Nature–CultureConstructs in ScienceLearning:Human/Non-Human Agencyand Intentionality

The field of science education has struggled to create robust, meaningful forms of education that effectively engage students from historically non-dominant communities andwomen. This paper argues that a primary issue underlying this on-going struggle pivots on constructions of nature–culture relations.We takeup structuration theory (Giddens, 1984.The constitutionof society:Outlineof the theoryof structuration. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.) and decolonizing methodologies (Smith, 2012. Decolonizing methodologies research and Indigenous peoples (2nd. ed.). London: Zed Books.) to reflect on the structural principles of the settled expectations of nature–culture relations. We suggest that taken together both Giddens’ and Smith’s respective discussions of time-space relations provide a powerful framing for nature–culture relations. Carefully examining shifts in the temporal and spatial scales during moments of talk and action in out-of-school science activities may help to increase the field’s understanding of divergences, convergences, and productive generativity betweenWestern science and Indigenous ways of knowing to create transformative science learning.Drawingonourwork in community-baseddesign research and studies of everyday parent–child interactions, we begin to describe emergent structural principles that may desettle normative time-space and nature–culture relations. In addition, we describe specific practices and pedagogical forms that expand views of human and non-human agency, as well as present and possible socio-ecological futures. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52:530–544, 2015