Page 101 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

78 W.-M. Roth

situations. Here, the parents participated driving their children and peers to the
different research sites and thereby engaged to make this interesting educational
context possible. The sites were close and easily accessible, facilitating such a cur-
riculum in a (semi-) rural setting, whereas they may not be easily accessible in
(sub-) urban settings. Given the size of the municipality, it was not surprising that
the participating parents knew each other; they were chatting about this different
approach to teaching and learning and compared it to the normal approaches that
also characterized their own schooling. In the past, I have written a lot about
another rural school, this one in France, about which I had seen a documentary;
I subsequently exchanged emails with the teacher (Bernard Collot) and he sent me
the book he has written about teaching in rural schools. Like I, he is actually in
favor of the context, which, in his situation, meant teaching in a 500-soul village.
Here, too, elementary school children went into the village, for example, to post the
letters they had written to pen pals around the world; and parents and other village
folk came to the school to engage the children in various forms of activities, like
the older lady coming to play chess with them or the gentleman who helped them
build and tend a vegetable and fruit garden. It turned out that the school eventually
became a totally open environment where young and old would come after school
and in the evening to make use of existing resources that allowed them to expand
their own room to maneuver, such as using computers and accessing the Internet.
Bernard Collot (2002) suggests that the schools in rural communities have an
advantage in that they may constitute small heterogeneous assemblies that are the
sources of dissipative, self-organizing structures. Once the structure is in place, you
do not need much to sustain these structures because they are self-sustaining. For
example, when there are classes gathering all students from K–6, then each year there
are only a small number of incoming and a small number of outgoing students, the
remainder being the same as during the previous year. Thus, students just continue
what they have done before and the incoming students become part of the existing
patterns of doing things. When I took my seventh-grade students and allowed them
to become part of the network of conversations and actions surrounding the health of
the watershed, they, too, were like the incoming students in Bernard’s class, learning
by participating in doing what others already were doing.
Bernard Collot suggests that small villages also can function like dissipative
structures concerning knowing and learning more generally, structures that stand in
a mutually constitutive relation with the school. In fact, school life and village life
no longer is distinct – schools become deinstitutionalized in the way I have been
advocating for some time now. Bernard showed that one does not have to regulate
children to achieve better than the national average on standardized examinations.
In fact, his students arrived at the school in the morning when they wanted, and then
wrote their own daily curriculum objectives on a chalkboard. They were completely
free in their choices, though they tended to enact particular activities, composing
music, writing to pen pals, gardening, constructing something, attending a play put
on by other individuals, or participating in a discussion (e.g., the one I watched was
a discussion among K–3 students concerning the question of whether god exists).
The teacher Bernard never lectured, and when he wanted to talk he had to ask the