Page 230 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

204 D. Karrow and X. Fazio

students’ correct identification of worm specimens. The validity of data was a
common concern for many teachers often burdened by students’ repeated requests
for assurance during worm identification, data recording, and database inputting.
Because the program conveys a scientific-technical premise, teachers’ attention is
drawn toward this and their perception of the program is skewed in this fashion.
While these observations of the nature of student and teacher participation are gen-
erally consistent with the WormWatch program objectives, if the focus remains on
scientific-technical knowledge, much is missed. Opportunities to reveal that which
is marginalized by such knowledge will be further explored when we introduce
Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in the next section.

The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger

The Phenomenological Movement

Little of Heidegger’s work has been considered alongside PBE theory largely because
it has only recently been translated, remains dense and impenetrable, and unsettles the
traditional course of philosophy most are familiar with. On top of this, is the undeni-
able association Heidegger had with the German socialist movement leading up to
and during World War II, and his reluctance afterward, to repudiate the regime or his
actions. Yet, despite these shortcomings and detractions, Heidegger’s work offers us
a distinctly different concept of place – one that we refer to as place-as-being.
This section begins by situating Heidegger’s work as a response to the limitations,
as he saw them, to western philosophy. We then provide a summary of his work, in
relation to place, through his monumental book Being and Time (BT) (1962). The
section culminates by acknowledging care as one of human being’s characters of
being suggesting that an essential task of education might be, “to inspire a psychol-
ogy of awe” – “To care about Being as such” (Irwin 2002, p. 203).
To understand Heidegger’s contribution to western philosophy, one must be
acquainted with his predecessor and mentor Edmund Husserl, the father of phe-
nomenology. Husserl was deeply concerned about the direction western philoso-
phy and its disciplines, mathematics and the sciences, were taking, namely,
consistently overlooking our ordinary, everyday experience of the world around
us. This compelled him to inaugurate the philosophical discipline of phenomenol-
ogy, which during the early 1900s, was motivated by his infamous dictum, “back
to the things themselves.” This has become a rallying call for philosophy to focus
its attention on how things become apparent to our everyday consciousness.
Unlike its contemporary disciplines, phenomenology would not attempt to
explain phenomena, as science and mathematics attempt to, but rather it would
describe “as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to aware-
ness, the ways things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience” (p. 35). In the
case of NatureWatch, in addition to satisfying program objectives, this might also
involve having participants (students) describe worms using a variety of