Page 325 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

24 Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based Education 299

Misconceptions also exist on the other side of the dispute; for example, reasonable
questions about the impact that an underground block-caving copper mine would
have on the present land surface become amplified into geologically unsupported
assertions that all of Apache Leap could tumble into a yawning pit.

Discussion: Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based
Education for Superior and Other Contested Places

The area encompassing Superior, Apache Leap, Oak Flat, and the surrounding high
country and low desert has been a richly endowed, naturally and culturally
meaningful place through several millennia of human habitation. It is presently a
center of conflict over deeply held place-based values and beliefs, variously held by
people who perceive themselves as having equally strong attachments to the place.
Hence, the dispute over this and similarly contested places can be seen as a conflict
among different and seemingly irreconcilable senses of place. In a time when such
contests are increasingly likely to be settled by legal decisions rather than by superior
force, place-based education can help each of the different and opposing groups to
understand the stakes that each has in the dispute. Few non-Natives understand the
bonds to ancestral homelands that traditional Apaches and Yavapais maintain, and
few can comprehend why they may hold its spiritual value above its economic
value. Few visiting naturalists and rock climbers may accept that a fourth-generation
miner in Superior could love the local environment just as much, if not more, than
they do. Someone with no geologic or economic background might wonder why
RCM would want to mine copper beneath Oak Flat, rather than some other place
out in the open desert. Young Superiorites or San Carlos Apaches might wonder
what will happen to their families and communities when the mine ceases opera-
tions 6 or 7 decades hence.
These kinds of meanings and attachments, if preserved and passed on in their
entirety, will help all of the stakeholders in the Superior area, present and future, to
politically and legally advocate for its continued ecological integrity and cultural
sustainability. This could mean action pivotal to a Congressional decision on the
land exchange, but it could also mean long-term, objective, community-based
monitoring of the environmental and social impacts of the mine, if it is built on
schedule, or an alternative economic development plan, if it is not.
What is most critical is that these dynamically changing places are always cared
for in a sustainable way; that schoolchildren who may someday work in such a
mine receive an authentically place-based education that enables them to explore
the local biosphere, reveals the geological processes that created the copper depos-
its, portrays the full human history and lifeways of the area, and imparts a balanced
understanding of all stances on the issue. Such things are not typically taught in
local schools or regional colleges, nor explained in depth by local museums and
media outlets, nor distributed on flyers or through digital social networks … but