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In-Depth Information
During this time we were visited by a doe and fawn walking through the pre-
serve. The elder on our trip interpreted this as the doe and her fawn welcoming us
and thanking us for the good work we were doing. Students, teachers, and other
community members then cut buckthorn for a couple of hours. During that time
there were a series of mini lessons that took place about other local plants, plant
indentification, and plant anatomy. We were also fortunate to observe several other
animals during the visit including a possum and possum baby sleeping in the trunk
of a tree, a snake, mice, and squirrels.
Design principles of culturally and community-based science programming.
The
design principles developed in our work address the issue of discord at multiple
levels including, but not limited to, content, orientations to nature, participation,
and practice. Our own work, and that of others, suggests that culturally based sci-
ence curricula has at minimum the following design characteristics: They (1) use
local, place-based instruction, and hands-on experiences (see Schroeder et al., 2007
for a relevant meta-analysis), (2) are inextricably linked with community participa-
tion and practices including community values, needs, language, and experiences
(Cajete, 1997), (3) are premised on the idea that nature is not an externality, apart
from humans, but rather that humans are a part of nature, (4) are motivated and
organized around a big idea, in our case the idea that everything is related and has a
role to play in the universe (systems level or ecosystems thinking), (5) place science
in an interdisciplinary or holistic contextualized and invite the learner to view phe-
nomena from multiple perspectives, and (6) explore and address the relationships
and tensions between Native science and western science (e.g. Cajete, 1997), and
(7) place science in social policy and community contexts that highlight the need
for participation and leadership (e.g., Aikenhead, 2006).
Community-Based Design: A Closer Look
In the following we focus on a few selected segments from a design team meeting
on the Menominee reservation in which elders, teachers, and community members
were present. The design team was working on a forest ecology unit and discussing
what they wanted the learning goals of the unit to be. In analyzing this section our
goal is seeing the larger sociohistorical frame that participants are working with
and the ways in which this frame functions in shaping the meanings of science and
Native peoples' relationship to science. We explore the variations in these meanings
and relationships both across individuals as well as across particular individual's
utterances. These variations are sites of struggle for meaning, reclamation, transfor-
mation, and sovereignty. We use discourse analysis to uncover these variations in
the context of teacher and designer meetings.
Before turning to the meeting in question, the reader must know something about
the history and relationship of the Menominee nation with their forested lands. The
Menominee have managed a sustainable logging operation, including a logging mill,
for more then a century (Beck, 2002; Davis, 2000; Grignon et al., 1998). The forest
is more than a source of economic values; many Menominee have a deep sense of
identity connected to the forest. The forest is a source of game, firewood, medicines,
