In voicing Nabah’s story, we have aired the sense of a ‘dysciencia syndrome’, wherein people exhibit inability, incapacity, disinterest, low motivation and poor self-esteem in relation to the learning of science. Nabah’s a story, in Hanson’s (2008) words, is of a young woman swimming against the tide. To maintain the metaphor, while social waves roll over her, there also exists a powerful undertow of personal perceptions and beliefs. She began as a girl in science refusal, as dyscientic, and ended (so far) as a young woman in growing personal agency in science acceptance – moving from one end of our putative spectrum to the other. In this, it is also a story of a movement from self-exclusion to self-inclusion. Nabah’s future lies, of course, in the future. We sincerely hope that she succeeds in achieving her science habitué. We gathered a collection of Nabah’s self-perceptions through interviews between 2015 and 2019. Over these four years, we used several different methods to work with her, primarily collecting her self-told, reflective stories. Other approaches included six short questionnaires and classroom conversations between October 2015 and August 2017 that explored Nabah’s aspirations, engagement, perceptions about school and out-of-school science. In addition, we conducted two semi-structured interviews, one in August 2016 and the second in July 2017, and a further open-ended conversational interview in March 2019.

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