Problematizing science as a primary school discipline: Learning from contingencies and diversities

This paper puts the idea of a contingent nature of science at its fore, asking what we as researchers can learn from seemingly irreconcilable differences in our approaches and interpretations to past, present and future developments in science education. To do so, we aim to explore the potentials of multi-perspectivity in an academic self-experiment. The idea is to problematize science as a school discipline from different theoretical, disciplinary and methodological standpoints. By taking one concrete example of a Luxembourgian primary school curriculum document, four researchers will independently apply their individual lenses on science as a school discipline. Concretely, the coverage of the hedgehog as a “characteristic animal” in our primary school curriculum will be commented on in historical, sociocultural and pedagogical perspectives. This concrete curricular example is seemingly defined and non disputable as a content theme in primary school science education in Luxembourg, and is also to be found in international curriculum policy documents. Yet a seemingly proven fact can be interpreted in multiple ways, not only to bridge controversies, as it is done so often, but as exploring the differences in a self-reflective manner. Through such multiple interpretations, we are specifically looking for inconsistencies between the four different narratives, instead of focusing on consensual conclusions or firm and consistent patterns. Instead we will follow a multi-layered approach to research in order to undertake a métissage approach to analyzing a component of the science pedagogical practice, allowing the different understandings on the Luxembourgian science curriculum to remain and complement each other in a complex manner