VISIONS OF CURRICULUM, COMMUNITY, AND SCIENCE

What is the role of science and science education in society? It seems to us important that people be educated about the ways in which science helps us understand the natural world and how science-related communities interact with multiple facets of society. Throughout this essay we will discuss the role of science and science education in relation to environmental issues and the relation of environmental issues to larger conceptions of community, sustainability, social justice, and eco-justice.

Science is best understood as a diverse array of local, discursive, and material practices.¹ Although science is often described as a universal practice that transcends culture and provides value-free knowledge, scholarship in the cultural studies of science has described the ways in which scientific practices are dependent on local cultural and material resources.² For example, the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe made use of cultural ideas of progress that had the effect of linking scientific practices with the Industrial Revolution and its desire to increase productivity and profit.³ In contemporary society, concerns of productivity and profit continue to override other concerns, such as maintaining a healthy environment. Although science and technology are culpable in environmental destruction, there are scientists who work toward very different goals and values: they want to harness the power of science to help address a pressing social issue, namely, how to maintain a healthy relation between the human population and the earth. We are interested in a science that takes responsibility for a wide range of social projects, not just corporate profit-making projects; such a science can be used to promote justice for all communities, not only those that can leverage support for their own continuity. Concomitantly, we need a science education that supports this conception of science. Within this framework, science education ought to be about cultivating a strong understanding of the content and methods of the sciences and the ways in which this knowledge is constructed, mediated, and used within a variety of science-related communities.

The three books under review here — William Doll, Jr., and Noel Gough’s Curriculum Visions, C.A. Bowers’s Educating for Eco-Justice and Community, and Elaine Riley-Taylor’s Ecology, Spirituality and Education— have been helpful to us in thinking about what kinds of values should be embedded in a science curriculum committed to supporting scientific practices that work toward social justice and environmental sustainability. The authors of these books share a concern for the ways in which the unfettered marketplace and insatiable consumerism have negatively influenced the curriculum, the nature of human relationships, and the environment. Curriculum Visions, as its title suggests, is about seeing the curriculum in new ways. This is an edited volume and, as such, the visions are an eclectic mix, held together by an approach of “constructively negative critical vision.”⁴ In other words, much of the future curriculum is defined as “post” in relation to much of what is. Using a literary metaphor of ghosts of the past, ghosts of the present, and ghosts of the future, this collection includes writing about the past ghosts of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, the present ghosts of globalism and commercialization of the curriculum, and ghosts of the future that may help us nurture our spiritual and intellectual selves in ways that better serve eco-justice and social justice efforts.

Ecology, Spirituality, and Education sets out goals very similar to those of Curriculum Visions. In this book, Riley-Taylor contends that the idea of mind/body separation is a malady stemming from modernity. This separation, she asserts, has “led to an ontological crisis of the human being that manifests, in part, as personal and cultural alienation affecting education.”⁵ She argues for an ecospiritual praxis that draws on deep ecology, ecofeminism, and postmodern theories. Riley-Taylor uses these perspectives to emphasize the deep interconnections between all aspects of an environment. She also uses the notion of interconnection as a way of writing about epistemology: “Ecospiritual knowing is a way of viewing the world relationally, an epistemology grounded in an awareness of truth as contextual and the individual as an integrative being.”⁶

In Educating for Eco-Justice and Community, C.A. Bowers argues against current school practices that separate children from their communities and the local knowledges that are a part of their community’s traditions.⁷ His concern with our ecological crises leads him to argue for a vision of curriculum that would work to preserve traditional communities and bring about less consumerism and better preservation of the earth. His agenda is an eco-justice one, and in many respects it is quite different from a social justice perspective, as we will discuss more thoroughly later.

In this essay we describe the relation between education, community, and eco-justice. In the first section, we discuss local knowledges and how they can work toward social justice and eco-justice. Next, we problematize the visions of community posited by the authors of these books and explore an alternative conception of community that can better facilitate broad participation in science-related communities. Finally, we use feminist literature to describe how science and science education can be re-visioned in a way that harnesses the power inherent in diversity of participation and uses this to bring about change in science-related communities.

Eco-justice, social justice, and the teaching of local knowledge

We share with these authors a commitment to social justice and eco-justice as appropriate educational aims. We do think it is important, however, to point out the tensions between these two commitments and to show how science education might contribute to both of these efforts. Although we share the view that including local knowledge is crucial to any effort to address concerns of social justice and eco-justice, we are concerned that an exclusive focus on local knowledge would deny students an understanding of the broader discourse of powerful science-related communities.

Bowers, Riley-Taylor, and the authors in Curriculum Visions directly address the ways in which their curricular visions contribute to the cause of social justice. In fact, Bowers argues that social justice cannot be achieved without eco-justice. He emphasizes the fact that both future generations as well as marginalized groups in contemporary society are disproportionately affected by environmental pollution and abuses of the earth’s resources. As long as this pattern of environmental degradation exists, there is little hope of alleviating the conditions associated with oppression.

Social justice, from an eco-justice perspective, tends to be concerned with the value and preservation of local forms of knowledge:

For example, Bowers’s construct of eco-justice recognizes that within mainstream ways of thinking (such as Western philosophy) different forms of knowledge are assigned a different status; science is an example of a high-status form of knowledge, while traditional, local knowledge is typically assigned a low status. High-status knowledge is associated with forms of knowledge that appear to be universal and that undermine the specificity, multiplicity, and legitimacy of local knowledge. Therefore, a main thrust of eco-justice is to recognize and elevate forms of knowledge associated with “minority cultures and the non-Western cultures that comprise the majority of the world’s population.”⁹ Bowers, along with the other authors in these books, does not articulate a role for science. While they are justifiably concerned that science is typically hegemonic, we believe that there are other, nonhegemonic ways in which science could relate to communities.

In his contribution to Curriculum Visions, Noel Gough also emphasizes the importance of local values and practices, which are in danger of being annihilated by the escalating momentum of globalism. Gough suggests that the idea of globalism denotes unequal national interests that favor wealthy and powerful nations (such as the United States). Gough’s concern is that “such versions, visions, and manifestations of globalization invite us to tolerate a type of relativism in which location— in all of its moral, metaphorical, mythic and material senses — is undervalued.”¹⁰ In response, Gough suggests a “transnational imaginary” as an alternative vision. This transnational imaginary rejects the cultural homogenization implied by globalism and the relativism associated with this position. Cultural homogenization denies the legitimacy of differences among positions, which in turn allows totalizing knowledge traditions to suppress local knowledge traditions. Thus, any version of this transnational imaginary must acknowledge the significance of the multiple manifestations of location.

Riley-Taylor also advocates a vision of social justice that is grounded in an ecological perspective. Her perspective recognizes and honors the deep interconnections between all aspects of an environment. Throughout her book, Riley-Taylor marvels at the natural world around her and uses her feelings of connectedness to imagine what a curriculum ought to be. As a theoretical core for educational practice, Riley-Taylor advocates ecospiritual praxis, which draws on deep ecology, ecofeminist theory, and postmodern process theories. Deep ecology foregrounds the ways in which particular value systems and worldviews contribute to environmental crises. A shortcoming of deep ecology, according to Riley-Taylor, is its inattention to androcentrism and the ways in which male-centered practices have contributed to a worldview that perceives the earth as a resource for human consumption. Therefore, Riley-Taylor uses ecofeminism to complement deep ecology and thus dislodge the assumed gender neutrality associated with modernity — that is, the notion that there exists a “universal” pure thought that is better than an integrative knowing that encompasses body, emotions, and spiritual understandings. Postmodern process theory acknowledges interconnections and the ever dynamic flux of life. The significance of this dimension of her framework is that it provides the possibility of transcending oppressive and totalizing categories. The recognition of and escape from totalizing categories makes Riley-Taylor’s ecospiritual praxis consistent with the aims of social justice. Riley-Taylor uses these positions to craft “a worldview that recognizes the natural world as having intrinsic value.…[T]he vision for curriculum…recognizes the mutually sustaining character of the human-earth relation and respects the inherent value of each part within that process.”¹¹ This view is shared by contributors to Curriculum Visions: for example, Kathleen Kesson and Donald Oliver write that “connectedness is the natural circumstance of all beings, living and nonliving, including the inseparability of humans from the rest of nature.”¹²

Critical educators have long argued for emancipation of oppressed individuals and groups from normalizing metanarratives that effectively constrain alternative visions of the future. Unlike Bowers, whose focus is on the preservation of communities living in close relation to the earth, critical educators have often focused on groups and individuals living in urban centers and other environments where emancipation is of greater interest than preservation of the earth. Although many critical educators are concerned with preserving local knowledge (Louis Moll, for instance, refers to this as “funds of knowledge”), they do not argue for teaching local knowledge to the exclusion of knowledge forms that are more likely to grant access to power.¹³ Lisa Delpit’s widely cited argument that education must provide minority children with a strong understanding of the discourses of the powerful exemplifies the priorities shared by many critical educators.¹⁴

In science education, Gloria Snively and John Corsiglia have proposed teaching “traditional ecological knowledge” along with Western modern science. They view traditional ecological knowledge as providing important resources for understanding the natural world in ways that are less ecologically destructive than Western modern science.¹⁵ William Stanley and Nancy Brickhouse have also argued that teaching non-Western scientific and cultural knowledge is an important way to help students better understand that Western scientific epistemologies are deeply embedded in cultural values.¹⁶ More recently, Lyn Carter has argued for a postcolonial approach “that would acknowledge the increasing awareness of shared historical processes, cultural reciprocity, and the diasporic tendencies of the globalizing world around more complex and multiple conceptualizations of Western science and indigenous culture.”¹⁷ Such an approach would better acknowledge the ways in which knowledge systems interact with one another and how they change over time. Neither they nor we, however, advocate excluding Western science from the curriculum since communicating in the language of Western science could be powerful in its own right as well as essential for effective interaction with those in power.

Educators particularly concerned with the position of science in the education of children living in indigenous communities have not abandoned teaching Western science; in fact, they have found that this kind of science education is well-regarded by the communities in which they work.¹⁸ Bowers and Riley-Taylor, on the other hand, take a strong oppositional stance to science. They focus on the destructive history of science and technology without considering how science might be changed and improved to help us find ways of organizing our communities and resources to better preserve our natural resources. Science education could make a very important contribution to such efforts by teaching students how scientific practices can be linked to a variety of different cultural resources and values. While science may continue to be used to strip the earth of its natural resources more efficiently, there is potential to use it for progressive ends, including to help us better understand how ecosystems function, how natural resources are distributed to or conserved in diverse human communities, and how we might develop ways of living that are less destructive of natural resources. We believe it would be wiser to reshape science and science education to serve the purposes of social justice and eco-justice rather than to abandon science.

Community as (un)Ideal

We believe it is important to understand communities as sociocultural organizations characterized by heterogeneity.¹⁹ Although communities are held together by some set of shared commitments, any community comprises diverse subcultures within which individuals acquire different competencies and play different roles. Furthermore, we see communities as dynamic organizations with fuzzy borders. Individuals may belong to many different kinds of communities; their membership may be fleeting or long-lived. Furthermore, communities are certainly no longer necessarily defined by constraints of time and space.

There are many different kinds of science-related communities that interact in important and interesting ways. Science classrooms can be understood as a kind of community in which acquiring scientific competencies is the major goal. There has been a great deal of interaction between science classrooms and academic scientists — an interaction that has rather profoundly influenced the science curriculum.²⁰ However, other kinds of science-related communities, such as environmental organizations, could play a stronger role in shaping the science curriculum in ways that would facilitate more responsible environmental ethics.

Each of the books under review here also includes a specific understanding of community in its curricular vision. However, their views of community differ from the one we have set forth. For example, Bowers’s conception of community does not adequately deal with issues of social justice within communities, whereas many of the other authors present such amorphous conceptions of community that it is difficult to understand what benefits might be derived from membership in a community.

Bowers’s vision of the future is organized around intergenerational (at least four generations), self-sustaining communities where local knowledge and tradition thrive, as opposed to spaces dominated by universalizing ideologies of science, modernization, and globalization. He embraces traditions and sees them as the best response to a consumer-oriented society that has become global in reach. These communities consist not only of humans but also of the surrounding animate and inanimate elements. The core commitments shared by members of the community include the preservation of tradition and ecological sustainability.

Riley-Taylor also advocates for education that contributes to the sustenance of communities. For her, communities are important in that they draw attention to relationships, including human, spiritual, and natural ones. Whereas Bowers’s communities are distinctive in their self-sustaining and intergenerational character, Riley-Taylor’s notion of community is much more fluid and ill-defined, allowing considerable movement within and between communities:

In his essay in Curriculum Visions, William Doll describes a set of nested communities wherein human communities are nested within ecological communities nested within cosmological communities.²² Thus, for Riley-Taylor and Doll the significance of communities lies in the relations they foster, not in their geographical boundaries, duration, or even their moral commitments. This postmodern use of the term “communities” makes them much more nebulous and lacking in the characteristics that are typically understood to define communities, such as a core commitment to some set of values. We had difficulty at times understanding why these authors held on to the term “community” at all.

Bowers’s ideas regarding tradition and community are quite clear and well developed, perhaps making his vision easier to criticize. The postmodern perspective on communities articulated by Riley-Taylor and Doll provides only a vague sense of their vision of communities. There is so much shifting through boundless space and time that it seems as though almost everything might somehow “count” as a community. Furthermore, whereas Riley-Taylor and Doll’s communities could be formed virtually anywhere, Bowers’s communities could not exist in urban areas, where living on local resources is not possible.

It is not entirely clear how many people Bowers envisions living in these small, close-to-the-earth communities or what he would do with cities. His desire to create a curriculum to address the environmental crisis facing us would be of little consequence without a plan for organizing life on a global scale. It is clear that he does not hold cities in high esteem, and his vision for the most part marginalizes their existence and significance. He favorably cites Wendell Berry’s essay “Conserving Communities,” in which cities figure primarily as a source of possible consumers for the products of the communities he wishes to conserve. Berry provides a number of recommendations for improving the self-sufficiency of local communities in order to make them independent of the global and national economy. He suggests, however, that cities could be a place for exporting goods and emphasizes the importance of having consumers in cities loyal to the products of the local community.²³

Urbanites are not only geographically disconnected from Bowers’s idealized communities, but many are also several generations removed from them and are unlikely to desire the re-formation of lost communities. In many areas there are relatively few people left who could teach the forms of local knowledge and customs that Bowers holds in such high esteem. In fact, he recognizes that the urban/rural divide explains quite well the differences between his concerns and that of other educational theorists:

Although these are interesting musings about the orientation of urbanites toward the environment, we do not know that it is actually the case that urbanites either care less about the environment or act less responsibly than people who do not live in cities. Bowers does not support his claim with evidence. Furthermore, half of the world’s total population and three-quarters of the population in high-income countries currently live in urban centers, and demographers predict that by 2020 the developing world will be more urban than rural.²⁵ This is a very large number of people to exclude from one’s vision of community. Moreover, considering the fact that Bowers’s ideal small communities living close to the earth will inevitably interact with cities, it seems important to theorize them in ways that go beyond viewing them as consumers of community-produced goods.

There may be other models for organizing life to promote ecological sustainability that Bowers does not consider. For example, Japan is about seventy percent forested, with the human population concentrated in cities.²⁶ They have recognized the need to preserve natural ecosystems, but they do this largely by keeping the human population in urban areas. The positive consequences of this approach would be mediated by the lifestyles of people living in cities. For example, if such a system is to succeed, city dwellers must recognize the value of agricultural lands, wetlands, and forests and work to conserve them. In addition, multiple people must live in a single dwelling to prevent the ecological destruction that comes from urban sprawl.²⁷ It would be interesting to see how Bowers might envision education for cities that could also contribute to ecological sustainability.

Although many of the authors considered here rely on conceptions of “community” in their curricular imaginaries, only one, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, in her contribution to Curriculum Visions, recognizes possible shortcomings of communities. She allows that there are communities with admirable moral commitments that allow for some personal freedom within the community; she offers Native Canadian schools and German Confessing seminaries as examples of such communities. Despite these examples, she argues that communities can often be oppressive — that is, while communities can inspire a sense of belonging for some people, within any community there are always subgroups whose traditions are marginalized.²⁸ Nel Noddings has also pointed out that the dark side of the ideal of community is “its tendencies toward parochialism, conformity, exclusion, assimilation, distrust (or hatred) of outsiders, and coercion.”²⁹ This creates situations in which people find themselves excluded by the strong majority culture. This kind of marginalization within community has serious implications, and it has not been adequately addressed in the reflections on “community” put forth by the authors in these three books.

As has been indicated, however, other scholars, particularly feminists, have effectively addressed issues of marginalization within community. For example, Susan Okin’s book Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? provides examples of communities that do not offer freedom from the totalizing tendencies that contribute to oppression.³⁰ Okin and the contributors to her book analyze the potential tensions that arise between feminism and multiculturalism. More specifically, Okin focuses on the tension between individual rights and group rights through exploring practices such as forced marriage, polygamy, and clitoridectomy that are often defended as cultural traditions. In a society that values cultural plurality, we cannot take away the rights of groups to maintain their traditional practices. However, as Okin points out, certain traditional practices, like the ones just mentioned, are oppressive to women. Forcing a woman to take part in any of these practices impinges on her individual rights. This insight broaches the dilemma about how to define justice and what constitutes justice for whom. If we are to elevate the status of local knowledge and community, as Bowers and others advocate, we need first to ensure that the traditions of a given community are not as oppressive as those cited by Okin and the contributors to her book.

Earlier we pointed to the differences between eco-justice and social justice. One of our concerns was whether either of these forms of justice is capable of addressing the distinct needs of urban centers. It seems that eco-justice, with its focus on community, places too little emphasis on the realities of urban centers. Iris Marion Young has articulated a similar concern, observing that ideals of community are too problematic for minority groups to ever serve the interests of the billions of people living in urban settings:

As a solution to the problems inherent in the ideal of community, Young develops a “metaphor of the city,” which offers resources for living with unassimilated diversity:

Within cities, one has the potential of affiliating with many different groups and of exposure to many forms of diversity without the requirement of shared values.

In contrast, while Bowers’s ideal of community fosters diversity across groups by conserving local knowledge and traditions, he offers no resources for addressing issues of conflict and oppression within communities. He states that communities can be oppressive, but he glosses over this problem and suggests that social justice would be a natural outcome of eco-justice. Since marginalized peoples are often the ones most victimized by environmental hazards, they are the ones most likely to benefit from a curriculum that teaches us how to avoid environmental hazards and live in a more ecologically sustainable way. There are hazards other than environmental ones — for instance, individuals who do not conform to the values and customs of the local community to which they supposedly belong may pay a high price for their deviation. Community-based knowledge has great potential to define inside/outside relations in ways that are as totalizing as Western modern science.

Community, as we understand it, contains something that motivates the members to affiliate, yet is sufficiently dynamic and unrestrained so that individuals have some freedom in choosing how, why, and when to affiliate. We want science education to support broad participation in science-related communities so that science can better serve a diverse array of needs as well as the shared need for a sustainable future.

Re-visioning science for re-visioning curriculum

Doll and Gough and the contributors to their book urge readers to recognize the visions associated with the ghost of curriculum present and, further, to see beyond the grasp of the present by envisioning a more liberating curriculum for the future. Donna Haraway, an influential writer in feminist philosophy of science, has also used vision as a metaphor. For both Haraway and the authors under review here, the goals are similar: they hope to crack open an institution (for example, androcentric Western science or hyper-controlled/hyper-controlling curriculum) and expose its powerful, yet vulnerable, normalizing tendencies in order to transform these tendencies. In terms of science, the metaphor of vision is productive because it provides a guide for action. As Donna Haraway suggests, “Moral and political discourse should be the paradigm of rational discourse in the imagery and technologies of vision.”³³ Our purpose, then, is to examine the ways in which visions of science can be incorporated into visions of curriculum and justice.

Because feminist philosophers of science have been so vocal about re-visioning science, we find it curious that the authors under consideration here rarely draw upon this work in developing their visions for curriculum. When these authors do address science, their inclination is to dismiss it. They oppose science for the following reasons:

These authors may well be justified in their critique of modern science. The views they criticize have certainly exerted a powerful influence on science education. Nevertheless, what they portray as science is the positivistic science that is best understood as a myth. Like other knowledge forms, the sciences are cultural forms of knowledge. Thus their exclusive focus on positivistic science is unfortunate because there are other perspectives on science that align with their goals. Several feminist philosophers of science who have called for a feminist successor science project have articulated alternative visions of science that provide a foundation for transformative forms of knowledge. They start by attempting to harness science for the benefit of women and others whose interests have not been adequately served by science. This feminist successor science project works against the mythology of science as universal knowledge and insists on what Sandra Harding calls a “strong reflexivity”:

This vision of science includes the kind of social values that are needed to channel science for the purpose of creating a just and sustainable future. To give up on science entirely is to give up too much. We cannot revert to an era in which science does not exist, nor should we dismiss science because it “has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason ‘we’ need it.”³⁵ To disengage from science is to leave it in the hands of elites whose values may work against the possibility of an ecologically and socially just society.

Haraway provides a powerful, and critical, vision for science, one in which position — in all its multiple and contradictory forms — is celebrated because it creates spaces for inclusion and possibility:

One particularly noteworthy aspect of Haraway’s vision is the notion of responsibility. Responsibility is also a theme throughout the books under review. Bowers, with his notion of eco-justice, and Riley-Taylor, with her notion of ecospiritual praxis, plead for responsible decision making. In terms of ecological issues, this means making decisions that do not negatively affect the environment, particularly since we are all deeply connected to and dependent upon our proximal and distal environment. In terms of social issues, this means honoring multiple ways of thinking, acting, being, and valuing. In a similar vein, Haraway makes a case for an epistemologically responsible science. That is, hers is a science in which knowledge about the natural world arises from between the norms; hers is a science that takes responsibility for legitimizing knowledge that is too often censored by “real” science.

Bowers dislikes progress; he sees it as inevitably linked to the metanarrative of science. However, it would be unfortunate to dismiss the progress that has been made in philosophy of science. Haraway’s vision for feminist science inspires critical thinking not only about scientific epistemology, but also about participation in science. In other words, Haraway’s vision looks critically at the patterns of who gets to participate in science. Some science educators are taking this to heart and working to describe the very real, and sometimes unexpected, ways in which people participate in science.³⁷ While full participation in science is not yet a reality for many people, it makes more sense to work toward the theoretical and practical potential of participatory science than to use this as a justification for dismissing science. It seems much more hopeful to capitalize on this feminist vision of science than to hold on to a tired caricature of the ghost of science past. These new visions open up possibilities for what counts as scientific knowledge and what it means to participate in science. In this way, Haraway’s vision of science inspires social justice in the form of transformative relations within and between communities.

Furthermore, we suggest that instead of rejecting science for its supposed universal epistemology and complicity with environmental destruction, the authors under consideration here would be better served by a vision of science that derives from national policies developed to encourage technologies that promote ecological sustainability. For example, Bowers notes that in European countries (Denmark, in particular) citizens have come to play a major role in directing the efforts to democratize science and technology policies. Schools should be places where young people learn how scientific institutions operate so that the population at large can be equipped to guide the development of the science we need.³⁸ Schools should also work to make science more accessible to everyone, especially those who traditionally have been excluded. Bringing in the “outsiders” with a critical education in science could empower young people to engage in science in ways consistent with “strong reflexivity” described by Harding. This requires a full engagement with science, not abandonment of it.

Conclusion

What is the role of science and science education in society? We envision a science that is responsible for supporting the interests, goals, and needs of a diverse population. This would include the needs that we all share: clean water and air, healthy and safe food, and a healthy planet that will be able to sustain life for the generations we leave behind. To achieve this kind of science, educators must provide a critical education in science to everyone so that these science-related communities are inclusive of everyone, particularly those who have historically benefited least from science. This critical education includes an education in the substance of science, but also in its epistemologies and social relations. We must teach sciences and local knowledges in ways that link them to values and purposes consistent with ecological sustainability and that encourage participation in science-related communities both in and outside of schools. This is a vision of the science education of the future worth working toward.