Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2009) 4:505–511

DOI 10.1007/s11422-009-9218-1

EDITORIAL

Tuning into others’ voices: radical listening, learning

from difference, and escaping oppression

Kenneth Tobin

Received: 22 May 2009 / Accepted: 22 May 2009 / Published online: 6 June 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Over my 35 years of being a teacher, professor, speaker, cultural worker, and

researcher, I’ve been asked many times: ‘‘where did you come up with the per-
spective on schools or media that you used in your article or speech—I’ve never
heard such a point of view before?’’ Oftentimes my answer involves telling the
inquisitor that I simply listened to people who had been deemed failures by the larger
society or by the schools they attended. Such individuals, I have learned over the
years, often possess some of the most compelling insights into what is actually
happening, into how people are seriously harmed by institutions ostensibly con-
structed to help them improve their lives. Such an emphasis on the power of dif-
ference, on gaining new perspectives from individuals who come from a different
locale in the social web of reality is central to my purpose here. This power of
difference—or as Paulo Freire (1997) articulated it, ‘‘a viable novelty’’—is key to an
ever-expanding sense of criticality. This evolving criticality is dedicated to a never-
ending search for new ways of seeing, for new social and cultural experiences that
provide novel concepts that we can use to better understand the world in a pro-
gressive way. (Kincheloe 2008, p. viii)
Joe Kincheloe’s greatest attribute is that he lived his life in ways that cohered with the
critical edge that he brought to his writing. For example, Joe wrote about the salience of
radical listening, which is to understand others’ texts in terms of their standpoints and
axiological commitments. Joe is one of few people I know who could listen to what a
speaker was saying without projecting his own ideas and identity into the conversation. He
was rare in hearing the kernel of an idea, and encouraging the speaker to grow that idea in
his or her own way. When Joe spoke he not only addressed what others had said, but
showed an understanding of its value. That is, his talk contained evidence that he
understood what had been said, its associated standpoints, and its potential. Rarely, if ever,

K. Tobin (&)
Urban Education, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 5th Avenue,
New York, NY 10016-4309, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

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did Joe begin with a statement that reiterated his personal standpoint. Dialogue began with
a serious endeavor to explicate others’ good ideas. Usually, conversations with Joe were
focused, highly interactive and intense, and laced with laughter, humor, and wit. Inevitably
they were lengthy as contributors to the dialogue worked together to produce outcomes that
reflected the collective as well as individual goals and successes.
Joe was one of the most emotional people I knew. He demonstrated passion concerning
issues of equity and injustice and stepped forward to represent the oppressed. Joe expe-
rienced social life in very different ways than I did and his stories about experiences we
‘‘shared’’ reflected his multilogicality and capacity to tune into the emotional structures of
fields. Being with Joe was a constant reminder that epistemology, ontology and axiology
were always salient—on the front burner.

Moving on …

Never was the compression of space and time so evident as when Joe Kincheloe passed
away in Jamaica in late December of 2008. Within hours of his passing I was informed of
his death in an email message, which simultaneously broke the news to a large community
of colleagues. The spread of this tragic news was viral. Interestingly, the same technology
that transmitted the news of Joe’s premature death to scholars around the world now
affords ready access to his scholarly products through a plethora of websites and electronic
resources, such as Joe’s interview of Henry Giroux on YouTube (e.g., http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=UvCs6XkT3-o). A Google search to locate Joe’s works provides an
overwhelming yield—testimony to the fact that he was a prolific scholar who produced
many resources that will continue to shape education globally for many years to come.
As far as Cultural Studies of Science Education (CSSE) is concerned, Joe was a trusted
colleague who encouraged the co-editors to proceed with the project to create CSSE as a
needed alternative to the status quo. Until now Joe’s only publication in CSSE was in the
first issue of Volume 1, as principal author in a Forum on sense of place.
With Joe’s passing several of the editorial board recommended that we publish The
much exaggerated death of positivism in CSSE, as a testimonial to Joe’s scholarship and
intellectual spirit. In their view, and mine, the article has much for science educators to
contemplate and its forthright stance raises questions that can be addressed by scholars in
our field. So much of what is done in research is habitual, emphasizing tenets of positivism,
a potentially dangerous situation, especially when those tenets align with implicit and
explicit stipulations in the guidelines of funding agencies, journals, Institutional Review
Boards, and dissertation committees, just to name a few. In the scholarly tradition to which
Joe ascribed, Peter Taylor and an international cast of scholars critique the paper in a
Forum that raises issues for our ongoing deliberation. Finally, Gillian Bayne, a former
student and colleague of Joe’s, authors the final article in the first set of papers, a distin-
guished contributors piece that examines some of Joe’s key works in cultural studies and,
tangentially, their impact in science education.

Capitalizing on difference

At a recent meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), held in

San Diego, I participated in a session that was oriented towards Gloria Ladson-Billings’
culturally responsive teaching (Ladson-Billings 1994). The paper I presented with

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Reynaldo Llena, a teacher researcher, addressed culturally adaptive teaching, arguing that
teaching and learning are dialectically related and that successful interactions involve the
continuous reproduction and transformation of culture as participants act for the other,
expanding their agency and coproducing forms of culture that are oriented toward the
collective motives for the activity (Tobin and Llena 2009). Because our research seeks to
understand cultural enactment we have adopted (and adapted) a definition of culture that
views it as enacted in fields that are structured. One of the designated discussant/critics for
the session at AERA, which included numerous papers, called for common definitions for
terms such as culture. Numerous publications have addressed the many meanings of cul-
ture including William Sewell (1999), whose work provides a foundation for much of our
scholarship. However, does the use of a plethora of understandings of culture warrant a call
for one clear definition?
How can colleagues understand one another without some effort to produce shared
understanding of the social constructs used in scholarly dialogues? A call for definition
seems like common sense. However, whether such dialogues would include definitions
might be contingent on the particulars of the scholarship. As scholars we must interrogate
commonsense to identify hegemons that saturate sensibilities. I regard intersubjectivity as
collective and continuous and the schemas that best define social constructs do not float
free of the material circumstances of social life. That is, the nuances of all social theory are
contingent on structures. David Harvey put it elegantly, ‘‘The positivist approach to theory
is a problem. Theory should be understood instead as an evolving structure of argument
sensitive to encounters with complex ways in which social processes are materially
embedded in the web of life’’ (Harvey 2006, pp. 78–79).
I view it as a necessity to be as clear as possible by surrounding social constructs with
examples to clarify the intended range of meanings for salient social constructs. Others
who access and appropriate my work are joining a dialogue in which they can contribute,
first through radical listening in which they seek to learn as much as possible from the
ongoing dialogue in its historical constitution and then contribute their texts, illustrating
their appropriations in rich detail, showing how theory reproduces and transforms simul-
taneously, and above all, how theory is always connected to the salient structures of a
study. With this in mind, my standpoint on definitions is that they can comprise thick
descriptions and be contingent on the circumstances of a study. At a time when I was
struggling to define action I was advised by Heinrich Bauersfeld, ‘‘Don’t be too concerned
with defining action, describe its meaning in use—surround your use with thick descrip-
tions from which the meaning can become apparent.’’ Cognizance of what has come before
the definitions will be viable in the context of the activity that is the research. The
expectation I have is that, as culture, definitions of social constructs, including definitions
of culture, would have thin coherence and associated contradictions, attributable to dif-
ferent structures for the field of the research and language always under-representing social
experience (Britzman 1998).
By way of concluding this section I want to return to an issue that is closely related to
the call for definition of social constructs like culture, namely, citing the work of others.
CSSE has a policy of citing substantively, which is for an author to take something from
published work and weave it into the ongoing thesis he or she is developing. In making the
decision to cite an excerpt from a published article an author must make every attempt to
establish what the excerpt means in the larger context in which it is published. The process
of figuring out the meaning is not unlike radical listening. Once the effort is made the
meaning of the text will necessarily change because of the structures in the text in which it
is to be inserted. Salient is the idea that in their appropriation ideas are transformed, but not

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without an awareness of the meanings that are historically constituted. Readers would not
expect the meanings to be identical and in any event, what a scholar takes away from a
reading always is a transaction between the scholar and the text, never a question of the
meaning being only what an author intended. In our use of published literature, including
critique, we ought not privilege our own understandings above others’ understandings and
in any event, from my polysemic perspective, there always will be numerous meanings of
text, nuanced by the motives of the salient activities in which the scholar/reader is a
participant. My personal standpoint is to reject the idea that there is one right meaning for a
given text. This puts me at odds with those who are apt to prescribe as authoritative and
correct their understandings of scholarly works that are foundational to our field. The
stance that one set of meanings is correct and others are incorrect can overlook the salience
of the purposes readers have in accessing particular works. These purposes structure
meaning making and highlight the value of readers being radical listeners as they appro-
priate others’ works.

Constituents of this issue of CSSE

This issue of CSSE consists of five sets of articles, the first associated with the Kincheloe
and Tobin article described above. The four other sets of articles are described in the sub
sections that follow.

Identity, elementary science and high stakes testing

Bhaskar Upadhyay addressed the important issue of science teacher identity for an ele-
mentary teacher who felt the weight of teaching science in a context in which high stakes
tests were an accepted practice in her school and beyond. The paper and the associated
Forum delve into issues of how best to research the important construct of identity and, in
so doing, numerous methodological issues are addressed, including different ways in which
identity can be theorized and researched. The participants in the Forum agree on the
importance of including the teacher’s voice in classroom research and involving teachers
as co-researchers and co-authors. The Forum, which includes authors from Australia,
Brazil and the USA also addresses uses of narrative in research on teaching and learning.
One issue raised by Stephen Ritchie in the Forum concerned a large international study
undertaken by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examined science
attainment in 59 countries (OECD 2007) in a study focused on scientific literacy, exploring
the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education (i.e., 15 year olds) could
apply knowledge and skills regarded as essential for full participation in civic life. The
implications of the study that I hear most about are that students in the US ranked 29th out
of 57 participating countries and more than 24% of the students tested from the US
obtained less than minimal levels of scientific literacy. In other words, the study was an
international comparison of science performance that aligned with the neoliberal agenda
that supports high stakes testing in the United States. Whereas the teacher in Upadhyay’s
study felt that the curriculum was constrained by high stakes tests required in Texas, the
PISA studies create a climate for arguing that the focus should be on a different type of
high stakes test—albeit with goals that seem like a step in the right direction. I offer a
cautionary note, citing Harvey (2005), who urges researchers in the social sciences to
interpret what they learn from their studies of institutions like schools in a context of

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macrostructures such as neoliberalism that saturate social life and the common sense that
supports what we do. Focusing enacted science curricula on high stakes tests seems highly
regressive and has the potential to strip away those parts of science that are not tested or are
not easily tested. Science educators might explore ways to remove the competition,
especially international comparisons, examine ways to foster the collective aspects of
knowing and learning science, and identify ways to enact science curricula that afford
social transformation and improved life on earth not just for humans, but for all species.

Aboriginal knowledge, power, and the nature of science

Michiel van Eijck and Wolff-Michael Roth provide a feature article that opens up a
dialogue on ways in which underrepresented groups might be enticed into science. The
article focuses on an Aboriginal student and his life trajectory, which includes an inves-
tigation of his practices in science and those used in everyday life. Inevitably the question
of what counts as science arises, as do ways to address identities associated with being an
Aboriginal and participation in myriad activities, including Western Modern Science
(WMS). Alison Sammel and Pauline Chinn take up these issues in a Forum that raises
issues of power, Whiteness, White privilege and the role of science education in affording
learners identifying and resisting the oppression of social life. Among the issues addressed
in this collection of papers are: the crisis of representation that places limits on learning
from experience and expressing what we learn textually, the necessity to problematize the
ontological and epistemological foundations for science education, relationships between
personal and collective agency, and the insufficiency of a science education built upon
assumptions of the supremacy of WMS. The papers in this set continue a dialogue that the
authors join and contribute to, clearly leaving many issues that warrant further exploration
in CSSE and elsewhere. Paramount among the issues placed on the table for further work
are, how to theorize and research culture. As I explain above, I do not regard science
education as being well served by just one theory of culture and I call for acceptance of
difference and use of a bricolage of theories in forthcoming scholarship. However, it is
incumbent on authors who situate their work in cultural studies to explicate their stand-
points on culture so that, to the extent possible, we do not talk past one another.

Sociocultural perspectives on sustainable development

Laurence and Jean Simonneaux examine sociocultural issues associated with sustainable
development. Two of the issues they address are situated locally, in France—the reintro-
duction of bears in the Pyrenees and wolves in the Mercantour National Park. A third issue,
global warming, affords the authors investigating the possibilities for transfer of reasoning
patterns across local and global contexts. As in other contributions to this issue of CSSE,
the papers in this set adopt different theoretical standpoints and in so doing raise interesting
issues for continuing the dialogue about identities and social representations.
The Forum is enriched by the participation of Ramón López-Facal and Marı́a Pilar
Jiménez-Aleixandre, scholars from Spain, who address issues of personal and national
identities and relationships between self and other, conscious and unconscious. Troy
Sadler, from the United States, also contributes to the Forum in an analysis of how the
authors of the feature article use the socioscientific reasoning framework that he and his
colleagues developed some years earlier. Attention is drawn to the way in which Sadler’s
earlier work is appropriated and the ways the authors explain and justify their standpoints.
Of particular interest to me are the logics that underpin the use of others’ work and the

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critiques that arise in this set of papers. I wonder, to what extent has and can radical
listening inform this dialogue? Have the authors endeavored to understand the position of
others by adopting their standpoints? In moving beyond Sadler’s earlier articulation of
socioscientific reasoning, have Simonneaux and Simonneaux nuanced social theory in the
ways Harvey argues social theory always must be nuanced? Or have they simply entered a
deadend? As van Eijck and Roth challenged us to think of culture in terms of theories of
difference, can we think similarly (i.e., in ways that embrace different) about standpoints,
the ontological status of what others have published, and the extent to which we as a
community of science educators can and do embrace polysemia?
The paper set raises axiology and its centrality in making sense of issues such as those
involved in sustainable development. This is an area in which much more work can be
done, extending beyond values to include emotions. Similarly, in pointing out the salience
of politics, the issue of macrostructures, especially the ideologies that saturate common-
sense notions of being in the world should, to an increasing extent, work their way into the
papers published in CSSE. The implications are profound for sociocultural issues such as
those raised by Simonneaux and Simonneaux.

Critical pedagogy and research on the teaching and learning science

Jennifer Goldberg and Kate Muir Welsh adopt a Freirean approach in an ethnography in
which most of the participants were Latina/o. In the two studies presented in the paper the
students were from grade 6 and 3, respectively. Issues that arise in the research include
critical pedagogy, conscientization, social justice, the teacher as co-inquirer, and ways in
which interviews and videotape can be used as data resources in research. Since I have
cited Harvey throughout this editorial I note here that social justice is not theorized
explicitly in the paper. Instead there is an assumption that the reader will nod in agreement
and the level of intersubjective agreement between the authors and readers is high. That is,
social justice points to equity, which assumes freedom to participate in social life. How-
ever, the assumptions about freedom being understood similarly across social categories of
readers of CSSE and especially the participants in the Forum likely do not hold. Among the
questions to be asked are: ‘‘Freedom from what?’’ and ‘‘Freedom to do what?’’ Harvey
points out that neoliberalism, that is a pervasive global hegemony, only assumes that
participants in social life are free to compete in a free market (Harvey 2005). Just what
freedoms are possible in the classes studied by Goldberg and Muir Welsh and what
freedoms do the different stakeholders seek? Some of these issues are raised in the Forum
and others can be pursued in subsequent publications in CSSE.
Alejandro Gallard emphasizes the importance of classroom research taking account of
macrostructures, including political structures associated with race, ethnicity, native lan-
guage, immigration status, poverty, and religion. He uses personal narratives of his own
childhood as an immigrant to the USA and as a non-native speaker of English to highlight
hegemony, neocolonialism and a necessity for youth to engage in conscientization. In his
examples he makes it clear that assumptions about immigrants often are wide of the mark
and cites as examples the hard work they do to raise money to support extended families in
their native countries. He deals with several aspects of identity including personal and
collective agency and the common situation in which others inscribe identities of Latino/a
youth, often according to stereotypes that incorporate deficit perspectives and have long-
term deleterious effects. Finally, Gallard looks beyond dualisms and argues for dialectical
frameworks in which social constructs, such as race and ethnicity, are theorized as dia-
lectical. There is a bottom line to his work and that is that research that has a critical

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pedagogy as a foundation should search for the connection between lived experiences of
participants and hegemonic macrostructures. As is clear from the initial quote that begins
this editorial, including the voices of the children and their parents and relatives as well as
their teachers and school leaders can enrich studies of the type undertaken by Goldberg and
Muir Welsh.
Gale Seiler and Anjali Abraham requested permission to analyze some tapes from the
database used by Goldberg and Muir Welsh. Their purpose in so doing was to show how
complementary insights could be obtained through different approaches. Their Forum
response begins with an analysis of macrostructures, and examines some geo-political
structures that mediate social life. The authors proceed with an argument for participatory
forms of research to bring polyphonia and polysemia to research on teaching and learning.
Considering their suggestion that student conscientization is important prompts me to note
that so much is contributed from the collective perspectives emerging from studies in
which teachers and students collaborate as co-researchers—now typical in the growing
volume of research on the uses of cogenerative dialogue in classroom research (e.g., Tobin
and Llena 2009).

References

Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects. Towards a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Freire, P. (1997). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2006). Spaces of global capitalism: Toward a theory of uneven geographical development.
London: Verso.
Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Knowledge and critical pedagogy: An introduction. Dordrecht: Springer.
Kincheloe, J. L., McKinley, E., Lim, M., & Calabrese Barton, A. (2006). Forum: A conversation on ‘sense
of place’ in science learning. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1, 143–160.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful teaching for African–American students. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
OECD. (2007). PISA 2006: Science competencies for tomorrow’s world (Volume 1—Analysis). Paris:
OECD.
Sewell, W. H. (1999). The concept(s) of culture. In V. E. Bonell & L. Hunt (Eds.), Beyond the cultural turn
(pp. 35–61). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tobin, K., & Llena, R. (2009). Producing and maintaining culturally adaptive teaching and learning of
science in urban schools. In C. Murphy & K. Scantlebury (Eds.), Moving forward and broadening
perspectives: Coteaching in international contexts. Dordrecht: Springer.

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