Lachney_MEMO_1

MEMO 1 – Michael Lachney Wolff-Michael Roth and Angela Calbrese Barton are both professors of science education. In this book they argue that scientific literacies emerge from communities in struggle between hegemonic (private and state science) and counter-hegemonic (local residence) forces: "When we think about scientific literacy as the outcome of contingent struggles over the values of competing situational definitions, it is no longer something that is owned by (or characterzes) individuals" (53). Each author in this book and others draws sociocultural theory, as understood in the tradition of Vygotsky, together with science and technology studies, particularly interesting is Barton’s use of feminist STS in community college chemistry courses. Both Roth and Barton have a history of working with underserved populations of students, through in- and after-school K-12 programming, and at community colleges. For example, Roth draws on his own experiences of homelessness to develop situations where scientific literacy emerges in relevant and meaningful ways for homeless youth.
 * Roth, Wolff-Michael, and Angela Calabrese Barton. //Rethinking Scientific Literacy.// New York : Routledge, 2004. **

The work and cases studies in this book are relevant to sustainability education through the re-focusing of scientific literacies not as something that exists in an individual, but something that “emerges through collective praxis.” In this view scientific literacy is something that is fostered through a dialectics community interactions, as people act in and on the their world through struggle. This means literacy emerges not in a person but in interactions between people. The follow quote exemplifies what the authors’ mean by scientific literacy as community praxis:

…we further propose to think about [scientific literacy] as a characteristic of certain everyday situations in which citizen science occurs. In such a context the notion of //learning// merely means that ‘some person has achieved a particular relationship with each other, and it is in terms of these relationships that information necessary to everyone’s participation gets made available in way that give people enough time on tasks to get good at what they”. (10)

What the authors are getting at here is that learning exists, to use Lave’s terms, as part of “legitimate peripheral participation.” People learn from each other by scaffolding community situations, whether that is learning to make shoes, learning to discuss politics at a community form, learning how to measure the PH of a stream as part of a research project, etc. It is not that the “learner” – in this case anyone involved in the community context – must replicate what others are doing, but instead participate by his or her own means and understanding. This makes Vygotsky’s concept of “zones of approximant development” extremely useful for understanding how scientific literacy emerges relative to the distance required for a given activity to be learned from another person. This implies community, and it is through community praxis that the authors suggest scientific literacy emerges, is the scaffolding for identifying scientific literacies.

This leads to the next idea about scientific knowledge as situated within communities of practice. The way that the authors understand science is as one “fiber” in the “thread” of community life and, as such, is only one of the many resources that people draw upon to understand scientific controversies and issues that they face in their community. For example in a case study about water quality at "Salina Drive" scientific literacies are argued to emerge rom the struggle between expert and lay knowledge. The expert knowledge of science is in a constellation of other knowledge systems that are molded together when considering something such as environmental sustainability."

What this suggests is that to deal with environmental issues at a local level is context dependent. They write,

"Reconfiguring scientific literacy in this way requires us to rethink the notion of "context" of human activity, and the relation between individual and context. Thus, the context of human activity is not a container filled with people nor is context, situationally and individually created experiential space. Rather, context is an activity system, heterogeneous and historically constituted entities comped of many often dissimilar and contradictor elements, lives, experiences, and voices and discontinuous, fractured and non-linar, experiences, and voices" (53).

I find this part of the argument most persuasive. They are arguing for context as a becoming among diverse actors. It is this becoming where scientific literacies emerge. I see when we have different age groups working together during the research program. However, when we tried to diversify the voices with the stakeholder game, I realized that students did not always want to take on the antagonist voices (the bad guys). I think this limited the stakeholder experiences and maybe even stunted Roth and Barton's idea that scientific literacies emerge from struggles between communities and larger forces. If the power is not represented can scientific literacy still emerge within community? This is what I want to know moving forward: How can we represent this power pedagogically? And, what happens with students' attitudes are more homogenous? Is it up to the teacher to find heterogeneity?

I am now looking into this more through the study agency and passivity as always coupled. I am looking into Roth's work on passivity" (Roth 2007) and thinking about it in terms of how Pickering (2010) discusses passivity.

Roth, Wolff-Michael. "Theorizing passivity." //Cultural Studies of Science Education// 2, no. 1 (2007): 1-8.

Pickering, Andrew. //The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science//. University of Chicago Press, 2010.