Page 28 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Prologue xxvii

this book plugs an alarm clock for individuals who are complicit with sleeping in
while the Earth’s environment “heats up!” (i.e., changes). This book provides a
nuanced lens for evaluating and resolving a few complicated educational problems
and community conditions, while protecting and conserving the most threatened
narratives.
These narratives if lost, would affect us in ways that will be discussed more fully
in the third section on indigenous knowledge, where children and their teachers share
some of the responsibility for setting things right through place-based work. (Please
note that the terms “Aboriginal,” “Indigenous,” “Native,” and “Elder” are capitalized
depending on the use by the author within each of the individual chapters and rejoin-
der.) The second section on place highlights these practices associated with schooling
and provides important experiential understandings needed to argue for education
centered largely on justice when integrated holistically. With a diversity of voices
coming together to initiate these conversations around the confluence of ecojustice,
place-based (science) education, and indigenous knowledge systems, this book is an
important starting point for educators in many facets of life. Throughout the book, the
weaving has been done conspicuously and we anticipate this book brings into better
focus a vibrant role for the Earth’s ecosystems, within ecosociocultural theory and
participatory democracy, which engenders a new era of peace.
Please join in this conversation for justice, place, and wisdom.

Breaking Free

We are bound
to this Earth, our island home,
by the logic of our domination: by leafy
shades of green and gray, by walls
built up, torn down, rebuilt,
made permeable
(oh, if we work hard connecting
youth with age, mysteries
with fact) – yes! – made permeable
by living well between place and being,
centering where locale arises, where thought
originates – pause there
a moment before flying
across lands, rivers, streams,
the dry and stony ground
of one place giving rise
to forests, and dark forests
giving rise beneath you to hills, and thoseat last! To rough-shouldered mountains
juxtaposed, multifaceted, teeming with wild