‘Going against the grain’: science teachers’ socio-political and social justice-informed praxis in secondary school science

Science educators have been advocating a socio-political and social justice-informed turn in science education (SE) in the face of growing socio-justice science issues (SJSIs). This encompasses a shift from downplaying science’s connections with wider socio-political and social justice arenas to it being grounded in critical reflection on its complexities, including political, economic and ethical. Through individual semi-structured interviews with science student teachers, practising schoolteachers and university-based teacher educators in England, this study examined their perspectives and practices regarding such a socio-political and social justice turn. Grounded in an ecological model, our findings reveal that participants primarily linked social justice issues to their immediate teaching environments (micro and mesosystems), and socio-political concerns to broader systemic contexts and issues (exo and macrosystems). However, structural barriers centred in conformity and one-size-fits-all curricula and pedagogies, such as top-down standardised curricula and assessments, anti-activism rhetoric and a lack of a national agenda for anti-racism and anti-misogyny action, limited their capacity to engage with social justice and socio-political dimensions of science. This study highlights both the transformative potential of socially just and socio-politically informed SE driven by science educators themselves, and the challenges posed by entrenched socio-political structures around the teaching profession and schools’ work.