Page 214 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

188 M. van Eijck

environmental education that emerged from attempts to bring youths closer to their
natural environment and the problems affecting these environments. This kind of
place-based education, also called “ecological place-based education,” is associated
not only with going outdoors close to the (sub-) urban environment to learn how the
natural and the suburban environment are linked up with each other but also with
acting responsibly and ethically in and toward this environment – a prelude to
education for ecojustice. However, all too often, the focus of ecological place-based
education is on the natural scientific aspects of place – as if nature existed as such
independent of the ways in which it figures in the varying experiences of different
people. From such a perspective, place-based education is a relatively unproblematic
educational approach.
The emphasis on natural science insulates place-based education (unwittingly)
from the social conflicts inherent in culture. This accounts for many place-based
approaches that do not link natural scientific themes explicitly with critical themes
such as urbanization and globalization. This is in part the result of place-based edu-
cation as a countermovement against those forms of science education in which
students often lose their sense of place by focusing on global or abstract issues that
bear no tangible relation to place – in fact, science, supposedly valid everywhere in
the world, seeks to generate universal and universalized knowledge that is independent
of any and every place. There is thus an inherent tension in place-based education,
making it a more problematic approach than initially foreseen. On the one hand, a
natural scientific approach “dehumanizes” the place and reduces it to its natural
scientific characterizations. On the other hand, the very same approaches aim at
bringing students closer to the place and away from global, abstract issues.
The problematic nature of place-based education becomes even more clearly
articulated once it moves toward urban settings and merges with critical pedagogy. In
this regard, place-based education is less associated with the typical natural scientific
aspects of the outdoors. Instead, place-based education deals with a complicated
amalgam that, besides the natural scientific, involves social, cultural, and political
aspects as well. Due to a shift from the natural scientific to the social perspectives on
place, place-based education deals with social constructs. The natural scientific
aspects of place are rather implicitly featured in describing the inner city material
landscapes to which social constructs – of which many are racist myths – are attrib-
uted. Such shifts from the natural scientific to the sociocultural reflect the need for a
critical pedagogy of place.
Following critical perspectives on place-based education, its problematic nature
becomes evident as a matter of the voices by means of which place is articulated.
Place, as a social construct, is defined by the perspectives people attribute to it and,
in turn, these attributions collectively become the voice by which people are bound
up with the places represented. Take a simple map of a place, which is often con-
fused for the place (territory) it denotes. Such a projection of a place, deceptively
simple and hence often unquestioned, is already problematic because of the names
used. Places are often designated by formal names, which comes across as if this is
the only name of the place that matters. However, places often bear local names of