Page 32 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

8 M.P. Mueller and D.J. Tippins

world over. When animals and plants and mountaintops become ecologically
degraded, we too become degraded. This degradation of communities and environ-
ments reveals what humans are willing to accept and exchange for shared common
cultural and environmental spaces. Consequently, ecological degradation can lead
to injustices in schools in ways which contribute to more abstraction and death of
Nature.
Ecojustice is a new term, used in this section to represent the holistic ways of
knowing ourselves in relation to others (Thayer-Bacon 2003). It guides questions
of how we should live in relation to, and nurture the Earth with, other people. In
many ways, it is a theory of integrated relations, which is impossible to distance
from humans and the more-than-human (Abram 1996). Ecojustice reminds us to
seek schools where much of education happens in a way that is more fully realized
through John Dewey’s classical theory of participatory democracy (Dewey
1916/1966), yet not limited to a realm of sociocultural knowledge and scientific
endeavor as the best method. Therefore, this section strives to reach out to notions
of understanding and democratic education as food for thought and body. Ecojustice
represents an interpretation of the condition of the sciences not separate from lives,
where the school’s community is enlarged and embodied within understandings of
embeddedness. Relations within the community are necessary to question those
ideas which make lives more threatened. In this way, ecojustice serves as a lens to
understand cultural assumptions or patterns of thinking which influence the ways
in which we frame ourselves in the world, such as behavior and action. Ecojustice
is a holistic theory which dissolves dualisms between epistemology and ontology,
or does not consider thinking and being as separate ways of encountering ourselves
within Earth. It helps us to evaluate cultural assumptions and the ways we frame
the world and why that matters.
Ecojustice also helps us to analyze educational experiences and the challenges
and tensions between sociocultural abstractions and interpretations and the larger
ecoeducational domain. Analyzing educational experiences and tensions can
reduce some of the nervousness that many scholars have described as “the threat”
to the world’s ecologies associated with, for example, population pressures, which
inadvertently perpetuate the control of women’s bodies (Mueller 2009). When we
de-emphasize the imperative of “crises” implicitly reinforced in the vast majority
of environmental scholarship about social and environmental justice, it guides us
to seek greater ethics. Ethics serve as the context of the third and greatest foci of
ecojustice within ecoeducation theory. In brief, cultural assumptions, educational
experiences, and ethics constitute ecojustice theory. These things live in relation to
each other and cannot be separated, only reduced to descriptions, which helps us to
understand the qualified parts of the whole ecojustice movement within schools.
Ecojustice draws on the communal activities within indigenous knowledge systems.
Further, an essential aspect of ecojustice theory is the conservation of cultural and
biological systems, in forms of nurturance, rather than construction, management,
and validation with humanity. Cultural traditions should always be considered
within the wider spectrum of ecorelations (in contrast to “correlations,” which is a
statistical deduction of Earth to the mathematical sciences). Whenever possible,