Page 87 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

64 W.-M. Roth

curriculum. Rather, it is the local context, the local community, which identifies
what is salient and important to the community. This may be a certain form of
environmentalism in one instance, salmon hatching in another setting (Roth
2002b), but it may be doing something for the physiological or environmental
health of the local community in one instance or a project in ethnobotany and the
economic revival of an Aboriginal community in another instance (Roth 2002a).
For example, I suggested that some of the Aboriginal communities of British
Columbia could bring back part of their culture by taking school children to the
traditional seaweed camps where they, through participating, not only contribute
to harvesting this traditional food staple but also produce and reproduce the whole
culture within which the harvest and consumption of seaweed has been lodged.
The main point of all these activities that I had been writing about was to engage
students in activities that already existed in the communities where children and
students live, and which therefore constituted a meaningful form of life and expe-
riential ground to which new concepts – e.g., scientific, mathematical, cultural,
historical, sociological – could accrue.
To show that all of this is feasible, I piloted three times a project of student
engagement in environmentalism. So that the teaching strategies would not get
lost, I cotaught the unit with local teachers, the later ones learning to teach the unit
by participating with earlier participating classes and teachers or by having previ-
ous participants come to their classes once the unit had started. The proposal for
the work to my funding agency explicitly argued for community involvement such
that others from the community not only came to the school but that the children
in the school would actually get out of their institution and into the community.
My sense always has been that such a move of taking students out of the institution
and thereby to deinstitutionalize would work especially well in rural schools
where many of the hazards present in and characteristic of urban areas – e.g., traffic,
distractions – do not exist. That is, place-based education appears to be particularly
relevant in rural areas, which not only provide so many resources for educating
students of all grades in the community but where the students come with a wealth
of knowledge about the local environment, which provides them with many
resources for learning – just as I had previously experienced it in Southern
Labrador during my first years of teaching. In my own situation, I chose environ-
mentalism for two reasons. First, there already existed a vibrant environmental
group in my semirural area, concerned with the ecological health of our main
watershed and the creek emptying it into the ocean. Second, I am personally com-
mitted to the environmental cause and enact sustainable practices (walking and
cycling instead of driving, recycling, and composting, producing all vegetables we
eat year-round, etc.). Third, I was able to document a 12-year struggle of one
group of residents in my community who did not have access to the water grid and
who faced the opposition of politicians and others in their effort to come to be
connected. It was this case in particular that allowed me to become aware of the
need to include forms of justice – eco-, environmental, and distributive justice – as
an integral part of any education.