Navigating Knowledge Systems in Intercultural Science Education

Abstract Intercultural science education faces the challenge of establishing genuine epistemic dialogues between diverse knowledge systems without assimilating them into the dominant Western epistemological framework; these dialogues would contribute to overcoming—rather than reproducing—the forms of epistemic injustice that have historically marginalized non-Western ways of knowing. The systematic review presented here analyzes the modalities through which diverse knowledge systems are brought into relation in intercultural curricula and then proposes an epistemological framework, informed by contemporary conceptions of the nature of science (NOS), to guide pre- and in-service science teacher education in ethnodiverse contexts with the presence of indigenous knowledge. Using mixed methods and PRISMA protocols, 56 publications from 2015 to 2025 were retrieved from international databases. Our analyses revealed a concentration of work on the subject in countries in the Global South, with marked predominance of qualitative approaches. The main obstacles reported for establishing dialogue between knowledge systems include institutional resistance, insufficient teacher training, and tensions in monocultural evaluation systems. There is evidence of a temporal evolution from parallel approaches to more sophisticated dialogical models, with an increase in indigenous coauthorship and active community participation. Building on theoretical anchors available in the literature and refining them through a deductive-inductive analysis of the corpus, we substantiate and empirically ground four main modalities of epistemic dialogue: hybrid epistemological models (deep epistemic dialogue), intercultural epistemic cocreation, cultural artifacts as epistemic bridges, and parallel knowledge systems. These modalities are discussed in light of recent objections to integrationist approaches. We conclude that navigating between diverse knowledge systems requires systemic transformations to balance methodological rigor with epistemic justice, moving beyond both forced integration and radical incommensurability toward spaces of genuine epistemic dialogue.