Editorial: Collective responsibility and the other

This issue of CSSE brings together four articles all of which deal with themes that are central to the enterprise of science education. Sonya Martin articulates how she, as a practicing teacher, implemented cogenerative dialogues in her classes, that is, how she implemented a new form of praxis in which teacher and students are provided with opportunities to talk about science curriculum and classroom learning environments at a metalevel to bring about changes that enhance learning. Charles Hutchison and Lynne Bailey describe the cross-cultural assessment challenges that four international science teachers encountered after arriving and beginning to teach in the United States; here adaptation to the new culture meant modifying or hybridizing their assessment philosophies and practices. Stacy Olitsky theorizes the limited subject positions available to high school students in inner-city schools and the contradictions that arise with student interests, which constrain their vision of action possibilities and thereby exacerbate those disadvantages for participating in science that are grounded in race and class. Tali Tal and Yarden Kedmi describe a curriculum project in Israel that aimed at enhancing active participation of learners in the issues at hand and thereby encourage higher-order thinking. All five articles, in more or less direct ways, articulate forms of participation and the possibilities that educational contexts provide for changing content and form of participating in the enterprise of science education. In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent to me that forms and contents of participation crucially hinge on the concept and praxis of responsibility, or more appropriately, collective responsibility. As the introductory quote shows, Mikhail Bakhtin holds that life in general, as cognition more specifically, cannot be comprehended other than in and