Critical Imagination and Conscientisation for Just Post-pandemic Science Education: Park Rangers as Public Science Educators

This chapter develops a theoretical framework to analyse the critical scientific imagination and how it leads to processes of conscientisation to agentically move towards just post-pandemic futures. Through the analysis of a case of an environmental conflict in Chile through the stories told by two park rangers, the chapter advances two elementary issues for critical imagination and conscientisation. First, the need to expand who counts as science educators, and second, the need to expand the time scales on which we think about the crises and challenges we experience. Acknowledging actors other than humans, such as non-humans, and more-than-humans entities, can help us to dispute science discourses in public spaces, and make scientific socio-political issues more pedagogical. At the same time, increasing the scales from which we think, moving beyond focusing on individualist and capitalist temporal rhythms, will allow us to cultivate our imagination for just post-pandemic futures through and within science education.