Module 2: Science! What is it good for?

Explain:  Science:  What is it good for?
Science, the word, as well as the discipline brings up a series of images to my mind.  Men in white lab coats briskly walking through a sterile looking laboratory; beakers and test tubes filled with colored liquids, slowly bubbling through tubes to other beakers and test tubes; machines whirring, computer monitors beeping, data sheets spewing from printers...  I'm sure most people get a similar vision in their head when they think about science as well.  Now, doing a similar exercise when I think of traditional native knowledge I get a completely different set of images - nets for blackfish, women crouched over collecting salmon berries, strips of salmon hung to dry...

  

balakov/flikr

Fish camp

These images are so different, so unbelievably at odds with each other that it's no surprise to hear statements like the the one made by a Toksook Bay high school student quoted in Ann Fienup-Riordan's book Yuungnaqpiallerput.  The young man, Jeffery Curtis, is speaking publicly about how he is happy to be given the opportunity to study science and to learn what the white people could teach at the University of Alaska because his ancestors had no science.  If I were to take a guess at when this statement was made I would say maybe 1940.  I'd be wrong - by sixty-three years.  The actual date - 2003.  Fienup-Riordan goes on to make this example more painful - the boy's  own family was full of individuals brimming with knowledge of the world around them and his grandfather was a master kayak builder.  This student has failed to recognize that what his ancestors have been doing, for thousands of years, is no different from what the white science professors he is longing to learn from have been doing for thousands of years - systematically solving problems around them.  Just without the white lab coats.  That's what it's good for.  That's its purpose - to solve problems in a systematic way.  And it's hard to believe that any culture still alive has made it this far without science.

Extend:  Where are these ideas originating from?
I wonder where thoughts like these come from.  It bothers me that I hold thoughts like these in my head.  I take a certain amount of consolation in the fact that when I actually think about my preconceptions that I recognize the fallacies, but it's still not ideal.  And it's potentially damaging to ones image of themselves and their culture if they don't recognize the fallacies.  I think of that student in Toksook Bay.  This hits close to home - literally.  Toksook it a mere seven miles from me.  It's just around the bay.  And if students there can think this, my students in Tununak can think this.  So where are these thoughts coming from?

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this topic right now, but the question reminded me of a conversation I was engaged in during a different class on US history.  We had read a book by Colin Calloway called New Worlds For All.  The following quote stuck out: "Columbus changed forever the history of the planet.  But he did so by connecting two worlds of equal maturity, not by "discovering" a new one.  Convinced that Europe was synonymous with civilization, colonizing Europeans failed to see anything of value in Indian civilizations" (Page 10).  Can it be that this is the legacy of the earliest Europeans to visit rural Alaska?  That these visitors failed to see the full picture - that they failed to see any value at all? 

I have begun an ongoing conversation with my students about how perspective allows someone to see something (or not see something) that another cannot (or can) see.  I think this conversation is an important one to have.  Failure to see something of another culture can make one seem naive, ignorant, or insensitive.  What happens when one fails to see something in their own culture?


Evaluate:  How important is science
I worry about a world without science.  I get some funny looks from my friends sometimes when I express this fear, but I truly am afraid.  Science has been around since the birth of humanity.  It has been present in every culture since then.  What we need to understand is that science may not look the same everywhere, it may not sound the same everywhere, but it does do the same thing everywhere - it solves problems.  If we fail to see science in cultures that look different than our own, we risk losing the contributions to science from that culture.  With the number of problems threatening humanity today, it would be a tragic end if we failed to see a solution because we didn't recognize or respect the source.  


Three classmates' blogs
In my exploration of classmates' blogs I stumbled across a few to comment on.

My first stop was Dave Sather's.  Dave shared an interesting story of a conversation that he had with a student about the upcoming winter, and it reminded my of a similar conversation I had this fall with a student of my own regarding the upcoming winter.  Long story short - it's going to be a snowy one.

My second stop was to AliciaWeaver's blog.  Alicia discussed the power of learning in a teacher's life to help connect with his or her students.  I have similar sentiments and spent most of last year figuring that out.  Okay, I am still figuring that out.

My final stop was Martha Gould-Lehe's blog.  It was interesting to read a blog from the perspective of someone who is an Alaska Native.  I surprise myself how stuck I get looking at the world from my own glasses (new young teaching white guy from the lower-48) and it's good to read things from another perspective.