Page 441 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

416 P. Chigeza and H. Whitehouse

Torres Strait Islands, who are not native English speakers, coming to the Australian
mainland to go to school and how they were able to engage, or not, with learning
non-indigenous science wholly taught and assessed in Standard Australian English.
We investigate what Klenowski (2009, p. 5) calls the “mismatch between home and
school language” that impacts indigenous student achievement in literacy and
numeracy. We have learned that when achievement is measured through a mono-
chromatic lens, students’ lack of fluency in the dominant language adversely affects
their achievement in science.
The effort to master the future cannot be undertaken in reality until the conditions indispens-
able for ensuring it a minimum chance of success are provided. (Bourdieu 1984, p. 73)
In approaching our study from a socio-cultural perspective (Giddens 1979), we
take up the idea of culture as praxis and position student research participants as
agents of their own culture(s). We examine language in particular, as language is at
the centre of cultural practice. We reflect Bourdieu’s position that language and
culture are unthinkable without the other. According to Jenkins (2002, p. 152),
Bourdieu insisted, “that language cannot be analysed or understood in isolation
from its cultural context and the social conditions of its production and reception.”
Winford (2003, p. 35) reminds us that languages are not “merely systems of rules …
they are also vehicles of social interaction and badges of social identity … shaped
by socio-cultural forces.” As such, our perception, even faith, in any language,
including that of Standard Australian English, the language of formal education in
Australia, is “conditioned by social practice, social relationships and attendant
ideologies” – meaning any linguistic prejudices we hold can be seen as a matter “of
race or class or ethnic prejudice in a subtle guise” (Winford 2003, p. 35).
Standard Australian English is a derivative of a dialect from the southeastern part
of the United Kingdom. The fact this dialect derivative became the language of formal
instruction and assessment in twenty-first century Australian schools, in a continent
with about 600 original languages from 250 language groups at the time of British
settlement in 1788, is a matter of power and politics and not a matter of linguistics
(Tripcony 2000). Bourdieu argued any “standard language” is only one of many
versions, socially highly specific and “generally bound up with a history of state
formation” (Jenkins 2002, p. 153). The state of Queensland (and, more recently the
nation of Australia with the development of national curriculum) is responsible for
generating a standardised science curriculum for students in grades 8, 9 and 10. Of
course, the language of curriculum, instruction and assessment is “standard” Australian
English. Bourdieu took a wide view of sociology, and he considered it quite reasonable
to analyse language, culture and education together, as we do here, because, “they are
all concerned with the manner in which domination is achieved by the manipulation
of symbolic and cultural resources and with the collusion of the dominated” (Jenkins
2002, p. 153). Bourdieu argued language serves practical ends, institutional as well as
social, and there is an explicit relationship between language and how people exercise
control over others (Snook 1990). Language practice is an instrument of action.
We draw on the cultural sociology of Bourdieu for what it offers our study
interpretations with regards to language/culture/education, and also for his stance