Page 310 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

284 M. van Eijck

Rather, it is often considered “annoying” by teachers during classroom activities.
The literary genres employed in this discourse are of a completely different order
than the one in the natural sciences. They express to the highest extent, students’
idiosyncratic “folk” language. As a Dutchman, I experienced the idiosyncrasy of
the literary genres employed in this language when I worked in an educational
project in Canada. While doing an educational ethnography, I followed students in
comparable place-based projects and once they engaged in this kind of talk.
Whereas I had hardly any problem with understanding my colleagues at the university,
I could hardly understand students’ “basketball and dating talk.”
Pagan highlights the emergence of typical “basketball and dating talk” to
address students’ decreased engagement in the stream-based activities. Once disen-
gaged, they no longer employ literary genres of the natural sciences in their language
use. Accordingly, in the stream-based activities criticized by Pagan, the literary
genres of the natural sciences dominate students’ “folk” language at the cost of
their interest. Thus, to me, with her study, Pagan calls for the novelization of sci-
ence education by means of river advocacy. Ultimately, in this kind of education,
the established literary genres of the natural sciences employed in stream-based
activities ought not to dominate students’ “folk” language at the cost of their
engagement.
Interestingly, Pagan’s study can also be read as a case of the novelization of sci-
ence education. However, in this case, the process is taking a completely different
direction than the process of curricular reform proposed by Pagan. The opening
vignette, for instance, features a student, Steve, who engages in the stream-based
activities in his own typical way: “Upon arriving at the stream, Steve immediately
catches sight of a large crawfish moving near a rock in the streambed and shouts,
‘Look, can I catch it and have it for dinner?’” Here, Steve satirically engages in the
stream-based activities. Catching a crawfish is certainly not the purpose of the stream-
based activities. Rather, it is the opposite of those aspects of the discourse of the
natural sciences that provide meaning and purpose to the water-quality measure-
ments. Scientists have their ethic codes too, and the water-quality activities are rather
related to a kind of responsibility for the river rather than harvesting its resources for
dinner. Hence Steve’s performance is even ironic.
To Bakhtin (1981), ridiculizing literary forms such as satire, travesty, irony, and
parody have always been the prime literary forms along which “folk” languages
struggle to get themselves heard in dominant, established literary genres: “espe-
cially among the folk, there flourished parodic and travestying forms that kept alive
the memory of the ancient linguistic struggle and that were continually nourished
by the ongoing process of linguistic stratification and differentiation” (p. 67).
Thus, perhaps unwittingly, the study of Pagan goes another step further in showing
that river advocacy actually works in novelizing the discourse of science education.
This is observable once a river advocate, Scarlett, is featured: “[The river] sustains
everything. It sustains the fish, the birds, the alligators, the grasses, the trees. You
gotta have it, I mean you gotta have oxygen, too, but we can’t see oxygen. We can
see the water.” Here, an originally scientific word, “oxygen,” that has a precise
and particular meaning in the discourse of science, is ridiculized by the advocate.