Page 483 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

458 J.D. Adams

ethnic, racial, economic, and linguistically marginalized groups. Concordantly,
Waukau-Villagomez and Malott call for an educational approach of incorporating
indigenous core values and beliefs learned at the heart of their contexts into teaching
and learning. Such an education would make it meaningful to the local students
while preparing them to be successful in the world beyond their concentric circle.
This idea resonates with Buxton and Provenzo, who recognize that while centering
teaching and learning on localized knowledge is important, ultimately, there is
science content that students must know and understand to be able to interact in the
global context. And, as critical scholars, we need to be extremely careful about placing
our views or reimporting colonization in the place of others. We need to think about
how indigenous knowledge challenges “critical thinking.”

Concentric Places

One theme that resonates through all of the chapters in this section is the embed-
dedness of indigenous knowledge. Like the concentric circles on the map, the
embeddedness tells of its entity. It has ancestral history. And, at the same time,
concentric places are connected by paths, tracks, and by their positions, which are
relative to one another. As Carter and Walker suggest, “indigenous understandings
of space are far more intuitively inclusive of the hybridity and interconnectedness,”
which is evident in the map. The map not only depicts the physical features of a
place, but also historical and ancestral relationships to the place and relations to the
physical features of that place. The more we know about a particular culture, the
less we seem to know. It becomes difficult to write about it in the way that academic
writing dictates! Let us not forget that for native cultures, oral narratives, visual
arts, song, and dance are often used to communicate histories and cosmologies.
Places are always layered with historical, spiritual, and cultural systems. For
Stonebanks, in Malawi, Mount Kasungu seems as if it is a dominant physical feature on
the landscape, but he learns it is also a layered and very complex place for the local
people representing spiritual, historical, and economic significance for them. Buxton and
Provenzo point out that we ought to always get to know these places with as much detail
as possible, but that can take many years, and so we must often do the best we can with
what we know. Stonebanks uses a critical theory lens to guide his work. He discusses
how the colonial history of the mountain rendered it practically useless (due to natural
resource depletion) to local people. Despite that, Stonebanks calls for teacher education
to unpack how education serves to maintain the status quo. He reminds us that critical
pedagogy can serve to bring an awareness of how these historical power structures influ-
ence goals of schooling in ways where we could be more positioned to teach in equitable
ways. To elaborate, Buxton and Provenzo further remind us that place-based education
and critical media literacy can provide powerful sources of engaging preservice teachers
in reflecting on what they take for granted as part of the local landscape. These field
experiences and the intellectual tools teachers know can be critically analyzed with their
experiences, as a way around traditional “multicultural” education.