Science Education from People for People

Taking a Stand(point)

Wolff-Michael Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135844776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Contributing to the social justice agenda of redefining what science is and what it means in the everyday lives of people, this book

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• introduces science educators to various dimensions of viewing science and scientific literacy from the standpoint of the learner, engaged with real everyday concerns within or outside school;

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• develops a new form of scholarship based on the dialogic nature of science as process and product; and

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• achieves these two objectives in a readable but scholarly way.

Opposing the tendency to teach and do research as if science, science education, and scientific literacy could be imposed from the outside, the authors want science education to be for people rather than strictly about how knowledge gets into their heads. Taking up the challenges of this orientation, science educators can begin to make inroads into the currently widespread irrelevance of science in the everyday lives of people. Utmost attention has been given to making this book readable by the people from whose lives the topics of the chapters emerge, all the while retaining academic integrity and high-level scholarship.

Wolff Michael Roth has been awarded the Distinguished Contributions Award by The National Association for Research in Science Teaching, for his contributions to research in this field.

He has also been elected to be the Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

1
Taking a Stand(point)

Introduction to a Science (Education) from People for People

Wolff-Michael Roth

The past 50 years have seen tremendous activity in science education, both in terms of the development of curricula and in terms of the research conducted on how people (mostly school students) know and learn science. Yet despite the tremendous amount of work done, many of the problems that had occasioned interest in the field after the Sputnik shock continue to persist. Thus, more than ever, many students do not see science as relevant to their lives and opt not to enroll in science courses at the secondary and post-secondary levels. More than ever, students do not opt for careers in science and scientists, reflecting on this issue in their flagship journal Science, wonder about ways in which they can increase the “throughput” in their science “pipelines.” A concern for science education that is to serve and educate all members of society, however, cannot be the same as the one for throughput and pipelines. Whereas scientists’ concerns are legitimate to the extent that we need scientists and engineers to produce knowledge that allows humans to control their environment and therefore to guarantee the survival of the species, science education for all has to be different in nature (Roth & Barton, 2004) because it has to address itself to the very different needs that distinguish the general public from those specific individuals whose needs are met when they pick up careers in science.

In this book, the authors as a collective therefore are not concerned with throughput or filling the pipeline. Rather, collectively they take the position that a key problem of past efforts is this: educators, psychologists, and natural scientists defined the nature of science, science education, and scientific literacy in terms of the products of laboratory science. The definitions of science have always been in terms of science content from a scientific perspective and in terms of disembodied forms of knowing. The definitions had little or anything to say about the tremendous experiences and competence everyday people (including students) have especially when they are uninstructed in science; and they had little to say about how science and science education could assist everyday, ordinary, and just plain folk in and with the problematic situations that they face in their ongoing lives. There are many such problems, as shown for example in the issues of (Zuni) gardening, having children, or facing (chronic) illness that feature in some of the chapters of this book. Yet these problems rarely if ever demand the kinds of knowledge that students are to acquire in their science classes. Those who cope with illness do not need to know the Krebs cycle or Newton’s third law; nor do Zuni gardeners need to know this form of science, as their own ways of gardening corn already is so much more adapted than the scientifically informed ways of industrial farmers. In the chapters of this book, therefore, there is little about how to cram—by transfer or construction—atoms, molecules, Krebs cycle, and Newton’s third law into the heads of children. And these problems always are bound up with human beings, lived experiences, emotions, worries, effect–affect transactions, and so forth.

One of the questions some science educators concerned with science education and social justice ask is how to make the sciences more relevant to students specifically, and all members of society more generally. But how do we have to think, and think about science, so that it becomes more relevant? Certainly not in the same ways that have turned students away from the sciences for the past five decades since Sputnik was launched. With a re-orientation of science and scientific literacy in and through problematic issues in the lives of people, science educators might actually begin to make inroads into the currently intractable problem of the irrelevance of science in the everyday lives of students specifically and all everyday folks more generally. Science would be relevant in and to these lives if the people themselves recognized it as a resource for action and therefore as something that expands their room to maneuver and power to act—i.e., to their agency. This concern for science as a useful resource in and for the lives of everyday people is at the heart of this book. That is, science education in the way the contributors approach it here is centrally about social justice rather than the stuffing of science content into the heads of children, students, and everyday folks. But the sciences have to be more. In a democratic society, the sciences have to be open to critique, open to be contested, unless they want to be of the same status as religions that one has to take on faith.

This tension for science educators arises from the fact that they understand their task as one of teaching canonical science. A quick look at the news shows, however, that science is not just a resource in everyday life but also a contested terrain. This is immediately evident when we follow the debate about global warming, where each side finds scientists to support their ontological stance according to which global warming exists (as the former vice president A. Gore suggests in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth) or does not exist (as G. W. Bush upheld for a long period of time). It is clear that the science itself is becoming the terrain that is contested in a debate (or “battle”) where science also is rallied in support of the various and divergent arguments. Allowing students specifically, and all people more generally, to draw on their knowledges as a resource to contest other forms of knowledge in decision-making processes leads to further tensions because of the incommensurability of the knowledgeabilities involved. Thus, scientists, policy makers, politicians, and everyday folk find themselves struggling with “integrating” forms of knowledge that cannot be integrated because they cannot be reduced to one another (e.g., Roth, 2008b).

Science as Resource and Contested Terrrain

The purpose of this book is to oppose the general tendency of doing science education (teaching, research) as if science, science education, and scientific literacy could be imposed from the outside, and as if the pertinent forms of knowing and learning were independent of the human orientation toward expansion of their room to maneuver. That is, the contributors take the position that adult, adolescent, and child learners will find science, scientific literacy, and science education relevant once they see and understand how their own possibilities of acting and being in the world expand. Such expansion comes with a positive (emotional) valence, which is therefore an important mediating aspect of becoming and engaging as a (science) learner. Therefore, in this book the contributors aim at constructing perspectives on science, scientific literacy, and science education grounded in the lives of real people and that are oriented toward being for real people (rather than disembodied minds). Our concerns thereby intersect with those of Dorothy E. Smith (2005), who, in writing Institutional Ethnography, produced a sociology for people. Collectively, the authors in this volume want science education to be for people rather than about how knowledge gets into the heads of people—be it by means of construction, transfer, or internalization.

One proposal in the past has been that science itself has to become a contested terrain and resource (Roth & Barton, 2004). Taking such an approach no longer allows science educators to think about the ways in which we can fit students specifically, and the general public more generally, to science as it is practiced in laboratories and in scientific journals. This is a form of science that, despite its origin in the everyday pursuit, languages, and practices of people, has become a form of practice that elevates and imposes itself as something special. Scientists have become the new high priests in a secular society. Whatever they have evolved as practice is taken and presented as something like a gold standard against which all other practices are evaluated—the discourses of students misconceptions, alternative frameworks, or naïve conceptions constitute ample proof for the deficit discourse science educators employ with respect to everyday knowing. For scholars in the cultural studies, of course, this is but another culturally specific standpoint on knowledge and on knowledge production and evolution. It does not have to be that way, as the events surrounding the AIDS community have shown, and how AIDS activists have been able to bring about a change in the methods of testing new drugs (e.g., Epstein, 1995).

The analysis of AIDS research has become an important testing ground for the social sciences as AIDS activism exerted a politics of identity organized by constituencies around specific illnesses and diseases such as breast cancer, chronic fatigue, and environmental illness. The relations between AIDS activists and scientists in particular showed how science itself can become both a resource (e.g., in the development of new drugs) and a contested ground (e.g., as the standard ways of doing science come to be scrutinized, questioned, and changed). Here, the AIDS activists worked from a particular position, that of people affected by the disease, and from the associated standpoint, communicated their point of view with such vigor that they were able to change how science is done and therefore what science is.

The standard method for testing the effectiveness of new drugs has been the double-blind experiment, randomization of participants to treatment and control, and working with particular populations. For example, AIDS trials employed samples consisting largely of middle-class white men. AIDS activists were able to argue that subject populations should be extended to injection drug users and hemophiliacs, women, minorities, and differing sexualities. They simultaneously pushed for (a) fair access to experimental drugs rather than random assignment and (b) generalizability. However, treatment activists have been able to engage scientists over the processes of drug testing and in the process have become legitimate players. Their legitimacy can be gauged from the fact that AIDS treatment activists have become, following a long struggle, full members of various committees of the U.S. National Institutes of Health that oversee drug development. They have also become participants in the advisory committee meetings of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where any new drug is considered for approval prior to being released.

The AIDS case is but one of a number of forms of activism that has had mediating influences on science and how it operates—i.e., its methods—and therefore on the very definition of science. Thus, organizations of people with a variety of diseases and illnesses have been able to assert their needs and mediate what science is done and how it is done: Those struck with illness do have power, as medical sociologists have shown (Rabeharisoa & Callon, 1999). Environmental activists have inserted themselves into the public debate and policy making concerning the testing and use of genetically modified organisms. And individuals from First Nations and just plain folks (e.g., fishermen in Newfoundland) around the world have begun to work with scientists and thereby brought about changes in the ways in which relevant systems are modeled, tested, and theorized. Thus, for example, the “Back to the Future” (e.g., Pauly, Pitcher, & Preikshot, 1998) approach uses complex computer-aided tools to combine vastly different forms of knowledge, such as the ones scientists produce in their laboratories and the local knowledge of Aboriginals and residents.

In each chapter that follows, the respective author/s take up the challenge of writing an approach to science, scientific literacy, and science education with a problem relevant to one or more real persons and to develop theory and a description of their approach out of this problem. This therefore becomes a science education from the standpoint of the knower/learner, engaged with real everyday concerns either within or outside school. That is, rather than developing a theoretical framework that will be imposed on some data materials, the authors begin with a problem in the lives of people (children, adolescents, adults) and then engage in a form of institutional ethnography, which begins with everyday experience as the grounds from which discoveries can be made. The resulting (and necessary) standpoint will be that of children, women, persons of color, Aboriginals, expecting mothers, or a person afflicted with chronic but undiagnosed illness. The authors thereby come to think and theorize science education from the place of those who learn and from the place of the people who might become interested because the payoffs from engaging with science in one or another form include an increase in their agential room to maneuver.

In accordance with Dorothy E. Smith’s work, the important dimension of doing research from a particular “standpoint” is that it does not subordinate the knowing subject to forms of knowledge that have been objectified and codified into science textbooks, that is, to the societal-hierarchical forces in a political economy. The present authors allow us to think ethnographically (sociologically, anthropologically) from the place of real people (including themselves) struggling with one or another facet of daily life (including school life). Yet, as those in movements of previously (and present-day) marginalized groups know, there are experiences that discourse does not articulate, and institutional ethnography is one of the tools that can uncover and make thematic these experiences. This also requires social scientists to go beyond what is apparent to real people: like the concepts (ideologies) and artifacts that we have come to use, there are things in our lives that have a determinate effect on what we do. These concepts and artifacts have an insidious effect in the sense that they may go against the interests of real people, instead serving those in power and the ruling relations. For example, in one town of British Columbia about 15% of the students were on Ritalin because they were said to have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder). Surely, there is not 15% of a population afflicted; and there are other ways to deal with attention than drugging children. Here concept of ADHD appears to be used to subjugate and drug children, who are calmed to the point that they are submissive, and it has little to do with the real lives of these children. But parents are made to buy into the use of Ritalin simply because it is said to deal effectively with ADHD. This formula (name) therefore serves as a (discursive) tool to make parents and children buy into and therefore produce and reproduce a practice that ultimately only serves the pharmaceutical industry.

The chapter contributions in and to this book strive to bring together two modes of subjectivity and activity that ordinarily have been kept separate: our personal lives as mothers, ill persons, student in a science class, Aboriginals in science, environmentalists, etc. that we share with others and our professional lives as academics. In these latter lives, we have all too often tended to objectify knowledge (discourse), on the one hand, and those who know and learn, on the other hand. Consciousness thereby came to be stripped of local particularities, auto/biographies, contingencies, needs, and emotions of people to whom some form of science and scientific literacy could become a resource. (Here, we do not pre-specify the nature of science and scientific literacy but rather leave it open to rearticulate what their nature is as an outcome or implication of the work reported.) Especially in the two metalogue chapters, the authors actively think through and propose alternative approaches to science and science education for the people.

Content and Structure of this Book

The book consists of 12 chapters, including two discussion forums (“metalogues”) and is grouped into two parts, “Culturing Knowledges” and “Othering the Self, Selfing the Other.” In the following two subsections, I briefly describe, contextualize, and relate the contents of the chapters in the two parts.

Part I: Culturing Knowledges

The title of the first part of this book evokes the inseparable connection all knowledge has to culture with the double entendre that knowledges also have to be cultured (nurtured). Etymologically, the term “culture” derives from the participle of the Latin colĕre, to attend to, respect. The word then made it from the term cultura, cultivation, tending, and worship through the French culture (couture) into English. In its present-day use, besides being a theoretical term in cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology, the term also refers to the action of cultivating soil, tillage, rearing plants and animals. In an interesting article about culture and identity, the etymology and these other senses of the word are brought into play to argue against culture as something pure:

“Cultures,” or whatever we call by this name, do not add up. They encounter one another, mix with one another, alter one another, reconfigure one another. They cultivate one another, clear one another’s ground, irrigate or drain one another, work one another or mutually graft themselves onto the other. (Nancy, 1993, p. 13, my translation)

As a result, there is nothing like a culture, because every entity thus denoted is itself multicultural and the result of a continual mêlée, that is, of a process “of affronting, confronting, transforming, detouring, developing, recomposing, combining, and doing bricolage” (p. 13). With culture, all of its elements are subject to the same processes, so that we cannot think of language or identity as self-same concepts denoting self-same phenomena. Identity, language, knowledge, and so on are heterogeneous processes, continuously making and remaking themselves, never quite themselves and always already other than themselves at the very instant that they realize one of their possibilities—in actualized identity, realized utterance or written sentence, concretely articulated and enacted knowledge. Historical developments of culture and language cannot be understood unless every (speech) act already is considered a change in and of what has been available up to the moment of its beginning (Bakhtin/Volosšinov, 1973).

All chapters in this first part focus on the experience of science and on scientific knowledge at and across the border of different inherently heterogeneous cultures—African Americans (people of color) in a largely white society (Parsons, Emdin), Zuni Indians and Latino/as in the US, Asians (Korea, Japan) in Canada (Hwang, her participant). The chapters show that knowledges are not impersonal but fundamentally situated in and mediated by culture and language, themselves not unities or unicities but multiplexes and pluralities. Learning science therefore is more than appropriating a new code, and requires a reconfiguration of the Self or a reconfiguration of science. In any event, it requires a continuous hybridization of cultures and cultural knowledges.

In “Revisiting and Reconsidering Authenticity in Science Education: Theory and the Lived Experiences of Two African American Females,” Eileen Carlton Parsons, an African American scholar, addresses the perceived universality of Western science and the way the promulgation of this universality in the practices of science education and scientific literacy serves to exclude many voices, ways of knowing, and ways of being that could potentially enhance science and its meaningfulness. In this chapter, Eileen literally places two narratives side by side. On the one side, there are the stories of two African American women brought up in two historically distincti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Taking a Stand(point): Introduction to a Science (Education) from People for People
• PART I: CULTURING KNOWLEDGES
• PART II: OTHERING THE SELF, SELFING THE OTHER