Unlearning modernity

Remaking science education in the Anthropocene

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22436033
AutoresMegan Hurley (0000-0002-7875-0798, Trinity College Dublin, autor de correspondencia), Marianne Achiam (0000-0003-1701-2959), M P Achiam (University of Copenhagen, autor de correspondencia)
Año2026
Volumen13
Número1
Fecha de publicación2026-07-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHumanities and Social Sciences Communications (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2662-9992 • E-ISSN: 2662-9992
EditorialSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/s41599-026-08221-9
OpenAlexW7168130609
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas44

Across select frontiers of the disciplines, contemporary science is beginning to reorient toward relationality, uncertainty and intelligences beyond the human. In fields such as holobiont biology and quantum science and in practices ranging from animal-technology collaboration to anticolonial research, emerging scientific work demonstrates the viability of a world viewed as entangled, co-constituted and not fully knowable from a detached vantage point. Yet, science education, even when positioned as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, remains anchored in the modernist logics of control, separability and human exceptionalism that have exacerbated the polycrisis. This misalignment is structural, rooted in science education’s inheritance of a modernist framework that emerging science seems to be gradually abandoning. Drawing on these developing practices, this Comment suggests that the boundaries of legitimate scientific knowledge can be expanded toward relationality, uncertainty, and intelligences beyond the human, and that science education has a responsibility to engage with these shifts. We propose that collectively unlearning the habits and mindsets that are no longer fit for purpose is a crucial step toward a renewed rigour in science education. This challenges the dominant model of science education as a pipeline from disciplinary knowledge to technological progress to economic growth, and establishes the case for a fundamental reorientation: from training problem-solvers to cultivating participants in knowledge generation, world-building and the shared stewardship of planetary futures.

Anthropocene · Environmental education · Science education · Traditional knowledge · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Indigenous and Place-Based Education · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism