Page 209 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

2 D.J. Tippins and M.P. Mueller

creativity across diverse aspects of society. In the same way that streams and tributaries
flow together to create a mightier current, we draw on our understanding of conflu-
ence to bring together three powerful currents – ecojustice, place-based education,
and indigenous knowledge systems. Scientists often acknowledge gravity as the
instigator of processes that draw moving water and runoff materials downhill,
forming streams, tributaries, and rivers that shape the surface of the Earth. Near the
source of rivers, water may flow out at a moderate rate. But as more runoff and
tributaries are drawn into rivers, a confluence is created and the rate of flow
increases until the water eventually slows and forms a floodplain where it empties
into a lake or ocean. The journey of a river mirrors the way we envision the inter-
section of ideas in this book. By examining the confluence of ecojustice, place-
based education, and indigenous knowledge systems, we hope to invoke new
insights, create fresh patterns, etch out new channels, and forge a deeper flow of
ideas. It is the intermingling of these currents that will allow ideas to merge and
make visible assumptions and relationships previously hidden. Through the inter-
section of experience represented in this book, we hope to foster unique questions
and invite further inquiries.

The Need for Confluence

In terms of the educational literature around ecojustice, place-based education, and
indigenous knowledge systems, there are currently few articles and books written
about them in an integrative way. A significant problem for these ideas is that
although they play a major part in what we do as science educators, they remain in
the margins of science education and environmental literatures. However, there is
an increasing interest in these topics within cultural studies and environmental
literature.
Historically, science education research has not always recognized and captured
the diverse ways in which all science educators are teaching within the larger educa-
tional domain. In the attempt to isolate and analyze educational phenomena, we have
not always been educated to think in terms of confluence or uncertainty. With great
trepidation, we may now be forced to consider the world as a web of multidimen-
sional and interrelated phenomena that require us to recognize and deal with the
possibilities of uncertainty.
Our educational quest for certainty has influenced efforts to produce generalized
science understandings which can be applied to any location. However, solutions to
some of today’s complex educational, environmental, and sociological issues are
elusive, formulated outside the wider concerns of justice, place, and indigenous-
ness. Test-driven curricula, for example, are rooted in a fragmented worldview with
little concern for the affective, emotive, and intuitive science understandings essential
to solving pressing problems of the world. In one sense, this book questions
accepted narratives, exploring ways to renew our sense of injustice and reconnect
ourselves with nature.