Theorizing passivity

Excerpt

My experiences across many different disciplines have shown that the peer review process essentially is conservative and, in some discipline, produces a regression to some mean—all articles in a particular journal resemble each other. As a result, there is little innovation in the forms and contents of thinking and theorizing. Despite being in special institutional positions (variously theorized as gatekeepers or obligatory points of passage), few editors appear to allow more innovative work to be published, where by innovative I refer to both content and genres of research and writing. Unsurprisingly, few authors attempt to submit innovative work when they have good reasons to believe that such work would be rejected. Although this journal has set itself the goal to foster innovative approaches to theory, method, genre, and so on of science education research, change may come slow given the predominance of conservatism in the field. In this editorial, I therefore point out one concept that deserves attention because it will radically reshape the ways in which knowing, learning, identity, and so on are theorized and the way in which we can (have to) teach science and develop science curriculum. The concept I have in mind is passivity (and the associate concept of passibility, the capacity to feel, suffer, and to be susceptible to sensation and emotion), which currently does not figure in any science education theory. In this editorial, I articulate and exemplify the use of this concept, and thereby hope to encourage science educators to reconfigure not only what they do, teach, and research but also how they do these things. …