This book encapsulates a line of research that looks at how students are positioned as ethical actors/decision makers in biology education by science policy, curriculum, and classroom resources. Its basis comes from a textbook study that examined how biology texts work to constitute subjectivities related to neoliberalism and global capitalism, sex/gender and sexuality, and ethics. The study found that textbook discourses set limits on a) the types of ethical concerns represented b) the modes of ethical engagement c) the dispositions necessary to engage in ethical action or decision-making. Policy reform, regulation, and personal lifestyle choices were the primary ways students could approach ethical decision-making or action. While these approaches are useful, they are likely not sufficient for dealing with major twenty first century problems such as climate change and social inequality, along with new ethical dimensions introduced by biotechnologies and genomic research. This research brief sets a context for how discourses of science education policy and curricula work to shape a ‘subject of ethics’, that is how students come to see themselves as participants in issues of ethical concern. Drawing from a structural-poststructural philosophical approach, Science and Technology Studies, educational research, and a methodology based on discourse analysis and ethnography, this book's overall goal is to assist with research into subjectivity, ethics, politics, policy, and socioscientific issues in science education.

Science education, particularly school science education, has long had an uneasy relationship with ethics, being unsure whether to embrace ethics or leave it to others. In this book, the authors argue that while the methods of science and of ethics are very different, ethics plays a key role in how science is undertaken and used. And so, ethics has a central place in science education, whether we are talking of school science education, for students of all ages, or the informal science education that takes place in through internet, books, magazines, TV and radio, or in places such as hospitals and zoos. Written for science educators based in schools and elsewhere, the authors make no assumptions that the reader has any knowledge of ethics beyond the background understandings of morality that virtually all of us have. Empowered with the knowledge shared in this book, readers will feel confident about the place that ethics has in science education. The authors provide a rich array of examples as to how science education, both in school and out of school, and for all ages, can be enhanced through including teaching about ethics.

This book poses questions on how to work ethically in research on science education. Applying research ethics reflectively and responsibly is fundamental for conducting research with people. It seeks to renew the conversation on how and why to engage with ethics in science education research and to adjust and refine research practices. It highlights both the need for methodological reflections in science education research and the particular ethical research challenges of science education. Science education research involves the study of people – often young and vulnerable people – and their practices. Researchers working within humanities and social science research commonly follow guidelines and codes of conducts set by country-specific ethics committees. Such guidelines function as minimal requirement for ethical reflection. This book seeks to engage the community of science education researchers in a conversation on ethics in science education moving beyond the mere compliance with governmental regulations toward a collective reflection. It asks the question of whether the existing guidelines provided for researchers are keeping up with contemporary realities of the visual presence of individuals in digital spaces. It also asks questions on how participatory research methodologies alters the relations between researchers and practitioners. This book is organized into two parts: Part one is entitled Challenging existing norms and practices. It asks questions such as: What are the conditions of knowledge that shape ethical decision making? Where is this kind of knowledge coming from? How is this knowledge structured, and where are the limitations? How can we justify our beliefs concerning our ethical research actions? Part two Epistemological considerations for ethical science education research centres norms and practices of conducting science education research in regard to methods, validity and scope.

Positing that education is a movement from one way of being to another, more desirable one, An Intense Calling argues that ethics should be the prime focus for the field of education. The book locates ethics, education, and justice in human subjectivity and describes education as a necessary practice for ethical reflexivity, change, and becoming (ethically) different. It also situates ethics as something that exceeds subjectivity, thereby engaging ethics as a material phenomenon through topics such as aesthetics and solidarity with non-humans. Jesse Bazzul explores various concepts in the book including power, biopolitics, the commons, subjectivity, and materiality, and draws from over twenty years of experience teaching in different countries including Canada, Ireland, the United States, China, and Ukraine. Taking a wide-ranging philosophical approach, the book entangles ethics, urgent political issues, and pressing educational contexts of the twenty-first century. In doing so, An Intense Calling maintains that ethics is the core of education because education involves finding better ways of living and being in the world.

This volume, a follow up to Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (2021), continues a transdisciplinary conversation around reconceptualizing science education in the era of the Anthropocene. Drawing educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together in a creative work that helps reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with this contemporary geologic time. This work continues the mission of transforming the ways communities inherit science and technology education: its knowledges, practices, policies, and ways-of-living-with-Nature. Our understanding of the Anthropocene is necessarily open and pluralistic, as different beings on our planet experience this time of crisis in different ways. This second volume continues to nurture productive relationships between science education and fields such as science studies, environmental studies, philosophy, the natural sciences, Indigenous studies, and critical theory in order to provoke a science education that actively seeks to remake our shared ecological and social spaces in the coming decades and centuries. This is an open access book.

This book presents a collection of critical thinking that concern cultural, social and political issues for science education in the Nordic countries. The chapter authors describe specific scenarios to challenge persisting views, interrogate frameworks and trouble contemporary approaches to researching teaching and learning in science. Taking a point of departure in empirical examples from the Nordic countries the collection of work is taking a critical sideways glance at the Nordic education principles. Critical examinations target specifically those who are researching in the fields of science education research to question whether conventional research approaches, foci and theoretical approaches are sufficient in a world of science education that is neither politically neutral, nor free of cultural values. Attention is not only on the individual learner but on the cultural, social and political conditions and contexts in science education. The different chapters review debates and research in teacher education, school teaching and learning including when external stakeholders are involved. Even though the chapters are contextualized in Nordic settings there will be similarities and parallels that will be informative to the international science education research community.

This edited book on ethics represents the outcomes of an international collaborative project that examined the role and place of bioethics in science and technology curricula.