Page 102 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

6 Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community 79

current chairperson (a student from the group) permission as anyone else participating
in the situation.
The literacy that the students in this study evolved constituted the outcome of a
live, place-based curriculum. It was a form of literacy that had as one of its central
features an ethico-moral dimension that characterized not only the activity (Roth
2008) but also the particular forms of identity that students developed (Roth 2007).
Such ethico-moral dimensions are central to a form of education that I refer to by
the term education as ecojustice project. Such a project is inherently open-ended,
always to come (Fr. à-venir), with results never achieved and achievable but always
in the future (Fr. avenir). In this nonfinalized way, we can never be satisfied with
having achieved ecojustice, but always have to strive further, always enacting rather
than achieving it – ecojustice as performative:
A performative produces an event only by securing for itself, in the first-person singular or
plural, in the present, and with the guarantee offered by conventions or legitimated fictions,
the power that an ipseity gives itself to produce the event of which it speaks – the event that
it neutralizes forthwith insofar as it appropriates for itself a calculable mastery of it.
(Derrida 2003, p. 152)
As performative, we cannot ever achieve ecojustice other than in concrete praxis.
That is, ecojustice achieved is ecojustice not attained, for, as other phenomena
including forgiveness and democracy, only an inner, irresolvable contradiction
keeps it alive. Moreover, it is only in the first person that ecojustice gives itself as
ipseity, which is neutralized as soon as we think we have attained and mastered it.
The children in my studies practice ecojustice but never can attain it, even if they
practiced for the remainder of their lives. And precisely in such reproduction and
transformation of ecojustice praxis, they retain it as a viable form of human life.
Ethico-moral stances, ecojustice, and sense of place in rural communities con-
tribute to a greater aim than transmission and handing down of knowledge. Rather
than studying to be admitted to higher levels of learning (school subjects as propae-
deutic) students actively participated in the social life of their community – both in
Bernard Collot’s and my examples; they did so in my case by contributing to the
available database on the health of one local stream. For my students, science was
a lived curriculum, in which students “have a feeling that they are involved in their
own development and recognize that they can use what they learn. This venture in
science curriculum development recognizes the socialization of science and its
relevance to how science impacts our culture, our lives, and the course of our
democracy” (Hurd 1998, p. 411). A lived curriculum requires a collective endeavor
involving not only one subject (e.g., science) but also disciplinary knowledge in the
social sciences, humanities, ethics, law, and political science. However, an interdis-
ciplinary approach gives all subjects an epistemologically equal place among all
others rather than attributing to it an epistemologically exceptional status. Truly
democratic forms of education (not in the sense of serving capitalist interests) allow
individual members to develop their own representations of salient issues.
In my approach, education moves outside the school and thereby becomes, at
least partially, deinstitutionalized. Conceptually, this deinstitutionalization shares
some similarity with the institution of halfway houses or with the group homes that