Page 460 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

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Table 4 Language Negotiation Model for Indigenous Students Learning School Science (Chigeza
2008)
Scientific ways of talking
An indigenous student’s everyday ways of talking and knowing and knowing
An indigenous student from a An indigenous student from a An indigenous
community where the community where English student becoming
vernacular is the commonly or dialects of Indigenous competent in school
used language, and English people’s English is the science ways of
is used only in community and school talking, thinking and
schools. language doing
Legend Language negotiation

work is necessary on equity grounds alone given the systemic obsession with
standardised assessment of a narrow science curriculum in Australia. National
benchmarking assessment is done using written text. Yet, the many and varied
indigenous cultures present on the Australian continent are predominantly oral and
visual cultures. Historically, the Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing did not
include codifying concepts in writing. Knowledge was and is passed from one person
to another in oral form. Indigenous students are asked to demonstrate scientific
understandings in a language not their own, conveyed in a non-traditional form (in
writing), and they must negotiate knowledges that are inimical to long-established
ways of being in the world. A socio-cultural view of knowing acknowledges
cultural differences in the nature of learning, what is valued as knowledge and the
ways in which indigenous students in secondary school draw on their cultural lega-
cies to learn as best they can the disciplines of western knowledge systems that
inhabit Australian school curriculum (see Murphy and Hall 2008). Returning to
Bourdieu (see Snook 1990), we need to acknowledge language serves essentially
practical ends for institutions as well as for groups and individuals. We are not
certain what purpose is served by positioning Australian indigenous students as
generally deficient in science achievement when measured against/by standardised
state, national and international testing regimes. One-fifth of Australian indigenous
students did not meet the lowest international TIMSS benchmark in science
(Thomson et al., 2008). Our research suggests what is being assessed on bench-
marking achievement tests in Australia is a student’s facility to represent concepts
in Standardised Australian English. Nearly half of Philemon’s Torres Strait Islander
students did not have the cultural resources to formally express physical science
concepts in the language of assessment. Klenowski (2009) argues equity in relation
to assessment is a socio-cultural matter rather than a technical matter. In our view,
any claim that remote indigenous students possess “low” levels of scientific literacy
is unreasonable and unjust, for how can this claim be truly justified? What we have
learned is that the historically persistent, deficit positioning of indigenous learners
in Australian science education is a dismal fiction that doesn’t stand up to class-
room analysis. What does seem just is the creative deployment of multi-cultural
resources in the classroom towards the project of learning middle school science.
And we continue to work together to further research such possibilities.