Page 405 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

380 C. Buxton and E.F. Provenzo

quote of Kincheloe is relevant here, “1) Critical pedagogy has profound insight to
pass along to all peoples; and 2) Critical pedagogy has much to learn from the often
subjugated knowledges of African, African American, Asian, and indigenous
peoples” (Kincheloe 2007, p. 11). Having worked at different times in my career
with various communities, such as an indigenous Mayan community in Guatemala,
a historic African-American community in New Orleans, a migrant farming commu-
nity in Colorado, and an immigrant Caribbean community in Miami, I have seen
similarities across these contexts in how local knowledge is maintained in the
community and marginalized in schools.
Place-based pedagogy, which can be formally traced at least as far back as Dewey’s
Chicago Lab school in the early 1900s, is actually rooted in the much older idea
that learning occurs most naturally when it is focused on the intersection of people,
their local environments, and an authentic purpose. While community-based learning
frequently occurs at this intersection of people, place, and purpose, school-based
learning is typically enacted as though it were completely natural to disconnect
learning from the community, people, animals, plants, and purposes that might
make it more authentic and meaningful to children who live in that context.
Exploring the connections between people and place is not, however, a politi-
cally neutral stance, given that environmental inequities are often rooted in racial,
ethnic, and class-based injustices (perhaps, at least, partially explaining why
schools largely stay away from this pedagogical approach). For example, in a place-
based teacher education project I ran in New Orleans in 2002 and 2003 (Buxton
2006), 5th grade teachers at the lowest academically performing elementary school
in the city engaged their students in a study of why poor New Orleans neighbor-
hoods such as theirs flooded before wealthy neighborhoods (sometimes only a few
blocks away) whenever there was a hard rain. The answer had to do with the fact that
the early wealthy settlers built their homes on slightly raised vestigial sandbars
(natural levees) that had developed before the Mississippi River was leveed, while
the slave and tenant farmer housing was built on the lower land between the sand
bars. This initial building pattern continued to the present day, with public and other
low-income housing being built on the lowest ground in the city, a fact that teachers
and students in my project discovered together through the study of topographic
maps. Students then made posters to explain this example of institutionalized class-
based injustice to adults in their community. When a new principal came to the
school the following year, she shut down the project, telling me bluntly that the work
we were doing was not sufficiently well aligned with the state science standards.
While perhaps not completely standards based, the place-based work in which
the students and teachers were engaged had clear real-world implications. This
injustice became starkly clear less than a year later when Hurricane Katrina
wreaked havoc on the city with highly inequitable results. The neighborhood where
my study had taken place was devastated while the wealthy neighborhood a quarter
mile away sustained only minor damage. Asking questions such as who lives where
and with access to what resources in a given community may naturally lead to
social action projects that can draw attention to local knowledge. In turn, these
actions taken to make a community a better place to live, such as the type of service