Page 226 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

200 D. Karrow and X. Fazio

student lived experience and learning in local phenomena to teaching and student
experience of the world with an improvement of people’s and communities’ lives.
Over time PBE has become socially and politically charged. Once again, referring
to our NatureWatch case studies, such a citizen science program illustrates this
tendency. Engaging students in physical environments, un-tampered by economic
or political interest (the commons), and having them collect ecological data to
assess the fitness of these environments, illustrates a rudimentary form of PBE
founded upon place-as-land/community. Depending on the degree to which the
citizen science program invokes concernful action around the ecological health of
community environments, PBE could reflect a conception of place-as-diversity.
However, NatureWatch, as we will examine in further detail, falls short of this.
Despite the efforts of Paul Theobald, summarized within his book, Teaching the
Commons: Place, Pride and the Renewal of Community, Chet Bowers and his on-
line book, Revitalizing the Commons, and David Gruenewald and his work entitled,
A Critical Pedagogy of Place, the field of place-based education remains theoreti-
cally immature (Nespor 2008). Gruenewald (2003) elaborates: “Place-based educa-
tion, in its diverse incarnations, is currently less a pedagogy per se and more an
alternative methodology that lacks a coherent theoretical framework” (p. 3). What
is common to these approaches is an emphasis on place or “context” and education
or “the value of learning” as separate entities brought together through deliberate
practice or pedagogy. They differ in the manner they approach PBE; pedagogical
enactments striving to relate place objects with learning subjects.
Theobald’s work situates PBE in a sporadic history of the critical junctures at
which the commons, arenas with strong borders controlled by dense networks of
intradependencies (the necessary relations within place) have been undermined
(Nespor 2008). Beginning with the ancient Greeks he intermittently traces the his-
tory of the commons noting its deviation over time while arguing for its mainte-
nance by schools directed toward promoting community (Theobald 1997). Oriented
slightly differently, although borrowing the idea of “the commons,” Bowers (2006)
advocates for the preservation of the “commons,” again in his owns words, “the
environment…available for use by the entire community,” encompassing “every
aspect of the human/biotic community that ha[s] not been monetized or privatized,”
by ways that schools and other institutions can help “resist their further destruction”
(p. 2). In an effort to move beyond mere “technique,” Gruenewald (2003) begins to
theorize the movement through what he refers to as a critical pedagogy of place –
an effort to conjoin critical theory with PBE and thus move the field of practice in
a direction inclusive of socially critical and ecological dimensions through what he
terms decolonization and rehabitation. Despite inherent problems with such an
attempt to theorize PBE, namely “it represents abstract context-free thinking, as
well as a rationalist approach to change and progress” (Stevenson 2008, p. 356), the
collective approaches of Theobald, Bowers, and Gruenewald are problematic
because they tend to moralize and emphasize dualities, as previously noted. As
place is idealized through some historical allusion to “the commons” and our pres-
ent condition as “the fall” from this ideal, a strong moralizing sentiment is
expressed. What is more, place tends to be defined in terms of regions with bound-