deeply concerned with the lived experiences of people. By making visible the material relations that give life to human experience, and by giving life to different imaginations, science education can thus become profoundly dialogical: turning away from the expectation of sameness, it houses in itself the invitation of taking authorship and to give form, that being a narrative, a personal journey, or a different way of looking at the world. This is what I call gesturing in plain sight, a science education that critically engages with material artefacts and their relations; one that inhabits the realm of the symbolic and the experiential, and one that speaks to sustainable futures in general, repurposing and reconceiving the work of science education in particular.