From a Multicultural to Multinatural Science Education: Perspectives from an Amerindian Perspectivism for Post-pandemic Scenarios

In the last three decades, some articles have examined a definition of science presented from multicultural perspectives in contrast to a universalist perspective of science. In this sense, a multicultural perspective on education is introduced to help students to acquire scientific knowledge without violating their cultural beliefs and experiences. More recently, the boundaries of the multicultural perspective in science education have expanded to incorporate other theoretical considerations, however, maintaining the vision of the uniqueness of “nature” and the multiplicity of “culture”. In our view, the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced not only the necessity of a socio-political turn of science education, but also an ontological turn, which would take into account more seriously and in ontological ways our relationships with the more-than-human world. Still, it is ill-defined and ill-conceptualized what this might mean to science education research and practices. In this chapter, inspired by Viveiros de Castro’s works (2015, 2017) and indigenous thinkers (Kopenawa, 2013; Krenak, 2019), we aim to connect the Amerindian thought and the multinaturalism with movements inside our field trying to reshape science and science education for a post-pandemic world. Implications of multinaturalism for science classrooms and for educating science teachers are also explored.