Page 215 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

15 Place-Based (Science) Education: Something Is Happening Here 189

indigenous peoples reflecting their century-old relationships with the place. Even
more so, the boundaries drawn by the natural sciences between human and nonhu-
man inhabitants of places are usually taken for granted, but even such boundaries
are social constructs.
Following Bakhtin (1981), I understand myself as existing in a material world
that I share with others so that – because of my unique position and therefore point
of view – there are as many natural worlds and senses of place as there are different
people. Indeed, the word “place” derives from ancient Greek word plateia (plateίa,
street), which referred to a central place in town for feasts, celebrations, events, and
meetings (cf. van Eijck & Roth, in press). Plateia is not some position, not an empty
space, but an area that becomes significant because of the events, meetings, feasts
that “take place” in the place, which thereby comes into existence as place by virtue
of the event. All subsequent uses of the word in all languages, e.g., Ger. platz, Fr.
place, Sp. plaza, It. piazza, refer to locations where people meet and significant
events occur. Put shortly, in places, something is happening that matters to folks.
Place-based education concerns the multitude of voices and the narratives they
enact in which the material place comes to be refracted and ideologically reflected.
These voices collectively represent the place – stand for its being, which brings us
to identity as one of the key issues currently at stake in place-based education.
Because of their own cultural-historically shaped biographies, scholars working on
place-based education cannot share the notions of the place of their research par-
ticipants that are fundamental to understanding the place as it is and hence, as a
social construct. Place is not simply a location that we can identify by listening to
a particular voice. It is a location unfolding in time where people inhabit, visit,
rebuild, make, enjoy, sorrow, describe, and recount, hence live it – it is articulated
by a multitude of voices.
In western scientific thought, “the thing is represented as an unknown X to which
perceptible properties are attached” (Heidegger 1971, p. 153). This is the case when
voices in the natural sciences reduce place by attaching categories for space and time
as if they are perceptible properties. This may be problematic for people who are not
used to listening to and articulating such voices, which is often the case with indig-
enous peoples. Hence, place as a lived entity is exactly what makes place-based
education so problematic once studied in detail. Its “self” continuously unfolds in
time as it is lived by its community – the collective people who live the place – and
can neither be grasped by a static identity nor be articulated by a single voice such
as the natural scientific.
With an increased interest in place-based approaches in the last 5 years, the prob-
lematic nature of place-based education has become even more evident. Several
educational studies have recently appeared that illuminate place as a multivoiced
and contested entity. As a result of this illumination, the discipline of place-based
education is in a process of transition, which is reflected in this section – something
is happening. Originally as an approach mainly used in science education in an
unproblematized way, it is currently evolving into a scholarly field of study that
takes the notion of place as foundational for education. This development is char-