Page 363 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

338 L. Carter and N. Walker

their holistic view of an interconnected world, and their moral and spiritual nature.
They also describe its narrative base, where encoded metaphoric stories are often
used “to compress and organise important information so that it can be readily
stored and accessed” (p. 23), and “solutions to problems can be carefully preserved,
refined, and reapplied” (p. 13). Snively and Corsiglia (2001) argue for the broadening
of conceptualisations of science to include the significant contributions of indige-
nous cultures’ TEKs in ways that promote epistemological justice and provide
ecological knowledge to address the environmental devastation caused by western
forms of science and development.
One well-rehearsed and highly influential approach within science education that
attempts to grapple with these issues is the ideas of cultural borders and boundaries.
Glen Aikenhead (e.g., 2001) and others have developed a number of tenets about
borders, their characteristics and functions, and their “crossing” that include:
(1) western science is a cultural entity itself, one of many subcultures of Euro-American
society; (2) people live and coexist within many subcultures identified by, for example,
language, ethnicity, gender, social class, occupation, religion and geographic location; (3)
people move from one subculture to another, a process called “cultural border crossing;”
…. (6) most students experience a change in culture when moving from their life-worlds
into the world of school science; therefore, (7) learning science is a cross-cultural event for
these students; (8) students are more successful if they receive help negotiating their cul-
tural border crossings; and (9) this help can come from a teacher (a culture broker) who
identifies the cultural borders to be crossed, who guides students back and forth across
those borders, who gets students to make sense out of cultural conflicts that might arise.
(Aikenhead 2001 p. 340 my italics)
In Aikenhead’s terms, borders can be identified and crossed, and that guides
(usually the teacher) can facilitate the passage and help negotiate any cultural con-
flicts that might arise; in short, clear borders exist between different subcultures
like TEK and western science. An effective culture broker would be highly skilled
in identifying “the cultures in which students’ personal ideas are contextualized”
and able to introduce “another cultural point of view, that is, the culture of western
science, in the context of Aboriginal knowledge (TEK)” (Aikenhead 2001 p. 340).
Aikenhead’s (2001) constructs of “cultural border” and “cultural border crossing”
have become a type of common sense and taken-for-granted commencement point
within multicultural science education scholarship of recent years.
Though Snively and Corsiglia (2001) and Aikenhead (2001) all write from
the Canadian context, their views of TEK, borders and border crossing are also
relevant to the indigenous peoples of Australia. Aborigines (with a capital “A”) as
Indigenous Australians are more generally known, were the first human inhabitants
of the Australian continent. Their occupancy is believed to be somewhere in the
region of 50,000–70,000 years, making them this planet’s oldest continual living
culture. There exist Aboriginal story and song lines that predate recorded history
by tens of thousands of years. Yet, like countless colonised people the world over,
the fate of Australia’s indigenous people is another retelling of the universal story
of colonial oppression familiar to so many. Within the first few years of European
settlement in the late eighteenth century, as many as 90% of some indigenous com-
munities died as a result of introduced diseases. Colonial expansion was characterised