Alienation and fetish in science education

This paper uses three specific concepts, alienation, reification and commodity fetish, to re-analyse some materials about laboratory science emerging from a recent ethnographic study of teacher education. It begins with a short introduction and discussion the concepts followed by a presentation of data from the ethnographic study. The concepts are then applied to that data. The paper concludes that laboratory science in teacher education is a potential site for the generation of a criticism of science but that this potential is squandered because of the emphasis on a fetishized notion of science as value-neutral generation of theory from empirical observations.