Children’s Practice of the Social Construction of Scientific Facts: A Meta-Ethnographic Synthesis

Science education researchers have attempted descriptions of the relationship between science studies and science education. Such descriptions have applied the aggregate logic of literature reviews to the interpretive works of sociologists and anthropologists. Metaethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988) provides a framework for the synthesis of interpretive studies which may be more appropriate to describing the relationship between science education and science and technology studies. This project attempts to articulate that relationship further using Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, a seminal work in science studies, and Barton's Teaching Science For Social Justice, a study of the scientific practice of youth who live in homeless shelters. The meta-ethnographic synthesis reveals that the relationship between the two communities of scientific practice and the knowledge they use and produce does much to determine the form of that practice