Page 459 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

434 P. Chigeza and H. Whitehouse

proposes that, “science knowledge refers to facts, concepts, principles, laws, theories
and models that have been established by scientists over time” (emphasis ours). So
much for recognising old, established indigenous forms of knowledge, or newer
emerging forms either. It seems that within what Nakata (2007, p. 215) calls the
“very contested knowledge space” of the disciplines, the intense political tussle
over what constitutes science curriculum in Australia has managed to exclude
proper (or is that properly exclude?) consideration of the old sciences of wind and
water, of people, ecology and place that made for the original habitation of Australia
and its islands. It’s not that Australian educators aren’t hotly contesting the present
constitution of national science curriculum, they are, and on many fronts, including
from indigenous standpoints and from sustainability standpoints. But it is disap-
pointing to see how little formal attention is actually paid to indigenous ways of
knowing beyond the policy statements. As one of our university colleagues remarked,
“what books haven’t they [curriculum developers] been reading?”
A further problem is how culturally different styles of communicating and rep-
resenting knowledge are, or are not, acknowledged. Literacy at school is usually
defined as reading, writing, viewing, speaking and listening in Standard Australian
English. From an indigenous perspective, literacy also includes storytelling, cere-
mony, songs, ritual and sharing a diversity of languages and dialects – what Martin
(2008) describes as multiliteracies. Restricting science literacy to print-based forms
of reading and writing denies the interacting socio-cultural and oral languages,
gestural and spatial dimensions of both old and emerging indigenous cultures
(Snively and Williams 2008). From our viewpoint, a middle school science learning
framework that accommodates multiple language dimensions is conceivable and
practical. Educators can respect and draw upon students’ culture, lived experiences
and home languages as foundations for them to advance their acquisition of science
cultural capital. A science classroom can be a dynamic cultural field, but we con-
tinue to worry that existing systemic constraints continue to make classrooms sites
for tribulation for a significant proportion of indigenous students when what they
bring to the classroom – their languages, knowledge, skills and experiences – are
not formally acknowledged in compulsory curriculum. Theobald has called being
at school, “twelve years of institutionalised life that demands the most unforgiving
brand of conformity” (1997, p. 132). Schooling is presently endowed with an
instrumentality “that has become even more refined and pronounced,” where
schools are now seen as “the mechanism designed to give the corporate liberal state
what it needs: workers capable of doing their jobs well and a certain group of elite
maths–science performers who will carry the torch forward toward [national] domi-
nation in the global economic market” (Theobald 1997, p. 133). Our purpose in
conducting this research was to look beyond the rhetoric of “the gap” and investigate
science learning in a real classroom situation. We argue learning science for
Australian indigenous students consists of staged and complex negotiations as
modelled below (Table 4).
Science educators and researchers can do more to develop appropriate ways to
smooth negotiations for the many indigenous students who constantly move
between different language and knowledge systems. Klenowski (2009) argues such