Page 74 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 6
Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community

Opportunities of Village Life for Teaching Science

Wolff-Michael Roth

It is often assumed and reported that students from rural schools do not achieve as
well as students from urban areas; and research often appears to overlook the special
needs and opportunities that arise for science teaching and learning, in particular,
from a rural setting (Tippins and Mueller 2009). Having taught science in rural
schools for more than a decade and in different areas of Canada, I have experienced
firsthand how there are special opportunities for teaching science that come with a
rural context. For example, science can be taught so that local people, local places,
and local knowledge matter, allowing students who often do not do well in school,
to find themselves and their local environment validated and to excel. This includes
students who are treated differently because of a “learning disability” that they come
to be stuck with despite the fact that they demonstrably make great contributions not
only to their own learning but also to the learning of others. Rural settings provide
particular opportunities for implementing the idea of “learning communities,” where
the term “community” goes beyond denoting classrooms or school and extends to
the entire village or municipality. That is, because of the size of the rural setting,
greater permeability between school and everyday life is a possibility and students,
rather than producing tests and assignments actually contribute to village life and as
a consequence, learn in the process of contributing to the social fabric of their set-
ting. This includes coming to understand ecojustice, because natural environments
perhaps more so than the manufactured urban environments allow us to understand
the connection between the totality of life generally and human life more specifi-
cally. Thus, learning science in rural schools is special because students may not
only draw on their local knowledge to make sense of more school-based (book)
knowledge but also because their engagement is situated in village life and what they
produce and learn enhances the amount of knowledge already available in and to the
collective. In the process, the students’ own local knowledge expands and their
action possibilities increase, including those for pursuing academic studies that take
them away from their rural setting. But for some – including myself, who, first as a
teacher then as a professor – rural life remains so attractive and the preferred lifestyle

W.-M. Roth
University of Victoria

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 51
Cultural Studies of Science Education Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_6,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010