Commentary for Part II: Two Fundamental Pillars in Science Education

The largest section in this edited collection, Part II pulls together four substantive chapters that variously examine aspects of science teaching and assessment. Given this diversity of subtopics, it seems not unreasonable to enlist a few theoretical lenses to detect if there are any interesting trends or patterns to make sense of these chapters. Table 5.1 below is my attempt although I do acknowledge that another science educator might easily arrive at a different set of analytic ideas held together by a compelling narrative. In addition, readers might realize that my choice of concepts do not typically appear side-by-side in the scholarly literature as what has been done here. There is a reason for this: I recall the provocation by Giles Deleuze who argued that novelty or insight comes when we place disparate things/thoughts together, when we continue to add/edit/revise things that appear settled or closed to further interpretation (Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, The Athlone Press, London, 1988). Hence, there are no closures because this interrupting process opens up new possibilities, visions, and relations that enrich life. For he and his collaborator Felix Guattari, the budding analyst should favor the conjunction AND over the verb IS (et[and] and est[is] are pronounced identically in French).