Page 46 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

22 R.A. Martusewicz et al.

Science Education in an EcoJustice Framework

Science educators using an ecojustice framework are ethically committed to strong
local-living communities using an approach to knowledge that can be described,
using the framework shared above, as situational, local, and supportive of
living systems. By situational we mean that we recognize that all creation works via
relationships – everything comes into being because of its situated relationship to
something else. Culturally speaking, all knowledge-making, all meaning is part of
an interactive languaging process that is metaphorical, and these metaphors can
either support life or treat living creatures as dead machines. Additionally, in the
Batesonian sense, situational refers to the complex communicating relationships
that make living systems possible. This also relates to what we mean by the local, since
any local place is composed of specific situated relationships and meanings – soil
and climatic type, geolithic base, topography, flora and fauna, human architecture
and settlement patterns, customs and traditions, and so on – that come together
within a particular space in a particular time that affect us in specific ways. The
“local” is not independent from other diverse “locals” that interact with and are
connected within other larger systems – social, political, hydrological, biological,
historical, and so forth – that shape it. Remember that ecojustice scholars and teachers
view the ecological as comprising both human and more than human communities
together, and so recognizing how these interact at various levels is crucial.
The point is that students and teachers ought to be starting their studies from
where they live while they identify and analyze relationships to other places/systems
as part of a commitment to protect life. We acknowledge the important contribu-
tions made by “placed-based education” (Gruenewald and Smith 2008), while
complicating that approach via the overarching cultural ecological analysis that
ecojustice offers. Ecojustice-oriented science teachers ask how the processes studied
or methods used support or threaten life? How meaningful and relevant is this to
students’ lives, and to the future of their children’s lives? And what is the larger
cultural context within which these processes are situated?
For example, we work with a group of teachers and community organizations in
southwest Detroit. The K-8 charter school is located in a landscape comprising
highly contaminated brownfields that is also a residential neighborhood where
these students and their families live. Middle-school students study science through
an inquiry model that poses critical and ethical questions to examine these highly
relevant aspects of their surrounding neighborhood. What is the history of this
landscape? What are these brownfields composed of? What makes them toxic?
What sorts of decisions led to this outcome and who made them? Who was
excluded? What is the meaning of community in this context? The teachers, in
cooperation with local community organizations, work to frame their curriculum by
the analysis and remediation of these sites. Focusing on this situated urban and
industrialized context and working with other content area teachers, the science
teacher approaches the teaching of state standard science objectives by involving
her students in direct inquiry and action to resolve this critical local problem.