Educating for relational curiosity and care in place-base science education: A pilot study

Abstract

This design-based research pilot study explores how place-based learning can support and restore reciprocal, caring relations with the natural world through fostering relational habits of mind as people walk through the world together.This paper necessarily challenges the perception of the sciences as being value neutral, acultural endeavors that explore a shared world. It does this through an interactional analysis of the subjective interpretive steps of learners who have been influenced by Western axiological, ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political commitments. Drawing from Indigenous scholarship and the philosophy of science, I investigate emplaced sensemaking of a triad of graduate students showing how diverse ontologies of land inform the knowledge-making processes and the subsequent futures those knowledges make possible or foreclose. The paper ends with reflections of the possibilities of how design-based research can help promote relational ways of knowing and being in the world by developing supportive pedagogies of walking