“We Know From Our Elders There Are Spirits in There [River]”: Reconstructing Science Education Toward Lived Survivance, Sovereignty, and Sustainability

• In Event: Roundtable Session 54
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting the Dominant Paradigm: Science Learning as Identity Formation, Community Action, and Transformation Toward a More Socially and Environmentally Just World

Abstract

Objectives and Perspectives
Water is essential to life; it is inseparable from human experience, place and practice, enmeshed in varied webs of meaning, perspective, activity and value within and across communities. Water is central to the many pressing environmental challenges facing our planet and to contemporary struggles over water rights to sustain human life and livelihoods. Tracing “a global fault line of inequality” (Watkins, 2006), access to water means different things to different people, from taken-for-granted routines of opening a tap connected to a safe water network to multiple sources and service providers to a daily struggle to collect and transport water over long distances. Water, in short, is a phenomenon at once mundane and precious, substantive and symbolic, natural and cultural, plentiful and scarce, flowing and contained.

Recent research in environmental and geoscience education has recognized the need for deeper understanding of students’ conceptions of water-related phenomena (Ben-svi-Assarf & Orion, 2005; Dickerson, Penick, Dawkins & Sickle, 2007; Dove, Everett & Preece, 1999; Shepardson, Harbor & Wee, 2005; Shepardson, Wee, Priddy, Schellenberger & Harbor, 2007). This research has investigated students’ conceptions of watersheds, the hydrologic cycle, and groundwater, within a constructivist, conceptual change framework. The methods and findings emerging from this research are largely consistent and have almost exclusively looked at students conceptions in experimental contexts.

This paper aims to add to the sparse landscape detailing water education by exploring the meaning and constructions of complex water phenomena in an after-school community based science program with urban American Indian youth and families. The program was part of a six-year community based design research project in which community members, teachers, and youth developed science learning environments focused on middle schools students and their families.

Methods and Data Sources
This paper, through discourse analysis, traces the ways in which teachers and youth construct meanings and explanations of water within western scientific paradigms as well as in Indigenous paradigms during “classroom” events. We examine three events in which sub-surface, surface, and atmospheric geographies of water are taken up in the context of assessing the health of a particular ecosystem. The group is engaged in studying an oxbow – a physical landscape with relevant hydrogeologic features.

Results and Significance
We find that teachers actively engage in multiple meaning systems and often rely on Indigenous ways of knowing to provide complex narratives for spatial relationships between surface, sub-surface, and atmospheric water. Further we find that during these events, youth are co-constructing explanations using experiential observations of health indications of the local areas. These observations rely on youth understanding the relationships that plants, animals, and amphibians have with water and the ways in which unhealthy water might be manifesting with these species. We argue that these relationally constructed explanations reflect increasingly sophisticated systems level understandings within both western scientific paradigms and Indigenous paradigms. We end with a discussion of the relevance for both increasing diversity in the sciences as well as creating science education that brings about more just forms of being in the world.

Author

• Megan Bang, University of Washington