thinking differently about cultural diversity: using postcolonial theory to (re)read science...

Thinking Differently AboutCultural Diversity: UsingPostcolonial Theory to (Re)readScience Education

LYN CARTERTrescowthick School of Education, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Received 11 September 2003; accepted 22 October 2003

DOI 10.1002/sce.20000Published online 4 June 2004 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

ABSTRACT: This paper makes use of postcolonial theory to think differently about aspectsof cultural diversity within science education. It briefly reviews some of the increasingscholarship on cultural diversity, and then describes the genealogy and selected key themesof postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory as oppositional or deconstructive reading practiceis privileged, and its practical application illustrated by using some of these key ideasto (re)read Gloria Snively and John Corsiglia’s (2001) article “Discovering indigenousscience: implications for science education” and their rejoinder, from the special issue ofScience Education (Vol. 85, pp. 6–34) on multiculturalism and science education. Whilemany would regard the expressed views on diversity, inclusivity, multiculturalism, andsustainability to be just and equitable, postcolonial analysis of the texts reveals subtle andlingering referents that unwittingly work against the very attitudes Snively and Corsiglia(2001) seek to promote. Such postcolonial analyses open up thinking about the materialand cultural conditions in which science education is produced, circulated, interpreted, andenacted. They also privilege a unique methodology already prominent in academic inquirythat is yet to be well explored within science education. Finally, I conclude this paper withsome general comments regarding postcolonialism and the science education scholarshipon cultural diversity. C© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 88:819–836, 2004

INTRODUCTION

We live in interesting times: complex, challenging, and rapidly changing times. Eminentphilosopher and cultural commentator Zygmunt Bauman describes these changes as moredisorderly and entangled than in any preceding epoch:

Things today are moving sideways, aslant or across rather than forward, often backward, butas a rule the movers are unsure of their direction and the nature of successive steps is hotlycontested. Changes happen all over the place and all the time . . . and, most importantly, the

Correspondence to: Lyn Carter; e-mail: [email protected]

C© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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sediments and imprints of one change are not wiped clean or erased before another changestarts to scatter its own. In short—forms of life do not succeed each other: they settle asideeach other, clash and mix, crowd together in the same space/time . . . Variety of life-forms ishere to stay. And so is the imperative of their coexistence (Bauman, 2001, p. 137, his italics).

Scott Lash offers another view of contemporaneity. He describes the world of global in-formation culture as “a swirling vortex of microbes, genes, desire, death, onco-mice, semi-conductors, holograms, semen, digitized images, electronic money and hyperspaces in ageneral economy of indifference” (Lash, 1999, p. 344) that increasingly fragments all beforeit as it separates us from our moorings. We are shifting, he argues, from a first epistemolog-ical modernity where knowing subjects constructed the objects of knowledge, to a secondor reflexive modernity of ontology where objects themselves have become possessed ofbeing. The rise of global information culture shifts us again, to somewhere else yet to beconfigured, but somewhere that sees human singularity decline as these objects begin tothink. It is the age “of the inhuman, the post-human and the non-human, of biotechnologyand nanotechnology” (p. 12), of an object material culture in which technologies, objects ofconsumption, lifestyles, and so forth come to dominate the cultural landscape and take onthe power to constitute, track, and judge. Like Benjamin’s melancholic we have no recoursebut to find our way, Lash (1999) laments, among the objects of this new time that is soresolutely upon us and irreversible.

These powerful and evocative comments on contemporaneity from Bauman (2001) andLash (1999) make it clear that we face an increasing range of complexities in our attempts tobetter understand and theorize our rapidly globalizing world. We may desire a conceptual netin which to capture the realities of our age, but it is not possible says Bauman (2001), sincethe defining traits of postmodernity’s coexistent life-forms are uncertainty and ambivalence,and permanently unfinished differentiation. How then are we to conceptualize the socialstructures and cultural processes that encompass science education when, to paraphraseLash and Featherstone (1999), the speed and complexity of sociocultural production ispushing us beyond traditional modes of analysis? This is an important question because itspeaks not only to our need to make sense of our complex world in theoretical terms, but alsoto the practical question of how we are to live and act in such a world. More specifically, andfor our purposes here, it speaks to the profound challenges of developing and enacting whatis required of a contemporary science education at the very time when taken-for-granted andshared meanings have receded, and have been replaced by the uncertainty and insecurity.

Recent decades have seen an increase in sociocultural perspectives within science educa-tion that are testament to these wholly transforming, complex and challenging forces at workin the world. Some of this scholarship has explored feminist, critical and poststructuralist the-ories interested in access to scientific knowledge, education, and power (see Appelbaum &Clark, 2001; Calabrese Barton & Osborne, 1998), while other research has investigated lan-guage and discourse issues (for example Lemke, 1990; Roth, 1998). However, most attentionhas been focused on cross-culturalism, and the encounter between the normative culture ofscience education, and cultural and linguistic diversity (Lemke, 2001). This increasing inter-est in diversity is a consequence of the complex transformations and newly intercivilizationalencounters of our rapidly globalizing world. Globalization has meant that at the local level,the world’s peoples rub more closely together ensuring that diversity, plurality, hybridity, dis-location, and discontinuity have become the leitmotifs of the global age. Science education’sincreasing interest in cultural diversity is apparent in the growing frequency of studies (seefor example Jegede & Aikenhead, 1999; Krugly-Smolska, 1999; Lee, 1999, 2003; Ogawa,1996), as well as in the recent publication of three special journal editions. These are a 2001Science Education edition introduced by Aikenhead and Lewis (2001) on multiculturalism

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and science education, one issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST ) onlanguage and cultural diversity introduced by Lee (2001), and a series of three JRST issuesedited by Calabrese Barton and Tobin (2001, 2002), devoted to science education in urbansettings where linguistically and culturally diverse students concentrate. This emphasis fitswith Peters’ (2000) belief that there are “no more pressing sets of problems in educationaltheory today than those that fall under the broad issue of cultural difference” (p. 18).

Significantly, the very complexity of contemporaneity has made available a range ofdiscourses and interpretative frameworks for conceptualizing the intricacies of Bauman’s(2001) coexistent life-forms that includes expressions of science education. Generated al-most exclusively outside the field of education, these discourses and interpretative frame-works include various forms of cultural studies, feminist theory, postmodernism, poststruc-turalism, neoMarxism, and postcolonial theory. Of these, postcolonialism’s unique area ofinquiry has the potential to offer science education a different vantage point from which toview cultural diversity. To date, science education has been reticent to engage with powerfuldiscourses like postcolonialism (exceptions are Carter, 2002; Gough, 2003; McKinley, 2001;Ninnes, 2001). It has also been largely silent on the whole question of the broader structuraland cultural processes transforming the practical and theoretical landscape which shapesscience education, and is expressed within it. Postcolonialism’s ability to delve into theseprocesses, and into the deeper ravines of referents like modernity, identity, representation,and resistance underpinning many theorizations of culture and difference including thoseused, but underexplored, within science education, can open spaces to generate differentdiscussions about what science education is, and could be. It provides essential theoreticalinsights to a science education concerned with the recognition of diversity and redistribu-tive justice relevant to the new complexities of the contemporary global world (see Lash &Featherstone, 2001).

In this paper, I make use of postcolonial theory as a discourse of contemporaneity tostart to think differently about aspects of cultural diversity within science education. I beginwith a brief review of some of the increasing scholarship on cultural diversity, and go onto describe several aspects of postcolonial theory including its genealogy and selected keythemes. Generating key ideas is useful, because once articulated, they become available toreexamine some of the unconscious thinking in science education’s scholarship on culturaldiversity. Accordingly I privilege postcolonial theory as oppositional or deconstructivereading practice, and illustrate its practical application by using some of these key ideas to(re)read Gloria Snively and John Corsiglia’s (2001) article “Discovering indigenous science:implications for science education” and their response, “Rejoinder: infusing indigenousscience into Western modern science for a sustainable future” (Corsiglia & Snively, 2001).Though textual approaches to research like this have a long tradition within the humanities,and have been utilized and developed by prominent scholars within education and qualitativemethodologies more generally (see for instance, Britzman, 1998; Cherryholmes, 1999; Ellis& Bochner, 1996; Tierney & Lincoln, 1997), they are not common within science educationscholarship. I have chosen Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) articles from the special issue ofScience Education on multiculturalism and science education, as many would believe theirviews on diversity, inclusivity, multiculturalism, and sustainability to be just and equitable.However, postcolonial analysis reveals subtle and lingering referents within their scholarshipthat unwittingly work against the very attitudes they seek to promote. Such postcolonialanalyses open up thinking about the material and cultural conditions in which scienceeducation is produced, circulated, interpreted, and enacted. They also privilege a uniquemethodology already prominent in academic inquiry that is yet to be well explored withinscience education. Finally, I conclude this paper with some general comments regardingpostcolonialism and the science education scholarship on cultural diversity.

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CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

The increasing science education scholarship on cultural diversity displays a number ofrelated and interpenerative tendencies that seem to draw together, I suggest, around two mainpositions: one focussed on the identities/subjectivities of those learning science, that is, theculturally and linguistically diverse students themselves, and the second, on considerationsof science as culturally located, Western and non-Western knowledge, frequently identifiedas multicultural approaches to science. There are a number of other approaches I grouptogether for analytic convenience into a third more general category.

The first tendency in the literature refers to the culturally and linguistically diverse stu-dents themselves (see for example Lee, 2003). This position acknowledges the inherentEurocentricism and hegemonic universalism of Western science, but as it is judged to behumanity’s most “powerful” and “best” (in the utilitarian sense) knowledge system, its cleardelineation within the school curriculum is sanctioned (for example, Cobern & Loving,2001). There is wide spread agreement (see Atwar, 1996) that “every student should haveaccess (to it) in order to function competently in the mainstream, in a global economy andin an information society” (Lee, 2001, p. 499). The rhetoric of “science for all” is reiteratedin these accounts, but as it is required to occur in culturally relevant ways, it is positioneddifferently from the science education reform literature. Despite their diverse backgrounds,the students themselves are compelled to accommodate Western science, with the focusconsequently on developing pedagogical strategies and curricula to enable their “bordercrossing” into Western science (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1999; Lee & Fradd, 1998; Michie,2003). Those that need assistance, as Cobern’s (1996) world view theory suggests, in-clude non-Western students whose culture interferes with learning Western science as wellas Western students whose prior knowledge, gender, and/or class make science equallyforeign. Snively and Corsiglia (2001) applaud these culturally sensitive perspectives andsuggest science education has begun to explore what it means to prepare students for aculturally diverse world.

The second tendency in the science education literature clusters around science as West-ern and non-Western knowledge that, to some extent, accept multiple conceptualizations ofscience. This position draws in part from science studies and problematizes Western science,acknowledging its Eurocentrism, and the contributions of the Other’s knowledge. In partic-ular, it raises questions about the place of the Other’s knowledge in school science (Stanley& Brickhouse, 2001), with those like Snively and Corsiglia (2001) arguing for the inclusionof indigenous and traditional science knowledge (see also Aikenhead, 2001, 2002; Arellanoet al., 2001; Cajete, 1999). While much of this discussion emanates from the First World,there is an increasing contribution from non-Western and/or Third World contexts strug-gling with the tensions of multiple knowledge systems that see cultural, linguistic, religious,and political imperatives compel the maintenance of traditional/indigenous knowledge, atthe same time as national development priorities demand the expansion of Western techno-scientific knowledge (see Aikman, 1997; Nakayama, Kawano, & Kawasaki, 2003; Semali,1999). Yousif (2001) for example, comments on the incorporation of Islamic science intoschools in Brunei as part of the process of “Islamization,” while Nanda (1997) somewhatmore sceptically looks at Hindu science as part of the “Hinduization” of education inIndia. Nanda (1997) believes the most ardent supporters of indigenization are those whosechildren attend Western schools and are themselves securely entrenched in transnationalcontexts.

There are other more eclectic approaches to cultural diversity in the science education lit-erature that makes them not easily categorized into either of the above positions. Prominentamongst these is the work of Angela Calabrese Barton (for example, Calabrese Barton,


2001a, 2001b; Calabrese Barton & Tobin, 2001; Fusco & Calabrese Barton, 2001) thatfocuses specifically on urban settings where the consequences of economic-political andcultural globalization play out. Dear and Flusty (1999) describe cultural diversity in urban-ized cities as combinations of high enclaves and multi-enclaves of mixed identity, makingfor heterogeneous spaces that transgress boundaries and produce hybrid complexities asemergent cultural forms. The sociocultural dynamic works with economic polarization, so-cial unrest, racism, and homelessness to provoke innovative solutions to interethnic relationsand inequality. Calabrese Barton calls on critical, feminist, poststructural, and multiculturalperspectives to raise questions about the nature of knowing in science, the relationshipbetween science and society, and the implications for school science in these complexpostmodern settings. Along with Warren et al. (2001), she seeks to reframe what is meantby science and diversity so that diversity can become resourceful rather than problematic.Calabrese Barton (2000) wants a critical urban pedagogy defined as a discourse of agencythat works towards social empowerment and sociocultural transformation. Science teach-ing, she argues, “must respond to the political and ethical consequences that science has inthe world, and must be equally infused with analysis and critique as it is with production”(p. 343).

While work like Calabrese Barton’s draws from the oppositional discourses, much of thescience education scholarship on cultural diversity is informed by the large normative edu-cational literatures on multiculturalism and comparative studies, usually with an emphasison cultural pluralism, inclusivity, and equity (see Lee, 2003). Dimitriadis and McCarthy(2001) judge these comparative and multicultural education discourses to be highly prob-lematic, reflecting the newly emerging critiques in comparative fields more generally (seeHuggan, 2002), as well as in the comparative education field itself (Crossley & Watson,2003). Together these critiques highlight the continuing Eurocentric nature of comparisonwith its philosophical and epistemological assumptions of universalism, humanism, andthe bounded and homogeneous nature of national contexts and identities (Huggan, 2002).Comparison is seen to compartmentalize difference within continually reasserting borders,paradoxically putting a break on those processes of intercultural understanding multicul-turalism seeks to promote. Further, it does not take account of the newly emergent mixed,hybrid, and diverse identities consequent to intensified globalization and diaspora. Multi-culturalism becomes an empty form of pluralism, Dimitriadis and Cameron (2001) argue,a discourse of containment deployed to bring the eruption of diversity within institutionalintelligibility and manageability. Prominent comparative education theorists Crossley andWatson (2003) call for a reconceptualization of comparative and multicultural education thatmoves beyond stable and unitary ideas about culture, tradition, and identity. They believethat the profound challenges of transforming global processes, when considered togetherwith recent theoretical critiques like poststructuralism, have significantly challenged theembedded Eurocentrism within the field. Dimitriadis and Cameron (2001) turn to postcolo-nial theory capable, they believe, of more complex conceptualizations of culture, identity,change, and contemporaneity for theorizing diversity, and able to provide new models ofthoughtfulness that question the reproduction of ideologies, dispositions, and values in edu-cation. In the next section, I introduce postcolonialism and develop some of its key ideas inorder to apply them to (re)read aspects of science education scholarship on cultural diversity.

DESCRIBING THE POSTCOLONIAL

Any excursion into contemporary social and cultural theory inevitably encounters thecategory of the postcolonial. Its foundational point is usually attributed to Edward Said’sOrientalism (Said, 1978) with its celebrated critique of European imperialism. Orientalism

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owed much to the earlier anticolonial work of Fanon (1968) who, within the hegemony/counterhegemony thinking of the time, attempted to validate the Other’s self-identity,promote resistance, and recuperate precolonial culture. Said however, drawing on bothFoucault’s theorizations of knowledge and power, and Gramsci’s view of resistance andopposition, directed attention to the textually produced modes of representation that discur-sively worked to consolidate hegemony (Chowdhry & Nair, 2002). Said’s work suggestedthe beginning of a shift from the first, Fanonian-inspired concerns of resistance and re-covery bound the certainties of colonial modernity, to more nuanced understandings of thereciprocal relationships between domination, resistance, and difference (Paolini, Elliott, &Moran, 1999). This shift was further developed by the poststructurally inspired scholarshipof the 1990’s, prominent in the more complex theorizations of ambivalence from thoselike Bhabha (1994) and Appadurai (1996). It also reflects the intensified diaspora and newforms of mixed and hybrid identities consequent to globalization (Goldberg & Quayson,2002). Hence, Hall (1996) suggests that contemporary views of the postcolonial repositions“colonization” as part of current transnational and transcultural global processes, exposingand rewriting earlier assumptions of nation-centred, imperial grand narratives, and recon-figuring a new field of discourse able to provide tools with which to think about the present.Similarly, O’Brien (2001), somewhat more succinctly, suggests that postcolonialism is afield that grapples with problems of identity and representation in the contemporary era.This second broad framework of postcolonialism privileges hybridity and ambivalence,which, while less sanguine about the prospects of recovery and resistance, still holds resis-tance and redistributive justice to be its overriding ethical and political project (Chowdhry& Nair, 2002; Goldberg & Quayson, 2002; Paolini, Elliott, & Moran, 1999).

Genealogies of postcolonialism like this should not mask its heterogeneous nature as acontroversial and dispersed body of discourses that stretches out across different disciplines,historical periods, cultural activities, and geographical regions (McLeod, 2000). It is an elas-tic category variously used to describe independence following the demise of the colonies,oppositional forms of thinking resistant to hegemonic power, an ethical project seekingredistributive justice, and specific genres of literary activities (Ashcroft, 2001; Goldberg &Quayson, 2002; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Punter, 2000). Its multiple meanings and applica-tions mean that some theorists regard it as a misleading category asserting differences on atheoretical level while reducing them in practice (see for example, Brennan, 1997), at thesame time others view it as a vital form of oppositional thinking and practice. Paolini (1999)for example argues, that not only does postcolonialism redirect our attention to the edge ofthe Western gaze enabling the deconstruction of Occidentalism, it also problematizes thecategories within which much of the discussion on global culture occurs. Thus, it critiquescontemporary global cultural processes unevenly restructuring world relations around therole of the economic-political, the appropriation of the Other, the spread of modernity withits liberal-humanist rhetoric of universalism, the hegemony of some forms of knowledgeand delegitimation of others, and the scope for Third World agency (see also Chowdhry &Nair, 2002; Goldberg & Quayson, 2002; Lopez, 2001; Mayo, Borg, & Dei, 2002).

These forms of postcolonial critique should be important to many domains of knowledge,Quayson (2000) argues, as part of a larger project interested in differential experiences andsocial redress. Since my earlier discussion established that much of the science educa-tion cultural diversity scholarship shares these concerns, it follows that postcolonial theoryshould be indispensable to this scholarship. Postcolonial perspectives can offer scienceeducation theoretical insights to critique the Eurocentricism inherent in stable and unitaryideas of culture, identity, and context still to be found in some of science education’s moretraditional comparative and cross-cultural studies. It can identify the continuing legacy ofscience education’s colonial practices, problematize notions of culture, and pay attention


to knowledge/power in the Foucauldian sense that, while implicated in these studies, arerarely explored at depth. In addition, postcolonial theory can offer science education aframework to critique aspects of contemporaneity that, according to Lemke (2001) andothers (see Carter, 2002; Kyle, 2001), are underacknowledged and undertheorized withinits scholarship. This includes the new forms of imperialism embedded in globalization, aswell as more complex conceptualizations of culture, identity, and difference appropriate tocontemporary transnational global culture. Lemke (2001) fears that science education hasnot looked enough at these sociocultural factors shaping science education, and making it anincreasingly global enterprise. He believes that most science education researchers’ tradi-tional backgrounds in cognitive psychology limits their focus and leaves them ill equippedfor such scholarship. He calls for greater engagement with contemporary social and culturaltheory including, I would add, postcolonial theory, so as the macro sociocultural factorsthat work to produce science education can be better understood and addressed.

Furthermore, postcolonialism can offer unique methodological insights that, while promi-nent elsewhere, have yet to be explored within science education. Postcolonialism’s elasticand loose form allows for an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach, promiscuous even,that Lopez (2001), paraphrasing Foucault, describes as a condition of dispersion, of localkinds of criticisms not reducible to a single position or school of thought yet efficacious intheir interrogation of a range of practices, institutions, and discourses. For Huggan (2001)and Paolini (1999), this gives postcolonialism deconstructive tendencies that enhance itspower as reading practice. Hence, postcolonialism as deconstructive or oppositional readingpractice offers science education a methodology of critique that facilitates more revealing in-terpretations of the differentiated experiences of science education. It draws attention to theunconsciousness in textual practice that, despite author intentions, can articulate meaningsconstituted and disseminated through long-standing and hegemonic practices (Coombes &Brah, 2000). Once such discourses have become sedimented into the cultural unconsciousand have been repeatedly circulated and recited, they are utilized as unproblematized culturalcode available to frame questions of research. Applied to science education, postcolonialtheory can expose unwitting and lingering colonial referents within the cultural codes usedto frame its research, emphasizing the need for vigilance, and recovering critical spaces foroppositional thinking and practice.

The significance of postcolonialism for science education lies then, in its willingness tolook beyond science education’s conventional categories of analyses, and to help revise itsframeworks in the face of overwhelming contemporary change. Consequently, postcolo-nial analyses make room for other previously excluded conceptualizations reminiscent ofBauman’s (2001) coexistent life-forms that jostle and “settle aside each other, clash and mix,crowd together in the same space/time . . . (and are) . . . here to stay” (p. 137). They havethe potential, I believe, to respond to Lemke’s (2001) call to reach out to other socioculturaldiscourses so as science education can advance as a discipline, and to contribute to otherdisciplines in their explorations of contemporaneous life-forms.

DEVELOPING KEY POSTCOLONIAL IDEAS TO (RE)READ SCIENCEEDUCATION TEXTS

It is time now to privilege postcolonialism as oppositional or deconstructive readingpractice and consider some of its key ideas that can be utilized to (re)read selected aspectsof science education scholarship. Despite postcolonialism’s essential heterogeneity, manytheorists have suggested significant clusters of ideas useful for considering the postcolo-nial (see Chowdhry & Nair, 2002; Dimitriades & McCarthy, 2001; Goldberg & Quayson,2002; Paolini, Elliott, & Moran, 1999). These ideas, while differing in scope and emphasis,

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inevitably include the constructs of cultural translation and representation, difference, hy-bridity, localism, boundaries, fragmentation, and pluralism in ways that reshape the cate-gories of culture, identity, and difference. Here I outline the constructs of representation,recuperation, and translation that I will utilize in the next section to analyse Snively andCorsiglia’s (2001) texts.

Representation

Understanding how modes of representation work to create, maintain, and to extend hege-mony is central to postcolonial theorizing. Representation refers to how, from the period ofempire onwards, and with the assistance of early scientific taxonomic discourses, knowl-edge about the Other was produced, and ultimately passed back through Western lenses tothe colonised themselves (Coombes & Brah, 2000). The very constitution of Western sub-jectivity depended upon the reciprocity expressed in identifiable binary opposites such asself/other, western/indigenous native, scientific/non-scientific, culture/nature, logos/spirit,and so on. Binary thinking references all forms against the self, generating alternative ver-sions of sameness, and effectively defining the terms in which the Other is allowed to exist.Contemporary postcolonial analysis drawn from poststructural theory aims to expose anddestabilize binaries as value-laden and based in often-concealed hegemonic assumptionsof the superiority of the first over the second. For those like Goldberg and Quayson (2002)this makes postcolonial criticism a purposeful ethical enterprise. Representation also en-compasses the shift in postcolonial thinking consequent to globalization and transnationaldiaspora, where new mixed and hybrid subjectivities further destabilize binary and boundedcategories of identity and culture.

Understanding representation facilitates reading practices sensitive to binary assumptionslingering within contemporary discourses. For example, Fuller (2000) has completed closereadings of several texts, including Knudtson and Suzuki’s (1992) Wisdom of the Elders, todescribe how colonial referents remain within some current representations of indigenousknowledge despite textual intentions to the contrary. Fuller (2000) argues that the frequentdefining of indigenous knowledge in spatial terms, that is, as an extension of a location oraffiliation with nature rather than in the scientific dimensions of non-Native knowledge, re-iterates and reinforces restricted representations of Natives. Nature and spirituality becomethe tropes around which the differences between Western and indigenous science is firstly,conceptualized and then, represented. Indigenous knowledge is placed on a timeline thatprecedes Western science, reaffirming Western science’s superiority of historical progres-sion so that the Other’s still traditional present is the Western traditional past now lost, andthe Western scientific present will be their future. In this manner, the binary relationshipbetween Western science and indigenous knowledge is continually being (re)establishedand (re)presented. Thus, Fuller (2000) has shown that postcolonial criticism helps to expose(neo)colonial representations that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Recuperation

Concomitant with ideas of representation has been the Fanonian-inspired counterhege-monic project of resistance aimed at recuperating subjugated histories. Coming to knowtheir past has been a critical project of decolonization for many people (see Lopez, 2001;McLeod, 2000; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). For instance, the “hidden transcripts” of folktales,songs, gestures, and cultural stories has been explored alongside the development of a largebody of postcolonial literature, popularly known as “the Empire writes back” (Ashcroft,Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989). These engaged processes seek to rupture hegemonic discourse


as they rewrite/right the position of the subjugated in history. Frequently appropriating thelanguage and textual forms of the oppressor, the Other reclaims their right to develop theirmodes of representation and actively determine their own meanings.

However, as Ashcroft (2001) and Fuller (2000) remind us, one of the most durable as-pects of colonization has been the imposition of binary thinking. Paolini (1999) argues thatrecuperative strategies taking an oppositional stance are tethered to limiting binary viewsof culture and identity. Such strategies search for authentic origins in artefacts, images,and practices cobbled together from precolonial times, and are usually expressed as uni-tary, unique, and available only to those of common ancestry (also Welsch, 1999). Theyconsequently portray static views of culture inwardly cohesive and outwardly delineated,contrasting with the more postmodern conception of fluid hybrid formations inherentlyadaptable and inventive, and always in the making. Hence, the second movement of post-colonial theory rejects recuperation as recovered and imaginary cultural unitariness, infavour of more nuanced understandings of continuous transformation, hybridity, and mixedidentities (Griffiths, 1995).

Translating Difference

The final construct to be considered here is cultural translation. Huggan (2001) describescultural translation tethered to notions of representation and to difference, as the superim-position of the colonizer’s perspective onto the colonized, so that Otherness is translated inways that makes it familiar, comprehensible, and predictable. It is a mechanism of controlthat interpellates and domesticates the culturally different, configuring them as alternativeforms of the sameness that can be appreciated as cultural pluralism only by the dominantgroup in whose cultural forms the difference has been constructed and represented (alsoGoldberg & Quayson, 2002). It hierarchically encodes the superior normative over theinferior other/local/different. Cultural translation is therefore a double move that rendersdifference at once both accessible, but also inferior, to the mainstream (McLeod, 2000).It was the imperative of the imperial mission from the beginning, Huggan (2001) argues,that continues into the neocolonial present where the West translates and speaks for Otherswhile speaking only to itself.

Domesticating difference totally though, would prevent it from acting as a knowledgeand cultural reservoir for the West, available to be mined for new ideas (Huggan, 2001).The recent interest in local and indigenous knowledges thought to contain ecological un-derstandings of natural resource management and biodiversity, and consequently able toalleviate the Western environmental anxieties, can be theorized from within this perspective.The value assigned to the knowledge/culture depends upon its translatability, that is, its re-moval from its original historical and cultural context, and ease of integration into the West.“Authenticity” it seems, means more in relocation. Within this view, difference is under-stood as a dialectical process of familiarization and estrangement that limits the assimilationof differences and maintains boundaries, even as it valorizes the discourses of Othernessand indigeneity. Postcolonial criticism suggests that translations and representations of cul-tural difference mask the real power politics of domination that make Otherness availablefor appropriation. It must be carefully deconstructed for these to be revealed (Huggan,2001).

(RE)READING SNIVELY AND CORSIGLIA’S (2001) TEXTS

These briefly sketched key ideas are now available to (re)read Snively and Corsiglia’s(2001) texts as a form of postcolonial criticism that attempts to extend the discourses and

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methodologies of science education. Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) article “Discoveringindigenous science: implications for science education” was one of three lead articles in thespecial edition of Science Education on multiculturalism and science education. Responseswere sought to these articles from six prominent cultural diversity scholars. Lead authorscould then rejoin, prompting Corsiglia and Snively (2001) to reply with, “Rejoinder: in-fusing indigenous science into Western modern science for a sustainable future.” Punter(2001) argues that there is no particular procedure for postcolonial analysis; rather it is aneclectic mix of amongst other things, historical analysis, discourse analysis, and criticalliterary criticism. Hence, I (re)read Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) texts against the keypostcolonial ideas of representation, recuperation, and translation in the style of literaryanalysis frequently used within postcolonial criticism.

Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) article “Discovering indigenous science: implications forscience education” fits within the second tendency in the cultural diversity literature, Iidentified earlier as science as culturally located, Western and non-Western knowledge. Inessence, Snively and Corsiglia (2001) argue for the broadening of science to include thesignificant contributions of Aboriginal cultures’ traditional ecological knowledge (TEK),in ways that promotes inclusivity, and provides ecological knowledge able to address theenvironmental devastation caused by Western forms of science and development. They de-velop their argument by defining TEK as the “timeless traditional knowledge and wisdom oflong-resident, oral peoples” (p. 8) acquired over thousands of years of direct human contactwith local environments. They emphasize the ecological depth of TEK, its persistence, con-sistency and reliability, its specificity, its holistic view of an interconnected world, and itsmoral and spiritual nature. And they describe its narrative base, where encoded metaphoricstories were often used “to compress and organise important information so that it can bereadily stored and accessed” (p. 23), and “solutions to problems can be carefully preserved,refined and reapplied” (p. 13). They go on to suggest TEK and Western science are compli-mentary and overlapping, and able to offer knowledge and views not available in the othersystem. Consequently, they envisage a cross-cultural approach to science education thatincludes TEK and other indigenous knowledge (IK) alongside Western science to “betterserve the needs of all students, both mainstream and multicultural students, who must solveproblems during times of environmental crisis” (Corsiglia & Snively, 2001, p. 85). SinceWestern science has been implicated in current environmental devastation, implementingthe practices of sustainability from nature-centred knowledges like TEK are crucial, theyargue, to both the developing and developed world. Their five-step process of science cur-riculum development includes Western science and indigenous perspectives of a topic “todevelop scientific thinking and to enable students to examine their own assumptions bydistinguishing between the relative merits of different sciences to understand science con-cepts, and to allow for the existence of alternative perspectives” (Corsiglia & Snively, 2001,p. 85). Both TEK and Western science are important and necessary ways, they suggest, ofknowing the world.

While Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) desire to broaden conceptualizations of science,promote inclusivity, and to achieve ecological sustainability is admirable, a critical post-colonial reading of their texts against the ideas of representation, translation, and recu-peration reveals subtle and lingering colonial referents. Although they acknowledge thelong colonizing history of indigenous peoples by the West, Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001)conceptualizations and representations of TEK and Western science suggest a traditionalunitary view of culture understood as inwardly cohesive and outwardly delineated (Welsch,1999). There is a sense of both systems side by side in the texts that implies the need forborder-crossing strategies. A postcolonial perspective argues that such models perpetuatebinary thinking. Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) repetitive interpellation of TEK and Western


science continually works to keep the cultures apart so their separation seems natural andpreordained rather than the differentiated relations produced and negotiated in complexmaterial and social fields of historical processes (see Fuller, 2000; Huggan, 2001). The dif-ferences between TEK and Western science are rhetorically domesticated and normalized.Further, Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) representations of TEK and Western science con-trast with more contemporary postcolonial theories that replace notions of unitary culturesand interculturality, with more complex ideas of hybridity and transculturalization.

Binary thinking also emerges in the familiar nature referent Snively and Corsiglia (2001)use to represent TEK. They define TEK in spatial terms that Fuller (2000), as we have alreadyseen, regards an extension of a location in nature wholly consistent with restricted colonialrepresentations of Natives. Representing TEK as nature knowledge by repeatedly invokingassociations of long-resident ecological understanding, places it on a timeline that precedesWestern science, making “the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ a matter of timing ratherthan culture” (Fuller, 2000, p. 84). Such descriptions are not only essentializing but forma preconstituted spatialized culture, where the “pregiven other . . . are construed as lockedinto stasis with their environment” (Fuller, 2000, p. 87). Fixed in nature with referenceto Western science on the evolutionary timeline, TEK cannot help but be constructed asWestern science’s binary other and consequently inferior. This is apparent for example,when Snively and Corsiglia (2001) suggest that teachers recognize “indigenous knowledgeor worldview in a way that creates a need to know Western science” (p. 27). While on someoccasions Snively and Corsiglia (2001) suggest the integration of Western scientific methodsinto indigenous technologies in a type of hybrid practice, the spatialized representationspredominate, and ultimately contain and control the terms in which TEK is represented andarticulated.

But perhaps the most telling example of lingering referents in Snively and Corsiglia’s(2001) texts comes the double move of cultural translation. Their desire to promote envi-ronmental sustainability both at the school level and beyond through the inclusion of TEKwithin science, requires them to represent TEK as sufficiently different to Western scientificand ecological knowledge, at the same time as they establish the scientific and ecologicalworth of TEK. This echoes Huggan’s (2001) point noted earlier of Other’s knowledge andcultural traditions acting as a reservoir for the West. Constructing TEK as Other is importantbecause if it “is not timeless, eternal, identified with space rather than time, traditional anduntouched by the corruptions of Western culture” (Fuller, 2000, p. 88), then TEK wouldnot be available to recast the West’s approach to the environment. Hence, Snively andCorsiglia’s (2001) texts need to contradictorily both separate and establish difference at thevery time they argue for Western science and TEK to be reconciled so that TEK’s ecologicaland scientific worth will become known and accepted.

Much of the rhetorical energy of the texts is taken up with these double moves of trans-lation and appropriation. This involves establishing the worth of indigenous knowledge,partly achieved, Fuller (2000) has observed, by linking it to nature. Snively and Corsiglia(2001) prove the ecological credentials of TEK by positioning Aboriginals as “closely tiedto place” (p. 16) with complex skills and a great deal of “exceptionally detailed knowledgeof local plants and animals and their natural history” (p. 16). As such, Aboriginals are anextension of nature, in harmony with it. Yet, most of the examples Snively and Corsiglia(2001) give have been interpreted, translated, and reported via Western researchers (bothscientists and anthropologists), so that “very considerable number of scientists have “de-coded,” transcribed, and interpreted significant quantities of precise indigenous scienceknowledge” (p. 23). Huggan’s (2001) cultural translation as the superimposition of thedominant way of seeing, speaking, and thinking onto the colonized is apparent in TEK con-figured by Western researchers. TEK cannot help but be imbued with Western perspectives,

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becoming accessible, even predictable, to the dominant group in whose cultural forms thedifference is expressed. The degree of value depends on TEK’s translatability, that is, itsremoval from the original historical and cultural context of production and its ease of reloca-tion into the mainstream. If the dominant groups’ requirements are ecological, then sharedperspectives between Western interests and TEK can be projected. Hence, Fuller (2000)argues the “privileging of Native science anchored in the construction of the Native as anatural complement to their environment is thus a compounding of, rather than a resolutionof problematic discourse” (p. 89).

TEK’s scientific worth must also be established within the text alongside its ecologicalmerit. The rhetorical strategies used to develop TEK’s scientific value include citing pastcontributions to Western science, and its usefulness for developing new knowledge. Snivelyand Corsiglia (2001) make several references to the way TEK has helped “medicine, agri-culture, engineering, pharmacology, agronomy, animal husbandry, fish and wildlife man-agement, nautical design” and so on (p. 13), and to its contribution as “highly desired infor-mation” (p. 21) readily available that could otherwise “take years for modern researchersto assemble . . . using conventional means” (p. 20). They advance TEK’s significance incontemporary dietary and medicinal contexts, genetic research, and the development ofdatabases for information on biodiversity. And they note the growing “official” recognitionby “working scientists (who) are increasingly acknowledging TEK” (p. 10) “to solve im-portant biological and ecological problems” (p. 8). They go onto claim further scientificlegitimacy with TEK’s apparent ability to meet some of Western science’s own epistemo-logical tests. “Large numbers of indigenous people observe, interpret, and orally reportnature exhaustively” (p. 23) and “most proponents of indigenous and multicultural sciencewould agree that objects and events occur in consistent patterns” (p. 22). But representingand justifying TEK in terms of its Western scientific usefulness is highly problematic inpostcolonial terms as it exposes the way TEK has been, and still is, assimilated and appropri-ated by Western scientific interests. Moreover, it effectively assigns some universality andgeneralizability to TEK that take it beyond localness. In the text, TEK and Western scienceare presented as natural allies in need of reconciliation so that Aboriginal knowledge canact as a model of the West’s “return” to harmony with the environment.

Snively and Corsiglia (2001) seem to have accomplished Huggan’s (2001) dialecticalprocess of familiarization and estrangement in their texts that limits the assimilation ofdifferences and maintains boundaries, even as they valorize the discourses of Otherness andindigeneity. We see here the paradox of exclusion and inclusion in the need to establishthe scientific and ecological worth of TEK at the same time as discursive practices ofOthering are adopted to keep it separate. For Huggan (2001), this paradox also exemplifiesthe irreconcilable tension within Western epistemology that sees all difference conceivedof as particularist while the particulars of the dominant canon are taken to be universal. Theway Snively and Corsiglia (2001) “distinguish between ‘Western modern science’ whichis the most dominant science in the world and ‘indigenous science’ which interprets howthe world works from a particular cultural perspective” (p. 8), and acknowledge that while“we all participate in indigenous science to a greater or lesser degree, long-resident, oralpeoples may be thought of as specialists in local indigenous science” (p. 11), perpetuates thisthinking. There is no indication that Western science is also an ethnoscience that interpretshow the world works from a particular cultural perspective. This absence limits Snivelyand Corsiglia’s (2001) ability to move beyond the unconscious colonial referents lingeringwithin their texts, despite their call for a new negotiation between Western science and TEK.

Taken together, this discussion of Snively and Corsiglia’s (2001) texts suggest that when(re)read from a postcolonial perspective, different analyses from the ones we thought weknew or would have expected, become enacted (Culler, 1997). This type of (re)reading


does more than merely shore up the sense of textual instability well known since Derrida. Italso exposes us with greater sensitivity to the subtle and supple forms in which continuinghegemony articulates itself, despite overt intentions to the contrary. While Snively andCorsiglia’s (2001) desire to include Aboriginal science has the potential to trouble thecategories of Western science, their scholarship reveals lingering colonist referents thatwork as technologies of containment, paradoxically making power relations invisible andkeeping dominant norms in place. The Other’s knowledge has been effectively translatedinto familiar cultural forms in ways that construct it as possessing knowable characteristicsable to be apprehended and controlled. These processes of Othering work to domesticate andsubsume, while simultaneously separating and regulating the boundaries, thus preservingthe integrity and authority of Western science. Hence, postcolonial theory suggests thatSnively and Corsiglia’s (2001) call for the inclusion of Aboriginal science in school curriculaunwittingly risks an empty form of pluralism reminiscent of Dimitriades and McCarthy’s(2001) critiques of normative approaches to multicultural education discourses that actuallyreasserts Western cultural control more than acknowledging the Other.

It is worth noting that of the six respondents to Snively and Corsiglia (2001) and theother lead articles in the special Science Education edition on multiculturalism and scienceeducation, Elizabeth McKinley was the only one able to frame a response in postcolonialterms. McKinley (2001) identifies some of the same issues of representation and superficialconstructions of difference considered here, albeit in her short space, necessarily in lessdepth. She argues that the type of cultural brokering implicit in Snively and Corsiglia’s(2001) texts is not only inadequate, but it masks the colonial thinking still abroad in suchscholarship. I would place McKinley’s (2001) response largely within the first postcolonialframework of resistance and difference discussed earlier (see Paolini, Elliott, & Moran,1999). It did not have the space to delve into the more complicated, postmodern articulationsof cultural difference and heterogeneity aligned with the second framework of hybridityand transculturation. Nonetheless, along with my also too brief discussion here, McKinley’s(2001) response indicates there is great scope for further analyses of the science educationresearch literature using key ideas from contemporary postcolonial theorizing.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL DIVERSITYIN SCIENCE EDUCATION

I return now to my earlier discussion of the increasing science education scholarship oncultural diversity in order to add some perspectives from postcolonial theory. I suggestedthat the literature displayed a number of related and interpenetrative tendencies that seemto draw together around two main positions: one focussed on the identities/subjectivities ofthose learning science, that is, the culturally and linguistically diverse students themselves,and the second, on considerations of science as culturally located, Western and non-Westernknowledge.

A postcolonial perspective within the first tendency, would argue that the continual rep-resentation of Western science as a discrete and unitary knowledge system engages inbinary thinking that constructs culturally diverse students as Other, such that interculturalexchanges like border crossing become indispensable. It emphasizes the learners need toshift, making diversity, at best problematic, at worst pathologized. Border crossing strate-gies are highly problematic in postcolonial criticism because they legitimate the constructsof borders and boundaries. Boundaries are seen as deeply implicated in Western thinking, assigns of modernity attempting to resolve contradictions as they regularize, categorize, sur-vey, and police in the manner that has dominated Western discourse (Ashcroft, 2001). Theirproduction was essential to the Western colonial project of cultural translation, signalling the

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European, and separating out the colonial. Postcolonialism has revealed epistemological,ideological, political, physical, and even biological boundaries, to be profoundly ambiva-lent constructs as they are momentary locations in transition beyond which one attemptsto move, and are simultaneously in-between sites that meet at different places (Ashcroft,2001; Lopez, 2001; Mignolo, 2000). In postcolonial theory, borders become nonborders,“in-between” spaces variously described as liminal, interstitial, or hybrid, that have thepower to deconstruct Western epistemic forms and exclusionary systems of meaning, mak-ing way for other possibilities. The recognition of the historical and social contingencyof boundaries, and of the limits imposed Western epistemology, has been critical to thecondition of postcoloniality, and Nederveen Pieterse (2001) argues, a profound moment ofintellectual realization in Western reflexivity.

Within this thinking, border crossing strategies aimed at learners are judged to be limitedconceptualizations that reinforce binary conceptualizations, and do little, McKinley (2001)argues, to help teachers shift their perceptions of Others, or acknowledge their difficulties.Moreover, there have been few attempts to explore the in-between, that is, difference andidentity as fluid, plural, situated, provisional, and hybrid consequent to the newly trans-forming global processes and intensified diaspora. Transculturalization has meant that stu-dents can simultaneously occupy several identity-inducing categories, complicating ways inwhich much science education research is conceptualized. Indeed, Lemke (2001) suggeststhat analysis in one type of identity category (for example, gender versus ethnicity or classetc) is all too common in science education research reflecting deep-seated ethnocentricand outmoded assumptions on the part of many researchers.

A postcolonial critique of the second tendency on multicultural science identifies a num-ber of difficulties, despite the apparent invitation to openness and inclusivity. For example,Aikman (1997) suggests that the term “multicultural” imply relations of equality and identityacceptance whereas “dicultural” and “bicultural” means subordinate hierarchies or asym-metrical relationships between cultures. That some science education scholarship clearlyemploys the former while frequently meaning the latter, is seen in Ortiz de Montellano’s(2001) and Brown-Acquaye’s (2001) privileging of Western science for Third World de-velopment, while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of indigenous sciences.We see the same double moves of inclusion and exclusion identified earlier by Huggan(2001). The inclusion of Other’s science has the potential to trouble the categories of West-ern science, but the processes of cultural representation and translation ensure Westernscience remains authoritative in most settings. These processes simultaneously work toseparate, domesticate, and subsume, regulating the boundaries and preserving the integrityof Western science and science education. Hence, the inclusion of the Other’s science inschool curricula risks an empty form of pluralism implicated, according to Dimitriades andMcCarthy (2001), in restorationist agendas to reassert Western cultural control. It is naı̈veto see these cultural pluralist approaches to diversity as anything other than pedagogicalmoments that are “managed” or “simply technical” McKinley (2001, p. 74) argues, as theydo not substantially challenge relations between dominant and subordinate groups markedby histories of oppression.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS POSTCOLONIAL SCIENCE EDUCATION

Perhaps Jessica Benjamin’s (1996) observations that, even if one adopts an oppositionalstance, the prior body of thought shapes one’s starting point and holds on to the coordinatessuch that rejecting the postulates doesn’t seem to be enough, is apt for viewing the scienceeducation scholarship on cultural diversity. The emphasis on culturally diverse students,multicultural science, border crossing strategies, and teachers as effective cultural brokers


that abounds within this literature is, in the end, not so surprising, as they are more man-ageable options than tackling the difficult work of decolonizing education interested indisrupting hegemony. Such tasks are only just beginning to be thought about, as they areprofoundly challenging in this rapidly reconfiguring and uncertain world. Postcolonialism’ssignificance lies in its promise of contributing to such an enterprise. Postcolonial analysesexpose the unconscious referents sedimented into the pluralist, multicultural, and inclu-sive discourses and practices deployed to address the eruption of difference with whichall education, including science education, is faced. (Re)reading Snively and Corsiglia’s(2001) texts has shown that multicultural approaches to education, despite intentions to thecontrary, can act as technologies of containment, used to “discipline” and manage the ten-sions and contradictions of difference consequent to the changing practical and conceptuallandscape. Close attention must be paid in science education and elsewhere, to help preventthe recitation, circulation, and perpetuation of these subjugating discourses.

As most of this work is still to be done, it is only possible here to muse about what anapproach to cultural diversity within science education drawn from postcolonial theorizingmight include. Such an approach would acknowledge the increasing awareness of shared his-torical processes, cultural reciprocity, and the diasporic tendencies of the globalizing worldaround more complex and multiple conceptualizations of Western science and indigenousculture. It would argue cultural production to be as much caught up with the injustices ofcontemporaneity, and the future, as it is with the past, recognising the development of indi-geneity influenced by the spread of modernity. Expressed within a framework of hybridityand ambivalence, it would construct more complex conceptualizations of cultural differenceas hybridized and fluid, always in the making, and recast culturally diverse students’ ho-mogenized identities into multiple, mobile, and provisional constructions, more accuratelyattune to conditions of living and learning under the indeterminacy of the transformingglobal world. Further, a postcolonial interpretation would reveal Western and non-Westernborders to be profoundly ambivalent constructs. As momentary locations and simultane-ously complex articulations of past and present, inclusion and exclusion, difference andsimilarity, the conventional thinking embedded in border crossings would be disturbed.Work would proceed that would be sensitive to empty forms of cultural pluralism that un-intentionally reasserts the hegemony of Western cultural control. But most challenging ofall would be attempts to renegotiate and replace borders as epistemological limits criticalto 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 inquiryin science education (in terms of new discourses and methodologies) must be addressedso that science education can engage in dialogues about key issues that are practically andintellectually urgent, and that will advance it as a discipline.

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