Abstract: In this chapter, we address the disconnect between students’ life worlds and the image of science in science education. This brings us to the notion of place, which has received considerable attention in educational theorizing because of its potential to link students, their life worlds, and their experiences in particular settings to formal science education. In current debates on place-based education, notions of place vary with the extent they allow the novelization of the image of science. Particularly, place is a problematic construct once dominated by the monologue of science. We contribute to these debates by a rethinking of place in a form that is appropriate for describing and theorizing its occurrence in a world we share with others. We understand place as the result of a dialectical and dialogical relation of the material world and its chronotopic (time–space) nature in the various conversations (discourses) in which it is constituted as this place; that is, we view place as a lived entity that results from a dialogical transaction between a community and its material environment at a particular moment in cultural–historical time and which hence shapes and is shaped by the identity of the people. We exemplify our rethinking with a case of an environmental education project in which place unfolds as a chronotope from a dialog between scientific and indigenous voices. This rethinking shows how images of science can be constructed as novelized discourses from the connection between science education and students’ lifeworlds.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-08-17
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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