Abstract
In response to Michiel van Eijck and Wolff-Michael Roth’s article and Michael Mueller and Deborah Tippin’s rejoinder, we explore traditional ecological knowledges as science education. Adopting a stance of situated partial perspectives, and drawing on selected literature in science and technology studies and feminist postcolonial theories, we reflect on acts of dissociation, localism, utilitarianism and principled pluralism as referent points for epistemological and pedagogical renewal. In conclusion, we return to an opening narrative of cultural loss combined with an invitation to imagine science pedagogy as a site of possibility, vulnerability and fragility. Such an invitation, we suggest, involves troubling manifestations of pedagogical and epistemic desires of normative closures and certitude. What now remains is a series of tensions and open questions for further work.
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Notes
This is a line from the Monty Python Sketch entitled Argument.
Building on the mystery of the unmanned and apparently abandoned brigantine merchant ship, the Mary Celeste, this metaphor serves to accent the mystery of the mobility of science, and how it drifts effortlessly intact across social and cultural boundaries with the specificities of its origins lost. Anderson and Adams (2008) reference work in anthropology that studies the movement of capitalism using similar nautical metaphors–see Ortner (1984). The ship is sometimes referred to as the Marie Celeste rather than the Mary Celeste. This confusion might have its origins in a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel and Sherlock Holmes detective mystery that refer to the Marie Celeste.
Meccano is a brand name of a popular metal construction system. The first sets were developed and sold in the UK during the early 1900s. It is still very popular, particularly in Europe I suspect. Indeed, as a child I (Alsop) shared Delio Gramsci’s obsession. As a child, I (Fawcett) caught snakes in the backyard instead.
Although it bears no immediate relevance for these discussions, I (Alsop) had the unusual situation of seeing Jeremy Bentham every day while at University. He is preserved in a cabinet at University College London and used to be on display between the Physics department and a university coffee shop.
Here we use plurals to emphasise the pluralistic natures of epistemologies and pedagogies.
For a helpful review of postcolonial studies of science education see Anderson and Adams (2008). Ilan Kapoor’s (2008) text, The postcolonial politics of development (London: Routledge) and John Willinsky’s (1998) text Learning to divide the world: Education at Empire’s end (London: University of Minnesota Press) offer detailed and assessable discussion of education and post-colonialism and development and post-colonialism respectively.
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This review essay addresses issues raised in Michiel van Eijck and Wolf-Michael Roth’s paper entitled: Keeping the local local: Recalibrating the status of science and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in education (published in Science Education) and the rejoinder by Michael Mueller and Deborah Tippins entitled: van Eijck and Roth’s utilitarian science education: Why the recalibration of science and traditional ecological knowledge invokes multiple perspectives to protect science education from being exclusive.
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Alsop, S., Fawcett, L. After this nothing happened. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 5, 1027–1045 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-010-9298-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-010-9298-y