Page 100 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

6 Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community 77

and therefore the possibility for lifelong learning without the discontinuities that
characterize the transition from formal schooling to other aspects of life. If the
motives underlying school science and environmental activism, stewardship, or
volunteerism are similar, based on the nature of tools, rules, divisions of labor, and
community, we can expect individuals (subjects) to move along trajectories that do
not exhibit discontinuities characteristic of other transitions. Students who partici-
pate in activities that contribute to the knowledge available in their community will
develop into adolescents and adults, continuing to participate in the activities relat-
ing to environmental health. The possibility for such transitions is clearly indicated
by a variety of situational organizations that foster the participation of students
and nonstudents alike. For example, as a result of my work in the schools, middle-
and high-school students conducted science–fair-related investigations. As part
of their career preparation, some local high-school students chose to participate in
“Streamkeepers,” a program fostering the recovery and restoration of ecosystems,
and open to any individual or group. Three national youth teams worked together
one summer to help the Hagan Creek–Kennes Project to improve the watershed by
2
moving native plants before clearing 11,000 m for a pond and wetlands that helped
improve the water quality in the area.
High-school and university students contributed to the data collection as part of
funded summer-work projects. Masters students at the local university became key
people in constructing community surveys to yield multilayered (GIS) representa-
tions, involving maps that displayed groundcover (vegetation), surficial geology,
soil, aquifers, topological, and present land-use (housing, zoning, or cadastral)
information.

Rural Education Has Great Advantages

In this teaching experiment, knowing and learning were taken as moments of cul-
turally and historically situated activity. Learning, which I understand as changing
participation in a changing world, is discernable by noticing self and others’ changing
ways of going about interesting and community-relevant issues. Because interaction
and participation cannot be understood as the sum total of an individual acting
toward a stable environment, learning cannot be understood in terms of what hap-
pens to individuals. Rather, if learning is culturally and historically situated and
distributed in this way, educators must focus on enabling changing participation,
that is, enabling new forms of societal activity that is collectively generated. I am,
therefore, particularly interested in forms of participation that are continuous with
out-of-school experiences and, therefore, have the potential to lead to lifelong
learning rather than to discontinuities between formal and informal learning settings.
Building on children’s sense of, and for, place, which constitutes their real dwelling,
also awakens their sense of ecojustice.
In my view, rural education comes with the advantage that the kinds of engage-
ment described here are much less problematic than they might possibly be in urban