Page 352 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

326 M. van Eijck

designed in ways that enable students to identify and associate with attributes of the
river that speak to them and educators should help students connect with rivers to
identify injustices and analyze their underlying assumptions regarding river rights.
Calkin responds to these accounts of river advocates by providing an essay
illustrated by drawings of his own. Often we forget that words and other symbols
emphasized in schools seriously limit our ways to experience places in authentic
ways. In contrast, Calkin presents drawings to express some of his place experi-
ences that are literally beyond words. He is cynical and skeptical about calls for
school reform centered on “knowing” rivers (nature) in more authentic ways. In being
so, he reminds us of the inherent but not so surprising limitations of science educa-
tion as a means of experiencing place. Art, he argues in response, may help to
harvest the potential of place-based education toward experiencing places in more
authentic ways.
In my response to the chapter of Pagan, I address the monologic nature of the
natural sciences in science education, which often dominates over students’ “folk”
language at the cost of their interest in place-based activities. Drawing on dialogic
perspectives, then, I read Pagan’s study as a case of/for novelizing science educa-
tion. This refers to a Bakhtinian process of linguistic stratification by which “folk”
languages struggle to become part of established discourses. Accordingly, Pagan’s
work on river advocacy lays bare inherent instances of satire and irony required for
this process. Such instances provide guidance toward a science education in which
dialogue is internalized in the discourse of place-based activities.
Collectively, Pagan’s chapter and its responses once again (literally) draw on
vignettes from local action to show how place-based activities call for action more
globally and vice versa. In this case, the focus is on individuals’ means of expressing
experiences of place as related to current science education. Arguably, individuals’
need for a means to establish a dialogue – one of the most basic human needs –
reflects another dialectic inherent to place-based education which is relevant in
regard to the topic of this book. This dialectic is underpinned by the fact that a
listener and a speaker presuppose each other in dialogue (irrespective of speaking
through either speech, writing, or drawing). Like I argue in my response, internalizing
dialogue in place-based activities, then, further shapes ecojustice theory and
education for ecojustice and opens up a space to bring in indigenous knowledge in
place-based activities, which further confluences the triad.
In the final chapter and its responses, the confluence of the entire triad of place-
based education, ecojustice, and indigenous knowledge is clearly featured as well.
Semken and Brandt open with a sketch of the implications of sense of place and
place-based education for ecological integrity and cultural sustainability in con-
tested places. Purposefully, they address the central issue of contested places put
forward by the responses of Martin and Stewart as well. They argue that place-
based education may be particularly beneficial in contested places, where many
disputes over land and resource use, access, or ownership are essentially conflicts
among different senses of place. They illustrate inherent dynamics with two case
studies of recently displaced indigenous groups and an analysis of an ongoing
ethnographic study of contested places in a naturally and culturally diverse part of