reconsider some of science education's scholarship on cultural diversity in .... discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within Science Education.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 38, No. 5, 2006
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education: Using postcolonial ideas to reconsider cultural diversity scholarship Lyn Educational EPAT © 0013-1857 October O 5 38 Postcolonial riginal 2006 Carter Philosophy Article 2006 Philosophy Interventions ofLtd Education and Within Theory Society ScienceofEducation Australasia Blackwell Oxford, UK Publishing
L C Australian Catholic University
Abstract In this paper, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education’s scholarship on cultural diversity in order to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help revise science education’s philosophical frameworks in the face of the newly intercivilisational encounters of contemporaneity. I then describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ (after Mignolo, 2000) that become useful to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique able to intervene and develops more revealing interpretations of some of science education’s scholarship and differentiated experiences. As the focus of these interventions, I have selected to discuss Cobern and Loving’s (2001) ‘Defining “Science” in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education’ and Siegel’s (2002) ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ from the ongoing discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within the journal Science Education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. Keywords: science education, postcolonialism, cultural diversity, multiculturalism, border epistemologies, sociocultural aspects of science education
Introduction Recent times have seen a rise in sociocultural perspectives within science education that are testament to the wholly transforming and increasing complexities of contemporaneity. While some of this scholarship has explored critical, feminist and poststructuralist theories interested in access to scientific knowledge, education and power (see Applebaum & Clarke, 2001; Calabrese Barton & Osborne, 1998), Lemke (2001) suggests that the encounter between normative science education and cultural and linguistic diversity has been a central focus. This growing preoccupation with diversity can be regarded as a consequence of the newly intercivilisational encounters of our rapidly globalising world. Globalisation has meant that at the © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
678 Lyn Carter local level, the world’s peoples rub more closely together ensuring that diversity, plurality, hybridity, dislocation and discontinuity have become the leitmotifs of the global age. Science education’s increasing interest in cultural diversity is apparent from the recent publication of several special journal editions that includes a Science Education volume on multiculturalism and science education. Consisting of three lead articles from Snively and Corsiglia (2001), Stanley and Brickhouse (2001), and Cobern and Loving (2001) to which six prominent cultural diversity scholars responded representing a range of positions, this volume generated considerable controversy. The following year, educational philosopher Harvey Siegel took the debate further in ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ (Siegel, 2002). These essays, in conjunction with similar science education literature (see for example Aikenhead, 2002; Jegede, 1999; Lee, 2001; Lee & Fradd, 1998; Loving, 1997; Southerland, 2000), raise some deeply vexing questions about the consequences of the newly intercivilisational encounters of globalising contemporaneity for science education. For example, questions about the ways in which science should be conceptualised and represented by science education not only invite debate about the complex issues of multiculturalism and diversity, and the epistemological parity between Western science and other non-Western sciences, but also promote reflection on moral and value imperatives, as well as our visions for the future. On the one hand, globalisation brings with it an appreciation of cultural diversity, while on the other it sustains rather than challenges existing boundaries and their attendant hegemonic impulses (Li, 2003). Such questions need to be considered within Narayan and Harding’s (2000) view that ‘changes in social relations always generate the need for revision in philosophic frameworks’ (p. ix), and Kyle’s (2001) call for a new political philosophy of science education. Significantly, the very complexity of contemporaneity has made available a range of discourses and interpretative frameworks that can be used for conceptualising these questions. Generated almost exclusively outside the field of education, they include various forms of cultural studies, feminist theory, poststructuralism, neoMarxism, and postcolonial theory. Of these, postcolonialism’s unique area of inquiry that describes transcultural global processes and critically appraises the resultant dominant and subordinate relations, has the potential to offer science education a different vantage point from which to view some of the issues of multiculturalism, diversity and boundaries. To date, science education has been reticent to engage with powerful discourses like postcolonialism (exceptions are Gough, 2003; McKinley, 2001; Ninnes, 2001). It has also been largely silent on the whole question of the broader globalising processes transforming the practical and theoretical landscape which shapes science education, and is expressed within it (see Carter, 2005). Postcolonialism’s ability to delve into these processes, and into the deeper ravines of referents like multiculturalism, boundaries, identity, representation, and pluralism underpinning theorisations of diversity, can open spaces to generate different discussions about cultural work within science education. It provides essential theoretical insights to a science education that should not only be concerned with the recognition of diversity, but also with redistributive justice © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 679 that addresses the uneven relations consequent to the contemporary globalising world (see Lash & Featherstone, 2001). In this paper, I make use of postcolonialism’s theoretical insights to help open spaces in some of science education’s scholarship on multiculturalism and diversity. In particular, I utilise key postcolonial perspectives on multiculturalism and boundaries to reconsider some of science education’s scholarship on cultural diversity as a form of postcolonial criticism attempting to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. I begin with a brief overview of postcolonialism that argues its ability to offer theoretical insights to help revise science education’s philosophical frameworks in the face of the newly intercivilisational encounters of contemporaneity. I then describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ (after Mignolo, 2000) that, once articulated, becomes useful to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique that intervenes and develops more revealing interpretations of some of science education’s scholarship and differentiated experiences. Postcolonial interventions draws attention to the unconsciousness in textual practice that, despite author intentions, can articulate meanings constituted and disseminated through long-standing and hegemonic practices (Coombes & Brah, 2000). They can reveal the often obscured colonial practices and assumptions deeply sedimented into some of science education’s normative scholarship, emphasising the need for vigilance, and recovering critical spaces for oppositional thinking and practice. As the focus of these interventions I have selected Cobern and Loving’s (2001) ‘Defining “Science” in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education’ and Siegel’s (2002) ‘Multiculturalism, Universalism and Science Education: In search of common ground’ from the ongoing discussion on multiculturalism and cultural diversity within Science Education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. Understanding Key Postcolonial Ideas For Young (2001) and others (see for example, Ashcroft, 2001; Goldberg & Quayson, 2002; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Punter, 2000), the ‘postcolonial’ is an elastic and highly contested term that simultaneously stretches across a number of different categories. These categories include, firstly, postcolonialism as epoch that acknowledges post World War 2 decolonisation, not only commemorating resistance over colonial powers but also describing ‘postcolonality’ as the contemporary condition of existence. Secondly, postcolonialism describes the development of new aesthetic and cultural formations responding to these changed historical circumstances. Postcolonial cultural producers rework the historical ruins of colonial relations to foreground the complexities and hybridities of human social and cultural realities (McCarthy, Giardina, Harewood & Park, 2003). Thirdly, postcolonialism as methodology draws from poststructuralism and deconstruction as the theoretical method of postmodernism. In this vein, earlier Fanonian-inspired and Marxist projects of resistance and attempts at historical recovery have given way to the more poststructurally driven theorisations of identity, difference, hybridity, and ambivalence prominent in the © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
680 Lyn Carter work of those like Bhabaa (1994) and Appadurai (1996). Lastly, postcolonialism refers to an ethical and political project resisting hegemonic power and seeking redistributive justice at the local and everyday level as sites of intervention and renewed action (see Delanty, 2000; Paolini, 1999). Many theorists however, remain unsympathetic to postcolonialism, and regard its multiple positionings as theoretically preoccupied and short on practical application (see for example, Brennan, 1997). It is not my intention to critical appraise postcolonialism as narrating its large and problematic discourses has been better done elsewhere, and would take me beyond my purposes here (see for example Loomba, 1998). Rather, I want to utilise that view of postcolonialism like Young’s (2001) for example, that regards it as a vital form of oppositional thinking and political activity. For Young (2001), postcolonialism ‘combines the epistemological cultural innovations of the postcolonial moment with a political critique of the conditions of postcoloniality’ (p. 57). Similarly, Huggan (2001) sees postcolonialism as offering at the same time political analysis, cultural critique, and philosophical insight so as we can work simultaneously from all positions to acknowledge the realities of concrete political and historical circumstances, as well as the changes in contemporary intellectual theory. For theorists like Huggan (2001), Lopez (2001) and Paolini (1999), it is postcolonialism’s very messiness and lack of coherence surrounded by heated contestations as it is, that ensures its strength. They argue that postcolonialism allows for an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach, promiscuous even, enabling suggests Lopez (2001) paraphrasing Foucault, a condition of multiple criticisms not reducible to a single position, yet efficacious in their interrogation of a range of practices, institutions and discourses. This postmodern gesture of not fixing gives it deconstructive tendencies that enhance its power as oppositional thinking. Postcolonialism is thus able to critique contemporary global cultural processes unevenly restructuring world relations, reposition ‘colonisation’ as part of current transnational and transcultural global processes, and help us work towards new political and intellectual interventions in the cause of redistributive justice (after Hall, 1996; Lash & Featherstone, 2001). Postcolonial analysis usually proceeds around a critique of embedded binary representations of the Other, the hegemony of some forms of knowledge and delegitimation of others, the spread of modernity with its liberal humanist rhetoric of universalism, the role of the economic-political, as well as developing capacity for Third World agency (see also Chowdhry & Nair, 2002; Goldberg & Quayson, 2002; Lopez, 2001; Mayo, Borg & Dei, 2002). For Quayson (2000), these forms of postcolonial critique should be important to many domains of knowledge as part of a larger project interested in differential experiences and social redress. As much of the science education’s scholarship articulates an interest in such concerns, it follows that postcolonial theory should be indispensable to science education. Drawing from both Huggan (2001) and Young (2001), postcolonial perspectives can offer science education at once political analysis, cultural critique and philosophical insight that venture beyond critical pedagogies to disrupt the continuing Eurocentrism of comparison and multiculturalism with their philosophical and epistemological assumptions of universalism, difference and the Other. These assumptions bound © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 681 to stable and unitary ideas of nation, culture, identity, comparison and difference remain embedded within much of science educations traditional discourse on multicultural education and cultural diversity. Postcolonial perspectives can help science education develop more complex conceptualisations of culture, identity and difference better suited to contemporary transnational global culture, as well as expose some of the new forms of imperialism being entrenched within globalised approaches to science education reform. For Lemke (2001) and others like Kyle (2001), these areas are underacknowledged and undertheorised within science education’s scholarship. Despite postcolonialism’s essential heterogeneity, many theorists have suggested significant clusters of ideas useful for considering the postcolonial (see Chowdhry & Nair, 2002; Dimitriades & McCarthy, 2001; Goldberg & Quayson, 2002; Paolini, 1999). These ideas, while differing in scope and emphasis, inevitably include the constructs of cultural translation and representation, difference, multiculturalism, hybridity, localism, boundaries and borders, fragmentation, and pluralism in ways that reshape the categories of culture, identity, and difference. In the next section, I describe the constructs of multiculturalism, and borders and ‘border thinking’ (after Mignolo, 2000) that, once articulated, become useful to develop postcolonial readings as an active methodology of critique that intervenes politically and intellectually to disrupt the continuing Eurocentrism in science education’s normative discourses. Multiculturalism Multiculturalism is a complex discourse of cultural pluralism, inclusion and equity found within liberal/humanist ideologies of various types, as well as existing policy structures of some Western settler nations like Australia and Canada (Delanty, 2000). In the latter form, multiculturalism rhetorically, and in practice, attempted to progress the nation towards a common future, supposedly peacefully forged from tolerant, racially mixed communities who were encouraged to sustain their distinctive pasts. Hence, ‘boutique’ or weak multiculturalism that celebrates diversity in foods, practices, artefacts and lifestyles as spectacles of commodified cultural difference are available everywhere. While such multiculturalism had a broad influence on many areas of social policy including education, Huggan (2001) argues it effectively substituted a culturalist interpretation of ethnicity for historical and economic versions, further sedimenting inequalities between diverse groups. But with the nation state’s decline and the paradoxical rise of exclusionary national politics as a consequence of globalisation, state-sponsored multiculturalism has receded though it survives in popularly circulated discourses of cultural pluralism and inclusion. Huggan (2001) suggests it remains at the centre of ongoing debates about strengths and weakness in liberal democracy more generally. Postcolonial readings of multiculturalism however, expose deeper paradoxes, highlighting the continuing Eurocentric nature of comparison with its assumptions of universalism, humanism, and the bounded and homogeneous nature of national contexts, cultures, identities, and indeed knowledges (Huggan, 2001). While © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
682 Lyn Carter multiculturalism aims to recognise pluralism and difference in corrective attempts at social inclusion, it necessarily superimposes the dominant’s perspective, interpellating difference, and fixing and essentialising stereotypical characteristics of various groups. Otherness is configured as alternative forms of the sameness that can be appreciated as cultural pluralism only by the dominant group in whose cultural forms the difference has been constructed and represented. Multiculturalism becomes a mechanism of control that domesticates the culturally different, emphasising their inferiority against the dominant norm, and further compartmentalising within reasserting borders. This puts a break on processes of intercultural understanding it seeks to promote. Hence, multiculturalism ambiguously works to separate and exclude as much as it does to include. As a paradox of inclusion and exclusion, it becomes an empty form of pluralism, a discourse of containment deployed to bring the eruption of diversity within institutional intelligibility and manageability, while simultaneously promoting an appreciation of the cultural Other. For Huggan (2001), this paradox exemplifies the irreconcilable tension within Western epistemology that sees all difference as particular and local in contrast to the universal Western norm. Thought of this way, many postcolonial theorists frequently view multiculturalism as a liberal form of racism at the same time it attempts to alleviate a liberal feeling of guilt. Boundaries/Borders and Border Thinking Concomitant with discourses of multiculturalism is the notion of boundaries and borders. Boundaries are deeply implicated in Western thinking, with the regulation of space by physical boundaries/borders a metonymy for the regulatory practices of Western epistemology itself (Ashcroft, 2001). The production of political and epistemological borders was essential to the Western colonial project of constructing and signalling the European, and separating out the Other. Once established, borders worked as signs of modernity, encoding a stable system of coordinates, where unambiguous and guaranteed boundaries differentiated, separated and regulated between social spheres, between nature and culture, and between the scientific and unscientific. Rationalisation and the autonomous knowing subject able to subsume the separated object as the known were the explicit foundations of bounded knowledge. Such boundaries have ultimately culminated in the universalising establishment of global forms of regulation spread from a Western centre to the periphery that, for Giddens’ (1990), makes modernity inherently globalising. Again, postcolonial interpretations have revealed boundaries/ borders, epistemological, ideological, political, physical and even biological to be profoundly ambivalent constructs. Boundaries/borders meet at different places, they are momentary locations in transition beyond which one attempts to move, they are in-between sites that are simultaneously complex articulations of binaries, and they are able to disturb conventional thinking in traditional notions in border crossings (Ashcroft, 2001; Kraniauskas, 2000; Lopez, 2001; Mignolo, 2000). Borders become non-borders, ‘in-between’ spaces variously described as liminal, interstitial or hybrid, with a complex uncertain world making them multiple and contingent, and changing both © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 683 the nature of the boundaries and those who define them. The context is rule finding and reflexive judgement. ‘They become not boundaries so much as a variety of attempts to draw boundaries’ (Beck, Bonass & Lau, 2003, p. 19). Within the Bhabhian view, those who live border lives on the margins of homelands or ethnic groupings, transform their knowledges into new and unexpected hybrids that are open to change. For Beck et al. (2003) this leads to a multiplication of claims to knowledge with knowledge boundaries between scientific and unscientific, between science and politics, and between experts and layman becoming drawn in several different places simultaneously, making it ‘abundantly clear that every given is in fact a choice, and that at the level of fundamental propositions, such ultimate starting points can only be normatively grounded, or defended as useful a priori constructs’ (p. 16). Similarly, Turnbull (2000) argues that what may have appeared as the rational grounding of boundaries was in fact a choice that could not be justified rationally. The recognition of this historical and social contingency of boundaries, and of the limits imposed by current epistemic orders has been, argues Nederveen Pieterse (2001), a profound moment of postmodern reflexivity. This makes boundaries of knowledge critical to the condition of postcoloniality as the capacity to renegotiate and replace boundaries as epistemological limits is deeply implicated in transformative postcolonial processes operating in a wide variety of circumstances (Ashcroft, 2001). Postcolonial intervention, for theorists like Kraniauskas (2000), Mignolo (2000), and Goonatilake (1998) amongst others, brings with it the potential to deconstruct existing boundaries and move towards a transdisciplinary epistemology that acknowledges Jameson’s (1998) concern regarding the need for new conceptual tools with which to cope with the overwhelming challenges of contemporaneity (also Bové, 1996; Featherstone & Lash, 1999). For example, Kraniauskas (2000) references Néstor García Canclini’s idea of conceptual transdisciplinarity involving the mutual transformation of concepts derived from various disciplines, as a new domain of theory necessary to study hybrid culture of the present modernity. Similarly, Mignolo’s (2000) notion of border thinking or border epistemology attempts to move to ‘other thinking’, beyond hegemonic epistemologies that attribute to themselves a pre-eminence and universality of reach. This ‘other thinking’ is not inspired by its own limitations, argues Mignolo (2000), does not seek to dominate, acknowledges subaltern epistemologies emphasis on performance and transformation, and is universally marginal, fragmentary and open making it better suited to the conditions of global contemporaneity. Western canonical thinkers with the desire to reassert their boundaries are unable to provide starting points he believes, for an epistemology that postcolonialism requires. This brings Mignolo (2000) to postulate a postOccidental reason located at the borders of modernity and coloniality that introduces transculturation into disciplinary practices in a form of double consciousness that goes beyond descriptions of hybridity into thinking about how the thinking intersects with the disciplinary categories themselves. It is a move that resembles changing the terms of the conversation not changing the conversation’s content. Beck et al. (2003) agrees with Mignolo (2000) arguing that the break in the subject-object epistemology in postmodern and reflexive global society is replaced © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
684 Lyn Carter by the interest constituted intentionality of knowledge, opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge. For Beck et al. (2003), this new knowledge is less certain, more probabilistic without the logic of discovery, more attentive to unanticipated consequences, and more negotiated at a political level that includes recognition of extra scientific justifications. Lack of space here precludes the discussion of these contentious ideas any further. While many scholars may dismiss this border thinking/epistemology as postmodern woolly thinking or melange, for me what is interesting in these ideas is the desire to go beyond traditional frameworks. Quayson’s (2000) view of postcolonialism as a ‘coming-into-being’ points towards more diverse ways of thinking about knowledges that includes what science and science education is and could be, as well as possibilities for living within all the complexities of postcolonial and reflexive contemporaneity. And it reiterates Harding’s (2000) notion important for science education that posits smart knowers and imperfect knowledge systems rather than the traditional view of imperfect learners struggling to learn the correct knowledge systems. It is time now to utilise the postcolonial conceptions of multiculturalism, boundaries and border thinking briefly sketched here, though well enough I think, to reconsider Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts as a form of postcolonial criticism, that is an instance of intellectual and political intervention attempting to extend the discourses and methodologies of science education. Punter (2001) argues that there is no particular procedure for postcolonial analysis; rather it is an eclectic mix of amongst other things, historical analysis, discourse analysis and critical literary criticism. Though textual approaches to research like this have a long tradition within the humanities, and have been utilised and developed by prominent scholars within education and qualitative methodologies more generally, they are not common within science education scholarship. In the next section then, I review Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts against the postcolonial constructs of multiculturalism, borders, and border thinking in the style of analysis frequently used within postcolonial criticism. Regulating Borders Within Multicultural Science Education In the second lead article in Science Education’s special issue of on multiculturalism and science education, Cobern and Loving (2001) write about multicultural science education, and the place of the Other’s knowledge in school science. Rather than broadening the definition of science to include traditional ecological knowledges (TEK) and indigenous knowledges (IK) as Stanley and Brickhouse (2001), Snively and Corsiglia (2001) and others (see Aikenhead, 2001; Cajate, 1999), Cobern and Loving (2001) argue to exclude them from the definition of science. Much of their text is devoted to establishing what counts as a Standard Account of Western science. Starting with the Ancient Greeks, and moving onto early and mid 1980’s philosophical views of the nature of science, they describe the well-established story of Western science, suggesting ‘there is a pragmatic view to science broadly acceptable in the scientific community and described in accounts by scientists themselves © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 685 …’ (p. 57). They then describe the ‘controversy’ surrounding calls for ‘indigenous knowledge (to be) reclassified as science’ (p. 53), concluding that ‘finding value in indigenous knowledge is not the same as conferring the title “science” and admitting indigenous knowledge of nature to the Standard Account’ (p. 54). Against each aspect of their Standard Account of Western science, they evaluate descriptions of TEK and IK, finding these forms of knowledge unable to meet set criteria. Good science explanations will always be universal even if indigenous knowledge is incorporated into science they argue, however: new additions to science (TEK or any form of indigenous knowledge) would soon face serious negative consequences. They would first lose their distinctiveness as a form of thought as they became absorbed by the dominant discourse of science. … They would lose because (they) … would inevitably be taken as mere ‘tokens’ of cultural inclusiveness rather than serious participants in the discourse of science. This tokenism would be reinforced by the inability … to compete where Western science is strongest—technical precision control, creative genius, and explanatory power. (p. 62) One does not need to look too far to find binary and exclusionary practices of multiculturalism in Cobern and Loving’s (2001) Standard Account, and the border it places between Western science and indigenous knowledge. They clearly believe that Western science can not only be defined with sufficient clarity so as to maintain a coherent boundary that excludes most forms of indigenous knowledge, but as Huggan (2001) suggests, they obviously support a culturalist interpretation of ethnicity rather than historical and economic versions that further sediments inequalities between diverse groups. Moreover, they seem to subscribe to the superimposition of the dominant’s perspective so that TEK and IK are configured as alternative forms of the sameness that can be appreciated as cultural pluralism only by the dominant group in whose cultural forms the difference has been constructed and represented (Huggan, 2001). Indeed, they argue outright that Western science’s ‘creative genius’ (p. 62) makes it rightly dominant to other forms of knowledge. Although TEK and IK are not ‘science’ in Cobern and Loving’s (2001) terms, they nonetheless argue for their inclusion in the curriculum within a spirit of ‘epistemological pluralism’ (p. 64): bringing TEK into the classroom is an excellent thing to do. It offers students a chance to see how the practice of science can benefit from the insights of another domain of knowledge. [ … ] It helps students see what is unique about science—what science can do that other domains of knowledge cannot do. (p. 63) The following year Siegel (2002) continued the debate by supporting Cobern and Loving’s (2001) position and responding to Stanley and Brickhouse’s (2001) criticisms. Much of the discursive energy of Siegel’s (2002) text is spent convincing us of the compatibilities between ‘a multicultural approach to science education … (and) a ‘universalist’ conception of science’ (p. 804). Siegel (2002) argues that © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
686 Lyn Carter multiculturalists like Stanley and Brickhouse (2001) misunderstand or misrepresent the universalist position believing it to embrace an unmediated access to reality. Like multiculturalists, Siegel (2002) suggests universalists acknowledge the socially and culturally locatedness of knowing a moderate form of reality that they attempt to investigate as objectively as possible. However, universalists prize not any old knowledge of the natural world, but knowledge which is (a) characterized in the form of theories which are (b) testable, (c) genuinely predictive (especially of novelty), (d) revealing of underlying unobservable entities and the relations and causal mechanisms [ … ] and is in their terms (e) genuinely and deeply explanatory. The production of such knowledge is the ultimate aim of scientific inquiry. (p. 808) Consequently, WMS (western modern science) for Siegel (2002) goes beyond culturally specific naturalistic approaches to knowledge like TEK and IK, and thus ‘they fail to satisfy the criteria of good science to which WMS aspires. [ … ] WMS is (hence) superior to local alternatives [ … ].’ (p. 809) Siegel (2002) goes on to argue that multiculturalism ‘taken to be an educational desideratum, must be justified not in epistemic but in moral terms’ (his italics, p. 810). He spends some time establishing the universality of multiculturalism as a moral imperative, thereby implicating multiculturalists as ascribing to at least, some forms of universalism. Finally, Siegel (2002) concludes his text with a discussion of the curricula implications of his position arguing that WMS best meets the criteria of good science and that science education should replicate the character of these criteria. While acknowledging the place for ‘local/indigenous/traditional /ethic understandings of nature’ (p. 817) within curriculum, he agrees with Cobern and Loving (2001) that treating them as epistemologically equal to WMS is ‘politically counter-productive’ (his italics p. 818), as not only would their distinctiveness be lost, they would also be co-opted by the dominant WMS. Siegel’s (2002) text sees the same regulation of boundaries identified in Cobern and Loving’s (2001) account. As indicated earlier, the production of political and epistemological borders was essential to the Western colonial project of identifying the distinctiveness of the European, and working as signs of modernity providing markers about what was to be categorised and controlled (Ashcroft, 2001). Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) boundaries like those others of the colonial project, act to limit and control in discourses of containment that postcolonialism would argue are symptomatic of the hegemony and imperialism of Western epistemology itself. Consequently, both texts display the assumptions of Eurocentrism with its stable and unitary coordinates where unambiguous and guaranteed boundaries differentiate, separate and regulate between nature and culture, and between the scientific and unscientific. Moreover, the subject-object epistemology of the knowing subject able to specify criteria to know and judge the object is reiterated in Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts as the explicit foundations of bounded knowledge. Though Siegel (2002) does acknowledge the cultural construction of all knowing, and claims that WMS is superior only on the specified criteria he describes, he fails to locate those criteria as hallmarks of a Eurocentrism that postcolonialism would find © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 687 highly problematic and exclusionary. It becomes clear from within a postcolonial sensibility that every given is in fact a choice, including Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) criteria for identifying good science, ‘and that at the level of fundamental propositions, such ultimate starting points can only be normatively grounded, or defended as useful a priori constructs’ (Beck et al., 2003, p. 16). What Siegel’s (2002) text argues as the rational grounding of boundary producing criteria is in fact a choice that cannot be justified rationally (see also Turnbull, 2000). Postcolonial analyses would locate Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) boundary producing criteria within the deeply sedimented colonial coordinates of Eurocentrism with its philosophical and epistemological assumptions of universalism, difference and the Other. These assumptions embedded within much science education scholarship are ill-equipped to delve into the complex conceptualisations of culture, diversity, hybridity, border epistemologies, pluralism and identity required for considering science education within contemporary transnational global culture. By contrast, postcolonial readings of Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts would work to deconstruct the boundaries between Western science, science education and indigenous knowledge, and between epistemological, and political and moral, imperatives that they have worked hard to assemble and defend. A postcolonial perspective suggests such boundaries act as reminders that those who have been erased or written out, or who cannot be articulated in the existing patterns of representation (McLeod, 2000). This speaks to a Bhabhian ambivalence that can be used to describe the complex processes of reciprocity occurring between Western science and indigenous knowledge in ways different to those Cobern and Loving (2001) and Siegel (2002) have acknowledged. Separating out the Other paradoxically creates new positions from which the dominant can be judged, engendering anxieties that reiteratively compel the dominant group to try and further separate, and fix themselves in relation to power. Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) need to reiterate criteria to (re)construct the Standard Account of Western science attempts to fix a position for the dominant knowledge, arguing for validation and recognition as it (re)asserts and defends its borders. Consequently, the subjugated indigenous knowledges reciprocally act to influence the way the dominant seeks to represent itself, undermining and deconstructing the continually reasserting boundaries that Huggan (2001) and others (see Lopez, 2001; Paolini, 1999) describe as Bhabha’s endlessly split condition of postcoloniality. Within this type of interpretation, the boundaries of knowledge and their regulation become critical to the condition of postcoloniality. The capacity to renegotiate and replace boundaries as epistemological limits is deeply implicated in transformative postcolonial processes (Ashcroft, 2001; Nederveen Pieterse, 2001). Postcolonialism offers a type of ‘thinking at the limits’ (after Hall, 1996) with the potential to develop a transdisciplinary epistemology that acknowledges Jameson’s (1998) and others concern regarding the need for new conceptual tools with which to cope with contemporaneity (also Bové, 1996; Featherstone & Lash, 1999). I have already noted moves in this direction that include Kraniauskas’ (2000) portrayal of Néstor García Canclini’s idea of conceptual transdisciplinarity, and Mignolo’s (2000) © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
688 Lyn Carter border epistemology that seeks ‘other thinking’ beyond hegemonic epistemologies attributing to themselves universality of reach. But whatever the suggested direction, Western canonical thinking entrenched as it is in Eurocentrism, can no longer provide a starting point Mignolo (2000) argues, for a postOccidental epistemology that postcolonial difference requires at the intersection of modernity and coloniality. This implies that canonical boundaries (and other borders) should be thought of as provisional, able to be dismantled in ways that deconstruct colonial discourse, and open up possibilities even if they are incommensurable. As learners mix Western science with other knowledges, intercultural, hybrid demands are placed on science education that both challenges the boundaries of Western science and subtly changes its terms. For Paolini (1999), this occurs in spaces of hybridity and ambivalence where a conditionally of the discourse rather than authoritative affirmation is expressed. For Gough (2003), it occurs in interstitial transnational spaces coproducing global knowledges whose legitimacy cannot be tied to any particular culture’s criteria for conferring knowledge. And for Beck et al. (2003) it occurs in reflexive modernity where the context is rule finding and reflexive judgement that leads to a multiplication of knowledge claims with knowledge boundaries between the scientific and unscientific, between science and politics, and between experts and layman becoming drawn in several different places simultaneously. Unlike its predecessor within the bounded first modernity, this new knowledge is less certain, more probabilistic without the logic of discovery, more attentive to unanticipated consequences, and more negotiated at a political level that includes recognition of extra scientific justifications. It is readily apparent that such complexities of thinking are absent from the positions taken up by Cobern and Loving (2001) and Siegel (2002) as they work to reinforce Western sciences’ authority and further entrench the privilege of Western style science education. Perhaps Jessica Benjamin’s (1996) observations that, even if one adopts a different stance, the prior body of thought shapes one’s starting point and holds on to the coordinates such that rejecting the postulates doesn’t seem to be enough, is apt for viewing the science education scholarship on cultural diversity. The emphasis on culturally diversity, multicultural science, WMS, border crossing strategies and so on that abounds within this literature, including within Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002) texts is, in the end, not so surprising, as they are more manageable options than tackling the difficult work of decolonising education. Such tasks are only just beginning to be thought about, as they are profoundly challenging in this rapidly reconfiguring and uncertain world. Postcolonialism’s significance lies in its promise of political and intellectual intervention by exposing the unconscious referents sedimented into the normative discourses of texts like Cobern and Loving’s (2001) and Siegel’s (2002). Reviewing their texts here, brief though it has been, has shown that continually reasserting borders can act as strategies of containment, used to ‘discipline’ and manage the tensions and contradictions of difference consequent to the changing practical and conceptual landscape. Close attention must be paid in science education and elsewhere, to help prevent the recitation, circulation and perpetuation of these subjugating discourses, particularly within its cultural diversity scholarship. © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education 689 Towards Postcolonial Interventions Within Science Education As most of this work is still to be done, it is only possible here to muse about what an approach to cultural diversity within science education drawn from postcolonial theorising might include. Such an approach would acknowledge the increasing awareness of shared historical processes, cultural reciprocity, and the diasporic tendencies of the globalising world around more complex and multiple conceptualisations of Western science and indigenous culture. It would argue cultural production to be as much caught up with the injustices of contemporaneity, and the future, as it is with the past, recognising the development of indigeneity influenced by the spread of modernity. Expressed within a framework of hybridity and ambivalence, it would construct more complex conceptualisations of cultural difference as hybridised and fluid, always in the making, and recast culturally diverse students’ homogenised identities into multiple, mobile and provisional constructions, more accurately attune to conditions of living and learning under the indeterminacy of the transforming global world. Further, a postcolonial interpretation would reveal Western and non-Western borders to be profoundly ambivalent constructs. As momentary locations and simultaneously complex articulations of past and present, inclusion and exclusion, difference and similarity, the conventional thinking embedded in border crossings would be disturbed. Work would proceed that would be sensitive to empty forms of cultural pluralism that unintentionally reasserts the hegemony of Western cultural control. But most challenging of all would be attempts to renegotiate and replace borders as epistemological limits critical to the condition of postcoloniality. Clearly, argues McLeod (2000) drawing on Bhabha, it ‘matters how we conceptualise difference’ (p. 228)! The paucity of this type of inquiry in science education (in terms of new discourses and methodologies) must be addressed so that science education can engage in dialogues about key issues that are practically and intellectually urgent, and that will advance it as a discipline. References Aikenhead, G. S. (2001) Integrating Western and Aboriginal Sciences: Cross-cultural science teaching, Research in Science Education, 31, pp. 337–355. Aikenhead, G. S. (2002) Cross-cultural Science Teaching: Rekindling traditions for Aboriginal students, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Aikenhead, G. S. & Lewis, B. F. (2001) Introduction: Shifting perspectives From universalism to cross-culturalism, Science Education, 85, pp. 3–5. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural dmensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press). Appelbaum, P. & Clark, S. (2001) Science! Fun? A critical analysis of design/content/evaluation, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 33, pp. 583 – 600. Ashcroft, B. (2001) Post-colonial Transformations (London, Routledge). Beck, U., Bonass, W. & Lau, C. (2003) The Theory of Reflexive Modernization: Problematic, hypotheses and research programme, Theory, Culture & Society, 20:2, pp. 1–33. Benjamin, J. (1996) On Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press). Bhaba, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (London, Routledge). © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
690 Lyn Carter Bové, P. A. (1996) Afterword: ‘Global/local’ memory and thought, in: R. Wilson & W. Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural production and the transnational imaginary (Durham, NC, Duke University Press), pp. 372–385. Brennan, T. (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Carter, L. (2005) Globalisation and Science Education: Rethinking science education reforms, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 42: 5, pp. 561–580. Cajate, G. A. (1999) Igniting the Sparkle: An indigenous science education model (Skyand, Kivaki Press). Calabrese Barton, A. & Osborne, M. D. (1998) Marginalized Discourses and Pedagogies: Constructively confronting science for all, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 35, pp. 339 –340. Chowdhry, G. & Nair, S. (2002) Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading, race, gender and class (London, Routledge). Cobern, W. W. & Loving, C. C. (2001) Defining ‘Science’ in a Multicultural World: Implications for science education, Science Education, 85, pp. 50–67. Coombes, A. E. & Brah, A. (2000) Hybridity And Its Discontents: Politics, science and culture (London, Routledge). Delanty, G. (2000) Modernity and Postmodernity (London, Sage). Dimitriades, G. & McCarthy, C. (2001) Reading & Teaching the Postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquiat and beyond (New York, Teachers College Press). Featherstone, M. & Lash, S. (eds). (1999) Spaces of Culture: City, nation, world (London, Sage). Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Polity Press). Goldberg, D. T. & Quayson, A. (eds). (2002) Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford, Blackwell). Goonatilake, S. (1998) Towards A Global Science: Mining civilizational knowledge (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press). Gough, N. (2003) Thinking Globally In Environmental Education: Some implications for internationalizing curriculum inquiry, in: W. F. Pinar (ed.), Handbook of International Curriculum Research (New York, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), pp. 40–60. Hall, S. (1996) When was ‘The Postcolonial’? Thinking at the limit, in: I. Chambers & L. Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question (London, Routledge), pp. 242–260. Harding, S. (2000) Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science, in: U. Narayan & S. Harding (eds) Decentering the Centre: Philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press), pp. 240–261. Huggan, G. (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic (London, Routledge). Jameson, F. (1998) Notes On Globalization As A Philosophical Issue, in: F. Jameson & M. Miyoshi (eds) The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC, Duke University Press), pp. 33–54. Jegede, O. J. & Aikenhead, G. S. (1999) Transcending Cultural Borders: Implications for science teaching, Journal for Science and Technology Education, 17, pp. 45–66. Kraniauskas, J. (2000) Hybridity in a Transformational Frame: Latin-Americanist and post-colonial perspectives on cultural studies, in: A. E. Coombes & A. Brah (eds) Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, science and culture (London, Routledge), pp. 235–256. Kyle, W. C. (2001) Towards A Political Philosophy Of Science Education, in: A. Calabrese Barton & M. D. Osborne (eds) Teaching Science in Diverse Settings: Marginalized discourses and classroom practice (New York, Peter Lang), pp. xi–xvii. Lash, S. & Featherstone, M. (2001) Recognition and Difference: Politics, identity, multiculture, in: S. Lash & M. Featherstone (eds) Recognition and Difference: Politics, identity, multiculture (London, Sage), pp. 1–19. Lee, O. (2001) Culture and Language in Science Education: What do we know and what do we need to know? Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38, pp. 499–501. Lee, O. & Fradd, S. H. (1998) Science for All, Including Students from Non-English-Language Backgrounds, Educational Researcher, 27:4, pp. 12–21. Lemke, J. L. (2001) Articulating Communities: Sociocultural perspectives on science education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38, pp. 296–316. © 2006 The Author Journal compilation © 2006 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
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