Collaborating across boundaries: Epistemic humility in teacher and teacher educator communities of practice

Science education needs to look beyond its epistemic boundaries to be relevant to the social, environmental, and cultural realities experienced by students. However, such a future-oriented approach needs to acknowledge and address legacies of violent histories. In Chile, an authoritarian dictatorship directed violence towards teachers, leaving a legacy of mistrust and silence, reinforced by a strongly classified curriculum. Through critical ethnography, we explore how two communities of practice addressed this legacy through the practice of epistemic humility. Each community brought together school-based and university-based science educators. Practicing epistemic humility involved challenging a discourse of expertise and engaged listening with an expectation of personal and collective professional growth. Becoming aware of a culture of silence in their schools, teachers were able to transgress subject boundaries to understand both themselves and science to exist within a web of expertise and knowledges. With this insight, they began to create transdisciplinary curricula. We draw out implications for implementing the new ‘science for citizenship’ curriculum in Chile and school-university collaborations in the field of science education.