Page 103 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

80 W.-M. Roth

replaced mental hospitals in some countries. In both situations, the members are no
longer locked up in institutions (prison, psychiatric clinic) but participate in (limited
ways, sometimes under supervision) the everyday affairs of their community. In my
situation, students’ activities take their place in the community more broadly rather
than being something relegated to particular locations (schools) with local and
temporal effects. The outcomes of students’ work has relevance and contributes to
the broader life world that they inhabit together with their parents, siblings, elders,
town council members, and others in the community. If science is to be for all, then
there have to be opportunities to participate in ways that emphasize students’
strengths, and address their interests, rather than setting up situations that bring out
inability, disability, and problems. Science in rural communities thereby contributes
to the reproduction of village society so that we may conceive of education as one
that focuses on the achievements of the collectivity and consider “best teaching
strategies” to be those that lead to new forms of collective activity. Science educa-
tion conceived in this manner not only builds on the sense of place that locals feel,
but also builds on the sense for place, which generally comes with a sense for the
need of ecojustice.
When rural educators focus on creating situations with the potential for scientific
literacy to emerge and for lifelong learning along trajectories not marked by currently
prevailing discontinuities when school boundaries are crossed, new instructional pos-
sibilities and difficulties are likely to emerge in nondeterministic ways. This is a direct
result of the school and rural community being small, order-generating entities that
produce and evolve new self-sustaining structures. Documenting these possibilities
and difficulties, as well as knowing and learning what emerges from them, remains
virtually uncharted terrain. Much research remains to be done to study the forms
distributed and situated cognition to take in the approach we propose. Before policy
recommendations can be validly made, such research has to show that our proposal
can be implemented more widely in a number of different domains and with more
diverse student populations than that participating in this research.

Coda

Academics often decry the poor state of rural education. The situation may well be
such that it can be decried, but this is not a fault of the nature of rural schools and
communities. There are other moments of society mediating what happens in rural
schools, the undesirability of teaching there, poverty, poor funding and endowment,
or low teacher pay. The fact is that only the sky is the limit for someone wanting to
innovate and capitalize on the opportunities rural communities offer to the educator
and to its students. In this chapter, I provide a number of examples of how with very
simple means rather innovating curriculum can be planned and enacted.
Academics also can do something for developing a sense of place in their col-
leagues and through their own actions. Writing about ecojustice in the disembodied
and dispassionate ways of an Immanuel Kant can only do disservice where the core