Page 308 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

282 M. van Eijck

a river is reduced to the degree that it limits how students relate to and understand
biological systems. She shows how natural scientific perspectives dominate in the
discourse of place-based activities at the cost of students’ engagement. Accordingly,
her work follows up with recent studies in science education questioning precisely
this “monologic” dominancy of the language of science (e.g., van Eijck and Roth
2009). The problem addressed in such studies is a discourse monopolized by the
natural sciences, resulting in a monologue (of scientific ideas) inherent to science
education with which students are not able to identify and that does not help them
significantly to learn to use the tools of science for their own well-being and that of
others in their local community. Indeed, there is a deep cognitive connection between
language and tool use. Accordingly, learning to use the tools of science requires also
the learning of language related to that tool use (Vygotsky 1986). This, in turn,
requires a dialogue rather than monologue. Following this line of thought, the task
is thus to bring dialogue into the discourse of science education. With this task in
mind, I embrace a perspective rooted in the dialogic literary philosophy of Bakhtin.
My aim is to show how Pagan’s case of river advocacy calls for and provides an
outlook internalizing dialogue in the discourse of science education.
In what follows, I argue that Pagan’s ideas can be taken as a case of/for novelizing
science education. This refers to a Bakhtinian struggle of linguistic stratification by
which “folk” language becomes part of established discourses and, as a result,
renews these discourses. Accordingly, I show how Pagan’s work lays bare inherent
instances of satire and parody required for this process. Such instances provide
guidance toward a science education in which dialogue is internalized and that
opens up opportunities for harvesting the potential of place-based education.
Regarding the scope of this book, I conclude by showing how novelizing the discourse
of science education also pertains to ecojustice and indigenous knowledge.

Novelizing

When reading Pagan’s study, I was struck by the data by which she illustrates how
individuals may engage in canonic place-based education centered on water-quality
testing of a local river. In the vignettes, several discursive layers are present upon
which activities like these unfold, each with their own specific linguistic characteris-
tics. Particularly striking is how Pagan describes the interaction between these discur-
sive layers since it goes straight to the heart of the dialogic perspective of Bakhtin.
Together with his colleagues Pavel N. Medvedev (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978)
and Valentin N. Vološinov (Bakhtin and Vološinov 1973), collectively known as
“the Bakhtin circle,” Bakhtin theorized the relationship between the everyday mate-
rial and social world that we inhabit and how it comes to be reflected and refracted
in literary texts. The resulting literary theory appeared to be reflective in the sense
that Bakhtin’s later studies on the development of new literary genres in the novel
since ancient times pertain to the cultural-historical development of human languages
more generally (i.e., Bakhtin 1981). Particularly useful for this response is that devel-
opment can be taken as a dialogue internalized in the novel’s discourse between