Challenging the Hegemony of Western Scientism in Science Teacher Education

Abstract

In 2017, in putting together our application to the Publications Committee for the positions of Co-Editors in Chief, we (Melville, Verma, and Campbell) set out the key priorities that we wanted to pursue if granted the stewardship of the Journal of Science Teacher Education (JSTE). Building on the influential work of our predecessors, Judy and Norm Lederman, we stated that we wanted to extend the global reach of the journal and increase the impact of non-North American science teacher education scholars within the science education literature. Now we are the Co-Editors of the journal, and as we enter the final 17 months of our fiveyear appointment, we can report on our progress in pursuing this key priority. Since 2019, the number of submissions from authors at institutions outside of the United States has increased from 50.9% (116 submissions), to 55.6% (142 submissions) in 2020, and 59.3% (143 submissions) in 2021. If we used this as a valid metric for extending the global reach of JSTE, we could claim to have been successful. Such a claim would be hollow, however, for even as the international reach of the journal has increased as depicted by the number of submissions to JSTE, we have become increasingly troubled by the naivete of our original priority. This feeling was initially based on the acceptance rates that we were seeing for submissions from outside the United States. At the time of writing, 14.7% of the 2019 submissions, 18.3% of the 2020 submissions, and 12.6% of the 2021 submissions have been published, or are still in process. All these percentages are below the acceptance rates for the journal, which has averaged 30.1% over the past three years. Certainly, language continues to be a barrier for some submissions, and we continue to work with the Publications Committee to address this. Over time, however, we also came to believe that other forces were in play—forces that we initially struggled to identify. What we have too slowly come to realize is that simply extending the “global reach” of the journal does not equate to the opening of opportunities to learn from other visions of science teacher education that can, and do, develop and prosper in other cultures. More importantly, we now understand that “If science spaces continue to operate through dominant cultural norms and values, merely providing access to materials or opportunities to participate in science will not make the kind of changes we seek” (Kayumova & Dou, 2022, p. 17). While we thought we understood what we wanted to achieve, and we acted with the most noble of intentions, we have to admit that we have fundamentally failed to challenge the hegemony of scientism in relation