Page 86 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

6 Local Matters, EcoJustice, and Community 63

environments and halfway houses, respectively, I argued as early as the mid-1990s
for a change in the way we think about and theorize science education (Roth and
McGinn 1997). The fundamental findings that led me to this conceptualization was
based on the research in situated cognition whereby the everyday mathematical
competencies of people in supermarkets, street markets, factories, scientific
research, and in a variety of jobs were not at all related to levels of schooling, to the
number of mathematics classes they had taken, and not even to the introductory
knowledge of their own discipline in the case of academics. Thus, my question,
“Why teach mathematics and science in schools if what students learn is not used
or unusable in the everyday life?” led me to argue for creating opportunities for
children to participate in everyday, by now legitimated activities such as environ-
mentalism. I did so not because of a sense that disaster was impending but because
I had developed a sense of, and for, place, organic living, and a protection and
enhancement of the environment (e.g., creating a garden that is part of a transit cor-
ridor for wild life, including insects and birds), and because I saw the pleasure that
comes from growing one’s own food. And I provided already more than a decade
ago existing examples of how children and students already participated in a variety
of activities, including:
• Environmentalism, such as when the elementary children of my city neighborhood
school were participating in seeding a new green corridor with butterfly pupa.
• Monitoring pollution, such as when the high-school students of a nearby
municipality monitored pollution levels of the ocean inlet around which their
city is built.
• Salmon enhancement, such as when the high-school students of another nearby
city were repopulating local streams by running small salmon hatcheries in
which they raised salmon to the smolt stage and then released them into the
creeks where they were imprinted by the mineral environment so that after a
long ocean journey they would return, spawn, and thereby bring to life an extinct
salmon run.
All of these forms of engagement already were existing activities, with their
varying object/motives that orient what people do and give sense to their actions.
Because these activities have their own culture, patterned actions, and characteristic
tools and instruments, they constitute forms of life; and participating in these life-
forms is inherently meaningful, providing meaningful grounds to which new and
unfamiliar words, practices, ideas, or resources can accrue and thereby become
associated with existing forms of meaning. Students work with others in the com-
munity who already participate in these life forms and become acquainted with the
way people act toward and talk about the object/motive of their activity. In partici-
pating with others, students adopt the object/motives, talk, and patterned actions
and thereby expand their own room to maneuver for accomplishing the goals they
set themselves.
In subsequent work, I extended these ideas, partially responding to critics who
charged that “not everybody has a salmon stream to enhance” and suggested that
there are not general or generalizable forms of activities that should drive school