Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education (Cultural Studies of Science Education, Band 18)

In this book various scholars explore the material in science and science education and its role in scientific practice such as those practices that are key to the curriculum focuses of science education programs in a number of countries. As a construct culture can be understood as material and social practice. This definition is useful for informing researchers' nuanced explorations of the nature of science and inclusive decisions about the practice of science education (Sewell 1999). As fields of material social practice and worlds of meaning cultures are contradictory contested and we akly bounded. The notion of culture as material social practices leads researchers to accept that material practice is as important as conceptual development (social practice).However in education and science education there is a tendency to ignore material practice and to focus on social practice with language as the arbiter of such social practice. Often material practice such as those associated with scientific instruments and other apparatus is ignored with instruments understood as inscription devices conduits for language rather than sources of material culture in which scientists share material other than words (Baird 2004 p. 7) when they communicate new knowledge and realities. While we do not ignore the role of language in science we agree with Barad (2003) that perhaps language has too much power and with that power there seems a concomitant loss of interest in exploring how matter and machines (instruments) contribute to both ontology and epistemology in science and science education.