Discourse and the new didactics of scientific literacy

Increasingly, there are calls for the school curriculum to reflect the real-world needs of students, such as the need to make difficult choices as citizens. The science curriculum is not exempt from these reappraisals of the relevance of what occurs in schools. Approaches to science involving social contexts are increasingly common, and with them demands for teachers to exercise new skills in curriculum-making. What are those skills and what is required to develop them? We argue that discourse among teachers is centrally involved in the process of re-invigourating the curriculum.