Page 447 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

422 P. Chigeza and H. Whitehouse

We struggle with educational approaches that work from the assumption that
Torres Strait Islander students come to the classroom with cultural deficiencies and
lack necessary knowledge, social skills, abilities and cultural capital. Yosso (2005)
challenges this traditional interpretation of cultural capital of indigenous groups by
conceptualizing it from a place of community cultural wealth, which includes
various forms of capital nurtured from the community such as aspirational, naviga-
tional, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital. Osborne and Tait (2002)
argue ignoring the socio-historico-political contexts of schooling is foolish if we,
as teachers, take seriously our fundamental commitment to help all students. These
forms of capital draw on knowledges indigenous students bring with them from
their homes and communities into the classroom. This perspective shifts approaches
to education from a deficit model to one of capacity building where arrays of cultural
knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalised groups
are recognised and acknowledged. A capacity approach to science education
acknowledges the multiple strengths historically marginalised students bring to
school and serves the larger purpose of greater social and racial justice.

Thinking in Creole, Negotiating in English

Research can be carried out by ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’. Teachers, as inside participants in
educational relationships, have the potential to ‘see inside’ these relationships; their ‘in-
sights’ cannot be duplicated by those who gaze at these processes from the outside (e.g.,
typical university researchers). At the same time there are dimensions of issues and prob-
lems that are not apparent to those in the middle of a situation but potentially identifiable
to those who are somewhat distanced from it. (Cummins 2000, p. 1)
Cummins (2000) argues that both “insider” and “outsider” researcher perspectives
are necessary for better understanding organisational situations and relationships.
One of the advantages of this research project was that Philemon, an outstanding
field negotiator, was positioned “inside” the classroom collecting data with his
students in his sensitive and unobtrusive way on how they were negotiating science
learning. On the “outside” was Hilary, with whom Philemon talked throughout the
research journey. Being a “whitey,” Hilary had little initial idea of the complexities
faced by students trying to learn school science in a second or third or fourth
language (being practically monolingual herself). However, she did know about the
applications of Bourdieu’s sociology. Together, we turned to the writings and inter-
pretations of Bourdieu to make sense of our findings, taking up Cummins (2000,
p. 2) stance that, “it is theory that integrates observations and practices into coherent
perspectives and, through dialogue, feeds these perspectives back into practice and
from practice back into theory.”
From the perspective of cultural sociology, science classrooms can be analysed
as cultural fields, where all classroom activity is mediated by a complex history of
social and cultural phenomena (Tobin 2005). Treating science as a culture implies
doing science as cultural enactment and learning science as cultural (re)production