Page 45 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

3 EcoJustice Education for Science Educators 21

as in charge of and outside of all natural systems and some humans as more worthy
than others of controlling those natural systems, enclosure practices claim every-
thing and anything to be up for grabs for the market and private profit. When the
commons are enclosed by processes of economic privatization, they are no longer
available to people who need them to survive unless those people can pay. If the
people cannot pay, they are generally blamed as deficient in any number of ways,
and left to fend for themselves. Enclosure is thus a process of exclusion created and
kept in place by economic practices, and a complex cultural mindset that presents
hierarchical relationships of value as natural. The resulting exclusions benefit the
few over the whole and thus contradict those essential collaborative interdependent
relationships that create life itself.
Unfortunately, science has all too often been used by powerful agents in the
process of enclosure, due to its enlistment in industrial processes (and thus, com-
modification), as well as in providing “data” to rationalize the hegemony of white
males who control both what is considered acceptable knowledge and how it shall
be used economically. The “market” as a mechanism of enclosure has become such
a powerful force on its own, that it contributes to the positioning and rationalization
of scientific knowledge as “high status.”
A great example of science at work was the understanding and decoding of DNA.
This scientific knowledge has since been applied by companies to develop patents
for the genetic code of specific varieties of rice grown by peasant farmers in India.
Once the genetic code of a particular rice variety is patented, farmers who may have
been saving those seeds for centuries, using their locally situated knowledge to select
for most desired traits, cannot legally save the seeds of that variety. They must purchase
them from the company that owns the patent (Shiva 2000). Another thing that had
been a long-standing part of a people’s commons (and freely exchanged) has been
turned into a commodity via the process and mindset of enclosure.
For science teachers, therefore, it is important to help students be aware of both
the ways in which enclosure works and the ways in which science has been used to
make the process seem “rational.” Students introduced to a cultural ecological
analysis, learn to identify how aspects of the commons that support life are threatened
under problematic ways of knowing and acting in our local communities.
Recognizing commons-based knowledges that support life (among our own families,
neighbors, and elders, as well as across diverse cultures) while analyzing the ways
in which science may function to enclose living systems opens the opportunity for
the fundamental strengthening of communities. Further, a process referred to by
Bowers and Martusewicz (2008) as “revitalizing the commons” offers educators the
opportunity to engage students with local community members to learn skills that
support local living systems while limiting or at least naming previously unacknowl-
edged acts of enclosure that threaten life.
Despite the important limitations that we have been emphasizing, science education
has much to offer within this framework given the background and theory explained
above. The following section offers a glimpse into a few examples we have witnessed
in two very different educational settings, one urban, and one suburban.