Page 82 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

6 Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community 59

“place-based education.” But place in itself does not have meaning, it is human
interactions and practices that make the lived-in world predictable, produce human
control over the environment, and sustain society and, with it, the individuals that
constitute it. One theory that captures all these dimensions is cultural-historical
activity theory, which I develop in the following section because it underpins much
of the curriculum work that I have conducted over the past decade.

A Brief History of Society and Consciousness

In this brief theoretical excursion, I write about the evolution of humanity, because it
shows very nicely, intelligibly, and plausibly the core elements of cultural-historical
activity theory (Roth and Lee 2007). Pre-hominids were directly exposed to their
environmental conditions and could do little but cope. Individual and group, if appli-
cable, accessed the available resources for sustaining their lives. Structurally, this
relation between individual, group, and the environment can be expressed in a triangle
(Fig. 3).
The figure shows the direct dependence – that is, unmediated by consciousness
– of the pre-hominids on the environment. They did not engage in building shelters
to protect themselves from a storm. Changes in the environment were detrimental
to the group (species as a whole) because required adaptations could not be made
within the life span of individuals. But we see that there was a role for the group
that already mediated access to the environment, for example, food, such as when
wolf hunt as packs or bees cooperate in the securing of food. The matters, however,
began to change once new avenues for interacting with the environment opened up,
as apparent from the structural relations in Fig. 4.
With tool use, new forms of relations with the environment become possible. For
example, different chimpanzee groups have developed different methods by means
of which to extract ants or termites from their mounds. Other groups developed
means to crack nutshells and thereby access the edible and nutritious seed. This
would not have been of much help, however, if one individual had invented such a

Fig. 3 Structural representation of individual, group, and environment of the life world of
pre-hominids