Mirrors, Prisms, and Diffraction Gratings: Placing the Optics of the Critical Gaze in Science Education Under Erasure (After the Critique of Critique)

The purpose of this chapter is to explore what Foucault refers to as “the” critical attitude and its relationship to science education. Drawing from the insight that the critical attitude is but a critical attitude, the possibility of critique as plural and multiplicative is explored herein; positing that (an) unsettling criticality is not only one which critiques settler colonial logics and practices but also the taken-for-granted ways-of-critiquing which can undergird these very efforts. In turn, the possibility of critique as plural is significant as the mode of critique within the multicultural science education debate (re)produces Indigenous science as yet-to-come. Building on the insight that scientific knowledge-practice is always already situated, the ways in which criticality in science education is always mediated by conceptual apparatuses, whether real or imagined, is considered. In particular, three optical apparatus—the mirror, the prism, and the diffraction grating—are employed to analyse and inform how the critical gaze might be differentially configured within science education to (re)open the space of responsiveness.