Page 71 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

5 Invoking the Sacred: Reflections on the Implications of EcoJustice for Science Education 47

structures that limited her students’ access, agency, and achievement in science
(Rivera Maulucci and Calabrese Barton 2005). For Randi, the joy in teaching
stemmed from her ability to make decisions about the curriculum that allowed
students to pursue their interests and opened possibilities for them to develop a
sense of agency about their learning. By blurring the boundaries between science
and literacy and developing performance-based activities she indicated that a
broader array of knowledge and skills were valuable in science. Another study
documented the societal forces that progressively devalued an immigrant youth’s
linguistic resources (Rivera Maulucci 2008). The transitional bilingual program in
her elementary school focused on English proficiency. She moved into monolingual
classes in middle school and through high academic achievement gained entry to a
private high school and then an Ivy League college. She found that her second
language proficiency, which was previously positioned as a barrier to learning, was
highly regarded and prized by the more affluent youth in her high school and col-
lege. These small-scale studies mirror the ways current educational policies enclose
the forms and types of access students in poverty have to learn science or maintain
their native language proficiency. Yet, each child that manages to find a way out of
a ghetto, ward, rural town, or homeless shelter and become successful contributes
to root metaphors of progress by individual will and determination with rewards in
equal measure. Meanwhile, the structures that contribute to poverty in urban and
rural communities and the downward assimilation of many poor, immigrant youth
remain largely uncontested.
Social justice in science education works to open possibilities for youth from
underrepresented groups to take on identities as science learners, to shape the goals
and purposes of science learning, and to improve student achievement in science.
However, the argument for ecojustice in science education asks a bigger question:
“How do we accept the sacred, what is fundamentally “unknowable,” while we
teach about the systems we care so deeply about?” In the examples given in
Martusewicz et al.’s chapter, students work in relevant local contexts in ways that
provide them direct experiences with healthy and contaminated soils, forge connec-
tions between students and nature, and draw on interdisciplinary ways of knowing.
The youth actively engage in understanding the physical, biological, and chemical
aspects of soil and unpacking the economic forces that have contributed to exploita-
tion and degradation of soils in their community. The science educators walk a path
of “guiding student learning along paths of inquiry that support living systems”
while identifying and disrupting “ways of thinking/acting that threaten [living
systems].” Ways of knowing emphasize community-based knowledge and an ethic
of living in relation to, rather than from, nature.
Yet, do science educators explicitly invoke the sacred that is at the essence of
why we care so deeply for soil as a living system? Or do root metaphors, such as
separation of church and state, or science and religion as separate ways of knowing
stop us just short of using the word, sacred, when teaching science to youth in
public and charter schools? Do we fear charges of teaching religion or indoctrinat-
ing youth, as if other subjects are neutral and value-free? If we do invoke the sacred,
do we understand and accept other schema youth might attach to it? In working