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25  Responding to Place                                         309

            underly scientific or environmental issues. To sum up, a socioscientific-issues (SSI)
            approach  arises  from  an  alternative  framework  that  unifies  the  development  of
            moral and epistemological orientations of students while also considering the role
            of  emotions  and  character  as  key  components  of  science  education  (Sadler  and
            Zeidler 2005). Still while the weighing and debating of community held values can
            and should occur in science classrooms, many teachers still believe that dealing
            with  values  or  moral  issues  should  occur  in  social  studies  or  in  extracurricular
            activities,  and  not  in  science  classrooms  (Tal  and  Kedmi  2006).  For  example
            Hughes (2000), asserted that:
              Teachers fear that extensive coverage of socio-science devalues the (science) curriculum,
              alienates traditional science students and jeopardizes their own status as gatekeepers of
              scientific knowledge. (p. 426).
            Despite this limitation, I believe that this developing discourse around SSI is very
            promising for science educators as it may leave behind the hegemonic conditions
            embedded within the earlier STS and STSE perspectives and provide more room
            for marginalized voices (such as indigenous communities) in the dialogue of how
            to  deal  with  the  troubling  environmental  issues  faced  by  the  broader  society.
            Further, the open-ended nature of SSI problems also allows room for a broad range
            of interpretations: offering opportunities for localizing and interpreting curriculum
            related to scientific, technological, and environmental developments. In short, the
            SSI approach may allow for a more ecological and inclusive framework for many
            place-based forms of science education: one that acknowledges the importance of
            context and community in its consideration of real-world problems. In short, it may
            allow for an emerging ecological framework for science education.




            Ecological Frameworks


            As noted at the beginning of this chapter, our educational concern for local space
            (community in the broad sense) is sometimes overshadowed by both the discourse
            of accountability and by the discourse of economic competitiveness to which it is
            linked  (Gruenewald  2003),  and  it  is  this  discourse  that  Semken  and  Brandt  are
            responding to. In short, place has become a critical construct, not because it is in
            opposition to economic well-being but because it challenges assumptions about the
            dominant “progress” metaphor and its embedded neoconservative values, which I
            have argued are so dominant in systemic curriculum reform efforts. An ecological
            framework breaks from this mold by taking as its first assumption that education is
            both “about” and “for” local communities.
              Ecological frameworks attempt to apply the principles of Ecology-derived from
            the Greek oikos (or household) to an examination of the relationship of all living
            things with their environments and with one another as living and interdependent
            systems. In a philosophical sense, ecological notions such as community or com-
            plexity  also  apply  to  our  conception  of  the  human–world  relationship  and  to  the
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