The Homework of Response-Ability in Science Education

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce response-ability as a concept and practice to (re)open science education’s understanding and enactments of responsibility towards Indigenous ways-of-living-with-nature (IWLN) and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). This is significant as even well-intentioned forms of responsibility are often and inadvertently over-coded by the (neo-)colonial logics that it sets out to refuse and resist: responsibility and the ability to respond are often not one and the same. Within this chapter, I revisit a significant personal pedagogical encounter in which this distinction made itself felt and known. Thinking with the work of Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen, this narrative provides a platform to explore practices of epistemic ignorance and its (co-)constitutive relation to knowledge, as well as what she refers to as “the homework of response-ability” required to (re)open the norms of responsiveness towards the possibility of heeding the call of Indigenous science from within the structure of science education. Concluding thoughts underscore the promise of deconstruction (rather than destruction) as a theoretical, methodological, and ethical tool to resist the (fore)closure of responsibility towards hospitably receiving Indigenous science on its own terms.