Page 81 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

58 W.-M. Roth

them and their parents with a living and a resource for leisure activities. I realized
only decades later that students could, in turn, enrich village life as part of their
educational experience. Because students began to value their village for its natural
resources and the opportunities these provided for them including their outdoor life
and their artistic interests, they developed a tremendous sense of place in a double
sense: place both as a resource and something that one can care for, enhance, and
keep as a livable place.
In this rural school, as in other rural schools where I subsequently taught, I also
learned to deal with and appreciate the different levels of academic ability. This was
important because if I wanted to do justice to the abilities, interests, and needs of each
student, I had to come up with ways of addressing what turned out to be tremendous
variations. Thus, in my seventh-grade biology course, I had three boys reading at the
first-grade level on the Gates–MacGinitie reading test and one girl reading at the
tenth-grade level. But these and other students did very well in my course because
they loved the environment, knew a lot about it, and, because of my flexible way of
allowing them to express themselves, they achieved well, nevertheless.
I also got to teach in the elementary school. Because of the size of the village, there
were no substitute teachers available. So when one teacher was ill, the others took on
the load. I was the only middle-school teacher willing to help out in the elementary
school. By rearranging my schedule, having other teachers take over my middle-
school classes, I was freed up to work, for as long as necessary, in a variety of elemen-
tary classes, spanning, over the course of the 2 years, all of the six grade levels.
In summary, teaching in this school was a great experience and many times sub-
sequently I was longing to be back in the village and to teach the mix of courses,
range of students, and to be close to an entire village as a whole. In my experience,
the village had provided opportunities for teaching because life was less regimented,
busy, and fast as it had become in the city. There was a general support among students
and among the parents to create the best education with the things at hand, even if it
meant as little as providing the students with some tools or leftover building materials,
or hiking along the beaches to pick up driftwood.
There was very positive feedback from both students and parents, although I had
made all decisions about what would be included in the curriculum and what we
would do. I was teaching with the belief that knowledge could somehow be found
out there or learned through experience. I did not think about the concept of “mean-
ing,” although I knew that the students who knew their outdoors also turned out to
do much better in my biology class than they were doing in the classes of other
teachers who only approached their subjects through the academic route. But
I personally did not have the conceptual means that would allow me to design cur-
riculum so that it made explicit use of the inhabited world as a meaningful entity;
and by participating in this world all actions took on meaning rather than having to
be constructed. That is, it took me many more years until I came to understand that
new words and actions accrued to the already meaningful world students are famil-
iar with rather than new words and actions getting meaning as a new attribute. It is
for precisely the same reason that some educators now emphasize the role of place
in learning, which has led to the emergence and development of the concept of