Globalisation, neoliberalism and science education

The geopolitical, economic and sociocultural complexity, that is, the twenty-first century, requires globalisation to be part of the lexicon of science education scholarship and practice. In this chapter, I contribute to the discussion of political economic globalisation focusing on the dominant logic of neoliberalism and its reconstruction of science education. Within the science education field, it is clearly ‘the road less travelled’ but nevertheless vital for understanding the way in which all science education proceeds even if it is under acknowledged or, indeed, not understood. To this end, I describe the acute and prescient observations of the French philosopher Michel Foucault who in his lectures to the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979 outlined the polycentric formation of neoliberal governmentality. To my mind, Foucault develops a particularly accessible account of neoliberalism’s tenets that can become visible in contemporary settings such as science education. I then review the privileged pedagogies within science education to suggest that they have been coopted to become part of the neoliberal subjectification of school science students.