Page 31 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 2
Nurturing Morally Defensible
Environmentalism

Michael P. Mueller and Deborah J. Tippins

We begin this section on ecojustice by acknowledging that schooling is a very small
part of the larger educational domain. As students sit at their desks or at lab benches
learning about science and how to do science, they get merely a glimpse of the
world at large. This world is the setting for a “science” inseparable from the lives
of men and women in every cultural, ethnic, racial, and national milieu. Moreover,
it is a science inseparable from the lives of animal and plant species, embedded in
the strata of robust geology. Children are pure witnesses to this Nature breathed in
and breathed out, their hands in the muck, their minds and bodies affected by the
minutiae of environmental toxins and nurturing chemicals. Our Nature is a world
of ecologies in which we humans are situated, withstanding rationalities which cre-
ate mindful tolerances of epistemic separation until Earth gives way to our
abstractions.
These abstractions comprise subjects taught in schools. But education is what
we do when what we learn in schools is used to make sense of our embodied and
relational situations. Subjects are fodder for school but education is larger than life
in school. Education begins in the womb of our mothers and before that in the soils
of the Creation. It ends and begins with soils. What matters then is the regeneration of
the soils in the Sacred, which is described in this book. Education that does not
offer the regeneration of the soils, and by extension, the lives of people, does much
less to contribute to the moral and spiritual formation developed when living more
fully within the community and environment. At the heart of every school is a com-
munity regenerated and built of lives vis-à-vis “life”; a metaphor having very little
to do with the larger stage of educational ecologies. The idea of educating children
is not limited to the spheres in which schooling occurs. Rather education lives in
relation to every other spherical geography in which young lives are nurtured the

M.P. Mueller
Department of Mathematics & Science Education, University of Georgia, Aderhold Hall 212,
30602-7124 Athens, Georgia, USA

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 7
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_2,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010