Page 235 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

16 Educating-Within-Place: Care, Citizen Science, and EcoJustice 209

through spacial existentials reveals Dasein’s spatiality. Dasein is “in” the world in
the sense that it deals with other entities with concern and familiarity. This character
of Being-in makes possible Dasein’s spatiality. This is illustrated through two
existentials Heidegger (1962) refers to as “de-serverance” and “directionality.”
De-severence refers to a “constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, making the far-
ness vanish, making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it close”
(Wollan 2003, p. 37). Through this existential, a second makes itself apparent –
directionality. “Every bringing close has already taken in advance a direction
towards a region out of which what is de-severed brings itself close, so that one can
come across it with regard to its place” (p. 37). And here we come full circle to
discover the relationship being has with place. As Casey (1997) adds: “[W]hen
closeness is realized by the conjoining of circumspective concern with directional-
ity, place results (p. 248, our emphasis). As students experience worms, engaging
with them through the existentials of care, de-severance, and directionality, through
the Being of their humanity (Dasein), place is created.

NatureWatch and Heidegger’s Philosophy

Let us again consider, in what ways NatureWatch could capitalize upon this basic
existential of care. We saw evidence of this fundamental structure repeatedly during
our case studies and salient episodes with teachers attempting to foreground such
experiences. PBE theory, which includes place-as-being through the concept of
educating-within-place, attempts to replace a traditional form of knowledge as
representation with a view of knowledge as a subspecies of a kind of concernful
dealing with the world. In what follows, we shift our attention from a theory of truth
conceived as judgment toward a theory of truth based on revelation. Recall, this all
presumes a conception of place-as-being, or an appreciation for place as that which
is revealed (appears).
To begin, we noticed that students generally looked forward to field-collecting
experiences. Field trips were usually met with great anticipation and excitement.
Once on-site, for the most part, students were touching earthworms, describing how
they felt, pressing down upon the earth to leverage their shovels, feeling the soil
with their hands as they located/sorted worms, discovering unknown invertebrates/
vertebrates, looking up to the sky to assess rudimentary weather conditions, gaining
an appreciation for their ecology and habitats, and so on. We even witnessed Grade
10 students comment, “we never knew worms existed underneath the school yard!”
It could be said, these students were forging a relationship with worms and the local
environs. In her landmark study in the 1950s reviewing the autobiographies of 300
European geniuses, Edith Cobb noted that many of these people described similar
experiences during childhood.
[T]he study of the child in nature, culture and society reveals that there is a special period...
of childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve, between the strivings of
animal infancy and the storms of adolescence – when the natural world is experienced in