Page 335 - Cultural Studies of Science Education
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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