Page 283 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 20
Critical Pedagogy of Place: A Framework
for Understanding Relationships Between

People in (Contested) Shared Places

Sonya N. Martin

In Pauline Chinn and David Hana’ike’s chapter exploring the role of place,

culture, and situated learning on teacher agency in science, Pauline and David
employ Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Actor Network Theories
to examine David’s lived experiences as a middle-school science teacher in Hawaii.
Through ethno- and biographic narratives, Pauline and David offer a “genealogical”
examination of David’s early experiences as a learner, focusing on the ways in
which his identity as a Hawaiian native has shaped his growth and development as
a science teacher. Specifically, Pauline and David emphasize the intentionality of
David’s establishment of activity networks with individuals within schools and the
local community as being connected to his identity. They provide examples of how
these activity/social networks have supported his development of a teaching prac-
tice that has enabled him to successfully connect school learning to place, culture,
and science for students who, like David, identify as Hawaiian natives.
Presenting the auto/ethnographic descriptions of their histories as and with indi-
viduals in this community, Pauline and David offer the reader not only names of
people, but also trace their connections with others in the context of specific places
on the islands. This reminded me of David Gruenewald’s (2003a) paper, “The Best
of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” in which Gruenewald explored the
connection between lived experience and place by quoting Paulo Freire:
People as beings “in a situation,” find themselves in temporal-spatial conditions which
mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on their own “situationality”
to the extent that they are challenged by it to act upon it. (Freire 1970/1995, p. 90, as quoted
in Gruenewald 2003a p. 4)
In this quote, Gruenewald explores the significance of people reflecting on their
“situationality,” including recognizing that “being in a situation has spatial, geo-
graphical, contextual dimensions” (2003a, p. 4). This concept was especially inter-
esting to me as I considered Pauline and David’s use of genealogy as a lens for
examining the socio/cultural/historical context of lived experience within a given

S.N. Martin
Drexel University, School of Education, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 257
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_20,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010