Page 333 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

25 Responding to Place 307

communities are historically based on STS ideas. However, these considerations
have also been critically examined within the domain of environmental education.
Environmental education in most countries is a grassroots endeavor and not manda-
tory or part of the core curriculum for schools. So, in response to these criticisms,
a humanistic vision for an STS framework (in the USA, Canada, and elsewhere)
was extended to include a variety of environmental issues. The resulting curriculum
domain has been described as a science–technology–society–environment (STSE)
framework.
Scientific literacy within the context of STSE, according to Hodson (1998), is
not merely about knowing scientific ideas and facts or being able to participate in
any form of inquiry. It is more about wanting to and being able to make decisions
and perform actions in routine life by every community member. According to this
perception, science education should be accessible to all, interesting, relevant and
useful, nonsexist, multicultural, humanized, and value-laden.
As such, the STSE focus was an attempt at developing a more humanistic form
of issues-based science education at its very inception. However, despite the intended
humanistic focus of this perspective, a cursory analysis of curriculum content in one
Canadian jurisdiction (Sammel and Zandvliet 2003) revealed that the implementa-
tion of STSE offered only a socio-historical perspective and that the dominant focus
remained on understandings of only positive scientific connections rather than
exploring how science has been socially constructed or how it could potentially
silence a variety of voices.
By extension, the view of environment in the implementation of the STSE
domain in Canada (and elsewhere) appears to be informed by the same epistemo-
logical (technological) focus as the previous STS frameworks. This is seen as
conceptually different from other types of environmental learning that instead seek
to embed learning in the context of community-based problem-solving or interdis-
ciplinary learning. The next section seeks to further problematize the inclusion of
environmental education within such technocentric visions of science education.

Problems with a “Scientific” Environmental Education

Problems with a purely scientific view of environmental education such as that related
by the STS or STSE frameworks described in the previous section have been
related by Bowers (1999), who remarked that the terms “environmental education”
and “science education” were increasingly seen as interchangeable. He then prob-
lematizes this emerging relationship:
The effect of this categorization is that the other areas of teacher education and graduate
education continue to ignore the connections between the values and ideas they promote
and the cultural behaviours now overwhelming the viability of natural systems. (p. 161)
While the inclusion of more technological and environmental concepts in science
classes is seen by many as advancing the current reform efforts, I assert that students
exposed to this model of education are asked to understand environmental and