Enclosure has tremendous ramifications for public education. Education is highly commodified and poised to become more so. Multinational corporations have a large stake in the texts, curricula, software, supplies, resources, and facilities uti- lized by schools. An ecojustice perspective interrogates current moves to privatize and standardize education, particularly in high-poverty communities and questions the ways such moves may serve to de-emphasize place, erase indigenous knowl- edge, and perpetuate inequity. For schools to promote ecojustice, educators will need to develop ways to open up the practices, policies, beliefs, and language of teaching, uncouple them from the economic engine, and begin to reimagine and revitalize their schools and communities. Revitalizing may involve shedding prac- tices that contribute to environmental degradation and restoring indigenous or com- munal ways of living where appropriate (Brandt 2004). Revitalizing may also require the creation of new ways of living in multiethnic communities that bring together peoples from many different places with diverse perspectives and values. We will also need to revitalize our languages, to excavate the root metaphors that underlie the ways we relate to ourselves, others, and the environment.
Science taught without a sense of wonder is limited to a body of knowledge and practices without a heart and soul. When science draws on a sense of the sacred, it embodies a fundamental understanding of the beauty and complexity of life that our limited senses, even with the help of modern technological advances, can only begin to grasp. For some, invoking the sacred may connect to spiritual beliefs and values. Furthermore, the sacred does not rely on the consequences of an action to determine worth, value, or morality. Ecojustice and place-based pedagogies have the potential to play a crucial role in bringing people together across the many limitations and
49 5 Invoking the Sacred: Reflections on the Implications of EcoJustice for Science Education possibilities that language and culture present, “to join in understanding local contexts and indigenous knowledge systems, and to test new ways of living in our world” (Brandt 2004, p. 105). To do so, ecojustice pedagogies may also need to transgress traditional boundaries between science and not science in order to expand the genres and ways of doing and being scientists, science teachers, or science learners.
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51 It is often assumed and reported that students from rural schools do not achieve as well as students from urban areas; and research often appears to overlook the special needs and opportunities that arise for science teaching and learning, in particular, from a rural setting (Tippins and Mueller 2009). Having taught science in rural schools for more than a decade and in different areas of Canada, I have experienced firsthand how there are special opportunities for teaching science that come with a rural context. For example, science can be taught so that local people, local places, and local knowledge matter, allowing students who often do not do well in school, to find themselves and their local environment validated and to excel. This includes students who are treated differently because of a “learning disability” that they come to be stuck with despite the fact that they demonstrably make great contributions not only to their own learning but also to the learning of others. Rural settings provide particular opportunities for implementing the idea of “learning communities,” where the term “community” goes beyond denoting classrooms or school and extends to the entire village or municipality. That is, because of the size of the rural setting, greater permeability between school and everyday life is a possibility and students, rather than producing tests and assignments actually contribute to village life and as a consequence, learn in the process of contributing to the social fabric of their set- ting. This includes coming to understand ecojustice, because natural environments perhaps more so than the manufactured urban environments allow us to understand the connection between the totality of life generally and human life more specifi- cally. Thus, learning science in rural schools is special because students may not only draw on their local knowledge to make sense of more school-based (book) knowledge but also because their engagement is situated in village life and what they produce and learn enhances the amount of knowledge already available in and to the collective. In the process, the students’ own local knowledge expands and their action possibilities increase, including those for pursuing academic studies that take them away from their rural setting. But for some – including myself, who, first as a teacher then as a professor – rural life remains so attractive and the preferred lifestyle