The armchair at the borders: The “messy” ideas of borders and border epistemologies within multicultural science education scholarship

This paper aims to further articulate multicultural science education scholarship. In particular, it explores the notions of borders and border epistemologies as intellectual resources to think again about the challenges of science education in the global world that demand more sophisticated concepts to unravel some of its complexities. It responds in part to Osborne's (2007) call for more “armchair science education” to “develop better theories about our goals and values” (p. 11). Borders and border spaces reconceptualize and extend the view of borders typically presented within the literature as unproblematic lines between cultures and knowledges that need to be crossed. The constructs of border epistemologies introduce to science education the work of cultural theorists, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Walter Mignolo. Collectively, their scholarship helps to theorize alternative epistemologies from the Global South that argue social and political justice must be premised within epistemological justice. I finish by problematizing some of these ideas for ongoing thinking around multicultural approaches to science education.