Serious Play: Inflecting the Multicultural Science Education Debate Through and for (Socratic) Dialogue

The purpose of this chapter is to differentially revisit the multicultural science education debate, a central curricular location that acts as both a potential entry point and problematic gate-keeping device for Indigenous science to-come, by inflecting it with a potentially less oppositional mode of meaning-making: serious play. Within this debate, it is generally agreed upon that there is a clear moral imperative to respect students from diverse cultural backgrounds within the multicultural science education classroom. However, what constitutes respect and how it is enacted continues to be hotly debated due to differing considerations of “what counts” as science. This has produced two largely incommensurable positions around the inclusion of Indigenous ways-of-living-with-Nature (e.g., ethnoscience, Indigenous science): those who contest its status as scientific knowledge and those who champion it. However, as the process of debate enacted is commonly one of opposition, there is little room for meaning-made across positions. Above and beyond addressing the sources of knowledge that continue to uphold this serious debate, this chapter plays with/in the debate processes as a means of opening these foreclosed spaces in science education as both form and content lead to the excluding, differing, and deferring of Indigenous science to-come.