Page 314 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

288 S. Semken and E. Brandt

philosophy to show a progressively greater emphasis on how to dwell sustainably in
places and thereby preserve their environmental and cultural viability. To illustrate
potential applications of this philosophy to contested places, we offer examples of the
human damage done by forced displacement of two indigenous groups in the south-
west USA and in Malaysia, and then present the complex of issues surrounding an
ongoing place-related dispute in a naturally and culturally diverse southwest US com-
munity. We conclude with a discussion of reasons why and ways that place-based
education can be brought to bear on these and other disputes over richly meaning ful
places, in order to safeguard their ecological and cultural attributes.

Place, Sense of Place, and Place-Based Education

We live in physical landscapes comprising landforms, water, air, and ecosystems.
On this substrate, we have created cultural landscapes populated by places: spatial
localities imbued with meaning by human experience (Tuan 1977), whether in situ
or vicariously. Places are social constructions. Their meanings originate from the
interplay of the natural attributes of the place, and all of the humanistic and scien-
tific ways that people can sense and understand it (Casey 1996). For example, a
place may be meaningful as a ceremonial site for an indigenous people or a home
to an endangered species, or for its portrayal in a famous artwork, or for a deposit
of an economically valuable resource. Simply naming a place gives it meaning.
Place meanings become as diverse as all those who inhabit, visit, use, learn, value,
preserve, or otherwise experience the place. In many places, different meanings
coincide, sometimes come into conflict as local demographics change, and are
renegotiated through discourse, scholarship, media, economics, and law.
Anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) wrote that
places are as much a part of us as we are of them–yours, mine, and everyone else’s–and
senses of place partake complexly of both. And so, unavoidably, senses of places also
partake of cultures, of shared bodies of “local knowledge” (the phrase is Clifford Geertz’s)
with which persons and whole communities render their places meaningful and endow
them with social importance. (Basso 1996, p. xvi)
While making meaning in places, people frequently form emotional attachments to
them. Such place attachments can vary in intensity from simple acknowledgment
that a place exists to a willingness to make meaningful personal sacrifices in
order to preserve or enhance the place (Relph 1976). The sense of place, as com-
monly characterized in the place-focused disciplines of geography, environmental
psychology, and rural sociology (e.g., Brandenburg and Carroll 1995) is the com-
bination of all meanings and attachments that an individual or community affixes
to a place. Sense of place encapsulates the relationship of humans to places.
Places are dynamic; just as geologic and climatic processes modify the physical
landscape, population and cultural changes alter the meanings and dimensions of a
place, albeit at very different rates. Cultures and worldviews are often distinguished
in part by their relationships to place: how geographically rooted they are (Orr 1992);