Page 35 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 3
EcoJustice Education for Science Educators *

Rebecca A. Martusewicz, John Lupinacci, and Gary Schnakenberg

We live in a world of immense power, beauty, and wisdom. Every living and nonliving
entity that occupies this planet, including humans, participates in an infinitely complex
set of shifting, communicating relationships that create everything, making life pos-
sible. And while humans may desire to understand it all, there is no possible way
to ever fully uncover or control all the resulting mysteries that circulate here. This
is the meaning of the sacred.
So why start here, with these thoughts about the sacred when this is a book about
science education? We take this position, that humans cannot completely or finally
understand or control these life processes, recognizing that it may ruffle some
feathers in a book of this nature. While not applying to all scientists, science itself
has a long history of engaging in the pursuit of knowledge grounded in this very
assumption that we can know and thus control the forces that make life possible.
We begin from the recognition that in order to know anything, humans must use
language to represent it, or more broadly stated, a symbolic system, which imme-
diately puts us at a distance from what it is we seek to know. Further, as we will
describe in more detail later, all our “languaging” engages a process of differentiation
that is actually very creative of something other than what we assume we are
merely re-presenting. And yet sometimes, all too often in fact, we forget that. We
get lost in our hubris as “creatures of reason.” To believe that we are outside it and
can thus unpack it all, or to believe we should even try, is a dangerous undertaking
certain to fail, to cause much damage both within human communities and within
the larger systems of life that we depend upon.

* Though we have life, it is beyond us.
Wendell Berry
R.A. Martusewicz and G. Schnakenberg
Eastern Michigan University, 517 Fairview Circle, Ypsilanti, MI 48197
J. Lupinacci
Eastern Michigan University, 7780 Charrington Ct., Canton, MI 48187

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 11
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_3,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010