ABSTRACT
One of the key contributions of constructivism to science education is the understanding that learners make their own sense of the world and the curriculum, beginning with what they already believe. What students believe depends, among many other things, on the cultural context in which they live. From one cultural group to the next, there are differences in the taken-forgranted understandings of science and the physical world. Differences between western and indigenous ways of learning science, for example, have been documented for Aboriginal people in Australia (Christie, 1991), Maori in New Zealand (McKinley et al., 1992) and Native Americans (Haukoos and Satterfield, 1986). For these and other people, cultural difference impacts on their opportunity to learn. Sometimes the issue may be with science itself, with the Whiggish assumption that western science is unproblematically the agent of human progress. Sometimes the issue may be with school science, with its preference for linearity, abstractness and specialised language. Sometimes the issue may be with the institution of school rather than the specifics of science. For students whose families have been marginalised and excluded from schooling and whose idea of the good life does not revolve around academic success, it is not always obvious that it makes sense to buy into the constraints and obligations of classrooms, homework and examinations.
