Page 53 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 4
Toward Awakening Consciousness:
A Response to EcoJustice Education

and Science Education *

Michael L. Bentley

Introduction

In “Ecojustice Education for Science Educators,” Rebecca Martusewicz, John
Lupinacci, and Gary Schnakenberg break new ground for the field of science edu-
cation in relating long-known limits to our ability to understand the cosmos to those
eternal mysteries they identify as the meaning of “sacred.” Our fundamental
unawareness was well-understood by the medical researcher and gifted science
writer, Lewis Thomas, who wrote that, “[t]he only solid piece of scientific truth
about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant of nature”
(1974, p. 58). Beginning with the premise of our fundamental inability to ever fully
know, Martusewicz, Lupinacci, and Schnakenberg argue that to achieve a sustain-
able society in proper relation to the ecosystem, science educators will have to
rethink the curriculum and adopt a different approach to instruction.
They begin with the premise that “languaging” is a creative process that produces
representations that diverge from the reality that intended to re-present it. In other
words, as we reason through our language-culture filters, these filters influence our
perspectives about reality, and those perspectives are necessarily flawed and limited.
The authors note that humankind’s 5,000 different languages are the bases of many
different cultural systems. So, it is the old “Blind Men and the Elephant” wisdom
story. Thus, as Michael Reiss (1993) has pointed out, every science is really an
ethnoscience: “What is of significance for science education is that there can be no
single, universal, acultural science” (p. 24). What’s more, science has to be reported
in a language (mathematics also being a language), and all languages are human
constructions. So the scientific enterprise has “incomplete ways of knowing by

* Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names.
The Rig Veda
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
M.L. Bentley
University of Tennessee

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 29
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_4,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010