Philosophy of science - Progress, Values, Inquiry - Britannica

AbstractInquiry-based Science Education (IBSE) is frequently framed as a participatory and therefore inclusive approach to science learning. This paper argues that this claim rests on an under-theorized understanding of participation. Dominant classroom enactments of IBSE embed normative assumptions about epistemic competence, communicative form, and learner autonomy—assumptions that function as selective recognition conditions, shaping who is seen as capable of participating in scientific inquiry, and in what ways. Drawing on Disability Studies in Education (DSE) and its norm-critical tradition, the paper analyzes how these assumptions produce epistemic exclusion. This exclusion arises not through the intentions of individual teachers or the commitments of IBSE as a framework, but through the unexamined norms by which classroom inquiry is organized, paced, and recognized as legitimate scientific practice. The construct of the Implied Learner is introduced to name the idealized participant these norms presuppose—articulate, agentic, collaborative, and epistemically competent—whose profile is not a neutral baseline but a historically specific normative construct.