Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Community Design in Action
:
Social policy and community context.
In each of
our programs there has been a range of community participation. All of the teachers
and research assistants in the project have been local community members. Both
communities also had elders and community experts lead activities with children.
For example, in Chicago we had an elder share creation stories and stories focused
on plants with children. At our Menominee site we have had community members
who work for the forestry department, fisheries, and water treatment talk with stu-
dents. In addition, teachers frequently made connections between the specific tasks
children and adults were engaged in with broader issues within the community.
Teachers used this as an opportunity to stress needs in the community that invited
children to think about science as a career path. For example, while students were
learning about issues with the Chicago river specifically, teachers made connections
to water issues on different reservations (i.e. the Oneida nation is currently exploring
creating a pond for drinking water, the Navajo nation is working to clean up toxins
in their aquifers; the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission was dis-
cussed as a community-based scientific organization that was developed to protect
our resources and sovereignty). Although these various connections were pointed
out some of the time, our efforts were not systematic. We intend to systematically
include this throughout the intervention and test its impacts.
Exploring and addressing tensions between western modern science and Native
science.
The design teams have focused on the ways in which various cultural
practices and artifacts, including stories, converge or diverge with ideas in school
science, and how to structure activities that facilitate students' exploration of both.
Often students are left to navigate and make sense of the multiple cultural con-
texts in which they live with little support or conversation. Although there has been
work on making the practices and expectations of schooling explicit to students,
generally this work has been engaged from a deficit perspective, one aimed at ush-
ering students into a different way of doing things (Delpit, 1995). This aspect of
our curriculum has begun to emerge by identifying key points within lessons and
activities where we think the hypothesized discord is often at an implicit or tacit
level or in places where we think there are generative intersections between mod-
ern western science and traditional practices and knowledge. We see this aligned
with what Gutiérrez, Larson, and Kreuter (1995), Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, and
Turner (1997), and Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, and Tejeda (1999) have called the
third space or places in which “alternative and competing discourse and position-
ings transform conflict and difference into rich zones of collaboration and learning”
(see also Van Eijck & Roth, 2007).
For example, when our students engage with the concept of biodiversity,
community-based views about all things being connected and having a role to play
is a resource to be mobilized that easily aligns with the western science concept.
However, within many Native communities rocks, water, and other entities that
would be classified as “nonliving natural kinds” are considered to be different living
kinds. We are making these sorts of differences explicit to students and embracing
and exploring the reasons for the differences in “classifications,” thereby creating a
third zone. In this project we are exploring the ways in which the third zone may
