Michael P. Mueller

Environmental and Science Education in Developing Nations: A Ghanaian Approach to Renewing and Revitalizing the Local Community and Ecosystems

Curriculum reform in environmental and science education now taking place in Ghana focuses on the community and ecosystems as the context of education. In Ghana, students conduct science investigations that include games, word searches, crossword puzzles, case studies, role play, debates, projects, and ecological profiles. This curriculum reflects an acknowledgement of the effect of conserving and protecting Ghanaian intergenerational knowledge and skills concerning the natural systems, including those of preserving ceremonies, personal expectations, narratives, beliefs, and values. The authors highlight these efforts to counter notions that Ghanaian education is still developing and to contrast the ideologies of seemingly developed educational landscapes in the United States. The authors argue that educational reform in the United States could benefit from an understanding of environmental and science education in seemingly developing nations.

Moral–Ethical Character and Science Education: EcoJustice Ethics Through Socioscientific Issues (SSI)

Socioscientific issues (SSI) provide situations where science teachers and students analyze complex issues associated with ethical, political, and social dilemmas, such as whether animals should be kept in zoos or whether plants should be genetically modified. While engaging in socioscientific issues, students become informed about scientific conditions and develop epistemological styles for dealing with scientific research and the consequences thereof. During a time of increasing awareness around cultural diversity, biodiversity, and ecological degradations, epistemic development is paramount for helping students evaluate how they frame their relationships with others including nonhuman species and physical environments. In this regard, social justice movements have been too limited and exclusive, with a higher priority for humankind. Social justice, as currently conceptualized in the science education literature, is seldom extended to nonhuman animals, plants, and the land. Social justice is often associated with disparities between the haves and have-nots, which is historically contrived with middle-class values, norms, and conventions. It is inherently limited to what is considered right for humans without considering how decisions convened around social justice will impact nonhumans.

Citizen Science, Ecojustice, and Science Education: Rethinking an Education from Nowhere

There is an emerging emphasis in science education on engaging youth in citizen science. The goals are similar to other context-sensitive pedagogical strategies such as increasing scientific knowledge and skills, understanding of the natural world, geographic awareness and ecological literacy, and ethical care for biological and physical environments. This chapter explores whether citizen science goes further with respect to citizen development. The emphasis is on how healthy communities and environments are indicative of school achievement rather than students’ scientific literacy. Different limitations for citizen science are analyzed in relation to the challenges of top-down, scientist-driven citizen science projects and bottom-up, community-centered investigative priorities for local choices and policy. Citizen science is emerging as citizens become more fully involved with their community and ecosystems, going back to the basics of civic responsibility and participatory democracy, community capitalism, and a shared sense of environmentalism. A guiding framework for citizen science cultivates the knowledge and skills needed to participate more fully in regional action and global advocacy, and how to address local situations in relation to larger global ones. This chapter takes account of the ways educators will collaborate with members of the community to effectively guide decisions, which offers promise for sharing a responsibility for democratizing science with others.

Introducing Generation R

Coming of age after the Vietnam War, Generation X represents individuals born between 1961 and 1981. They are popularized as the 13th generation to be familiar with the United States flag. Their experiences are shaped by the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall, a span of political peace for the USA, the rise of the home computer, Atari and Nintendo, the Internet, dot-com businesses, a teacher lost on the Space Shuttle Challenger, Desert Storm, and the emergence of grunge, hip-hop, and punk rock. Generation Y is known as the Millennial Generation or Net Generation. Their birthdates range from 1970 to 2000s. This group is marked by a rapid acceptance of digital technologies, communications, and familiarity with home computers. Generation Y also carries the dogma of MTV Generation, which includes most youth of the late twentieth century. MTV youth are popularized as being politically liberal, culturally and radically tolerant of same-sex marriage, and concomitantly protective of their status as youth; many are living with parents longer than previous generations. Gen Y’s experiences are shaped by decreasing economic prosperity and greater unemployment; worse, they are considered a generation of “trophy kids”—reflecting a sense of entitlement for their participation in competitive activities. They telecommute and strive to fit employment into their lives rather than adapting their lives to the needs of society. However, there is a trend for Millennials towards greater access to feedback, responsibility, and involvement in the decision-making and advocacy processes of the community. This chapter discusses the emergence of the generation of children whose parents are from MTV: Generation R. Most members of generation R are not yet born; they will deal with a large number of different community and environmental problems, which their parents and teachers did not face. Generation R (for responsibility) will need to become equipped to deal with these challenges.

Bee Hunt! Ecojustice in Practice for Earth's Buzzing Biodiversity

ABSTRACT The Bee Hunt! project and curriculum are designed with cultural and environmental sensitivity in mind. In this project, K–12 students develop their awareness and understanding of science and investigate North American pollinator declines. Bees, butterflies, and other pollinators are integrally connected to the pollination of the worlds crops for agricultural, pharmaceutical, and textile use. Because pollinators are so important, this article relates to a serious condition emerging from cultural and environmental disregard in school science. The authors explore some reasons why educating for cultural diversity should be extended to include biodiversity and provide a case study to engage students with the Bee Hunt! protocol, digital photography, and data sharing. Finally, the development of Bee Hunt! curriculum guides, including ideas for inquiry-based learning experiences for teachers of elementary language arts; middle school life science; and high school biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science, is described. The ongoing focus of Bee Hunt! is to help students learn about bees, build local expertise, increase confidence, and develop community responsibility.

Nurturing Morally Defensible Environmentalism

We begin this section on ecojustice by acknowledging that schooling is a very small part of the larger educational domain. As students sit at their desks or at lab benches learning about science and how to do science, they get merely a glimpse of the world at large. This world is the setting for a “science” inseparable from the lives of men and women in every cultural, ethnic, racial, and national milieu. Moreover, it is a science inseparable from the lives of animal and plant species, embedded in the strata of robust geology. Children are pure witnesses to this Nature breathed in and breathed out, their hands in the muck, their minds and bodies affected by the minutiae of environmental toxins and nurturing chemicals. Our Nature is a world of ecologies in which we humans are situated, withstanding rationalities which create mindful tolerances of epistemic separation until Earth gives way to our abstractions.

The Need for Confluence: Why a “River” Runs Through It

In the recently released The World of Science Education: Handbook of Research in North America (Roth and Tobin 2009), Regina Smardon (2009) provides a brief history of sociocultural and cultural-historical frameworks for science education. Smardon’s key point is to bring together sociocultural and cultural-historical activity theories in science education to analyze the complexity of cultural staying power, change, and individual and collective agency. This book builds on sociocultural theory by enlarging the conversation around the ecosociocultural confluence of ecojustice, indigenous knowledge systems, and a sense of place, and demonstrates how they also lead to a greater participatory democracy. Creating participatory democracy through cultural studies and environmentalism is in line with this mission of confluence, situations where we participate and advocate through actions.

Infectious Disinfection: Exploring Global Water Quality

Learning about the water situation in other regions of the world and the devastating effects of floods on drinking water helps students study science while learning about global water quality. This article provides science activities focused on developing cultural awareness and understanding how local water resources are integrally linked to the quality of the worlds water supply. After reading and discussing a case study highlighting one water situation facing the people of Kenya, students explore water sanitation and testing methods, including solar pasteurization and the Colilert test for total coliform bacteria and Escherichia coli. These investigations are relevant to inquiry-based water quality labs for high school biology, chemistry, and environmental science.

A Life in Relation to the Broader Stroke of Education

Beginning a worldwide conversation with this first book in the new series on Environmental Discourses in Science Education is paramount for the encroaching cultural, community and environmental turbulence. This turbulence has been described by the growing needs of populations of people worldwide who depend on fewer agricultural and natural resources and the mounting environmental challenges of climate change. Facing science education in and for turbulent times, Ken Tobin (2014) writes: “The wellbeing of citizens is at stake because of events like these occurring globally, almost every day. Science affords us hearing about and learning from such events, and inevitably knowledge of science and technology are needed to understand what is happening and for others to solve the problems” (p. 293). He goes on to say that science is a “power discourse” that emphasizes disciplinary science within school settings. According to Tobin, “It is important that science educators expand the goals of science education to include science in everyday life and afford opportunities for continuous science learning including the years after compulsory schooling” (p. 298). Indeed many people never go to school and yet possess the traditional knowledge of local places that comes from living in a community that has breathed education for thousands of years. Most people, even formally educated individuals, do not recognize when they are using the science generally learned in the schools and colleges. It is not a knee-jerk reaction to think “huh, I just used science in my life”. But for many Aboriginal, indigenous, and other peoples worldwide who use traditional knowledge and skills, cultural language and ceremonies, and rely on the place-centered narratives, what might be described as science is a way of life and cannot be separated from the natural world.

Critical Civic Literacy and the Limits of Consumer-Based Citizenship

Under conditions of neoliberalism, consumer-citizenship has become a dominant form of public life in the contemporary U.S. This chapter explores the ways in which consumer-citizenship is furthered by color-based marketing: that is, the Madison Avenue practice of labeling goods and services pink, green, red, or other hues in order to imbue these commodities with symbolic meanings. We assert that these two trends—consumer-citizenship and color-based marketing—constrict civic engagement in numerous ways and are thus salient to educational policy in general and science education in particular. Given the recent attention given to “green” consumer products, for example, as the proposed solution to broad-scale ecological problems, it is critical that educators attend to the claims made by color-based marketing schemes and teach students to do the same. Drawing on scholarship in critical literacy studies, we propose that critical civic literacy education has an important role to play in science education as well as throughout the curriculum. Although subject to unequal distribution, critical civic literacy education can offer students new ways of conceiving of themselves as scientists, learners, and agentive members of broader, social and biotic, communities.