Tinkering with/in the Multicultural Science Education Debate: Towards Positing An(Other) Ontology

The purpose of this chapter is to address the ways in which ontology, as an absent presence, is always already (re)shaping science education. Particularly, this chapter uses and troubles Cobern and Loving’s reminder that attention to ontology is uncommon within the multicultural science education debate. As they call for a (re)consideration of how epistemology aligns with ontology, concluding that knowing nature through WMS is universal and “common sense”, an ethic of deconstructive tinkering—using concepts, categories, and constructs that are uncommon to the context of science education to explore that which is common—is employed herein. Latching onto the binary co-constitution of common and uncommon, and moments in which they vacillate as a lever to (re)open spaces of science education to other meanings (e.g., Indigenous science to-come), Cobern and Loving’s criteria of ontological alignment is unsettled, (re)situating their claim of “common sense” towards (re)opening the logics of the multicultural science education debate.