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16 Educating-Within-Place: Care, Citizen Science, and EcoJustice 203

order that remain marginalized. We will return to these marginalized experiences
after considering Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in section four.
What allusions to PBE theory are invoked by NatureWatch as it presently exists?
That NatureWatch has the capacity to invoke place-as-land/community is certainly
obvious. This usually amounts to educating students in physical places outside the
domain of the classroom. These physical places are broadly construed and may
include everything from natural to cultural settings. NatureWatch certainly provides
students with opportunities to work in more natural settings situated within their
local communities. In our three case studies, which included two schools situated
within suburban settings and a third in a highly urbanized setting, students got
outside collecting worms. In some instances, collecting sites were the school
grounds, or adjacent natural spaces, such as a farmer’s field or a deciduous forest.
In the urban secondary school, students visited a section of the Niagara Escarpment
to collect their worms. Either way, students were outside, within a different “place”
implementing the WormWatch program.
As to whether WormWatch invokes place-as-difference, the sociopolitical
dimension theorized by Gruenewald, in our experience, is doubtful. As the pro-
gram is highly controlled with stakeholders’ roles carefully prescribed, students
and their teachers had little or no opportunity to examine larger issues stemming
from collected data. For instance, in several cases, teachers expressed concern
over the lack of worms discovered on school sites. They posed questions about
this, that is, the health of student’s play/work environments, but that is as far as
their inquiries went. WormWatch did not provide opportunities to invoke a criti-
cal pedagogy of place to borrow from Guenewald, although it certainly has the
potential to do this should Environment Canada choose to embrace such an
approach to citizen science, or should teachers feel they have the license to do
so (Karrow and Fazio 2010 submitted).
In bringing this section to a close, a few general observations are in order. With
regard to the various WormWatch case studies the prevailing attitude toward any
relationship between the student and his/her environment is distinct. Because of the
manner in which the program is conceived, structured, and implemented, students
assume the position of a detached, objective, and impartial “scientist.” Students
have little or no opportunity to develop a sustainable and meaningful relationship
with their local environment. They, as “subjects” rove about visited environments
observing worm “objects.” The type of knowledge privileged throughout these
field-collecting exercises is scientific-technical knowledge. Students are educated
into acts of “correct” identification, as per the premise of the program, with the
teacher acting as the arbiter of that knowledge. Interestingly, student buy-in seemed
to taper off during successive site visits. For instance, within elementary schools,
during the third or fourth visit to a site through the course of a month, students spent
more time digging and backfilling while pursuing various other off-task behaviors,
than assessing basic ecological conditions. Frequently, one or two students ended
up with the tedious task of classifying the worms, no easy task even for the casual
zoologist, while the balance of the group (4–6 students) milled around. Furthermore,
several teachers indicated that the implied value of the program hinged upon