Page 37 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

3 EcoJustice Education for Science Educators 13

relationship among linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity that creates differ-
ent maps or ways of seeing and behaving relative to the natural world as well as
toward other humans. As English is spread worldwide as the dominant language of
western economic systems, for example, diverse languages are being lost. As lan-
guages are lost, so too are important knowledges and practices of local bioregions,
knowledge used for hundreds of years to cultivate the land and to protect water-
sheds and the diverse species within them. Utilized by the interests of powerful
minorities, western science has had a role in this destructive process.

The Cultural Foundations of Ecological and Social Problems

For K-12 teachers, the first goal of this framework offers an analytic path for learning
to identify and disentangle the ways language works to frame the ways we think.
This approach entails a “cultural-ecological analysis” (Martusewicz and Edmundson
2005) that most science teachers are probably not used to using to think about their
roles and responsibilities. This piece of the framework invites us to consider the
ways that our beliefs about, and behaviors toward, both the natural world and each
other are constructed within a complex and centuries-old sociolinguistic system.
Ecojustice scholar C. A. Bowers (1997) uses the concept “root metaphors” to get
at the ways that language operates analogically to create foundational discourses
such as ethnocentrism, individualism, mechanism, scientism, and anthropocentrism.
The idea of “root” here is important because the metaphors at the heart of these dis-
courses are old and deeply entrenched in our day-to-day lives; legitimated through
what we have come to call the Enlightenment, they shape both the institutional struc-
tures and individual relationships and identities implicated in both social and ecologi-
cal violence. At the most basic level, exchanged linguistic forms or discourses,
handed down over many centuries, shape the ways we think at a deep unconscious or
taken-for-granted level. For example, an instrumental view of knowledge as made up
of discrete disciplines can be linked to “mechanism,” the idea that nature is reducible
to an object made of predictable parts and laws for our use.
This idea emerged during the Scientific Revolution to replace a more organic view
of the world as a product of a divine creator. In 1605, for example, Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) wrote: “My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not
to a divine organism, but to a clockwork” (Merchant 1980, p. 129). According to
historian Carolyn Merchant, this rendering asserted rational control over nature,
society, and the self, redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor.
“The removal of the animistic organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the
death of nature – the most far reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution” (p. 193).
Commenting on our contemporary inheritance of this way of thinking, Wendell
Berry (2000) writes:
The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption
of the idea that the world and its creatures are machines – that is, that there is no difference
between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language,
wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly