Science and the “Good Citizen”: Community Based Scientific Literacy

Science literacy, often defined as competency in school-like science activities, is frequently touted as a key to good citizenship. Based on a two-year ethnographic effort regarding science in the community, we suggest that science as taught in schools has no determinate relation to the activity of good citizenship. Rather, when considering the contribution of scientific activity to the greater good, the analysis must consider the entire situation. Science must be seen as forming a unique hybrid practice, mixed in with other mediating practices, which together constitute what can be called “scientifically literate good citizenship.” This case study, an analysis of an open-house event organized by a grass-roots environmentalist group, presents some examples of activities that embed science in “good citizenship.” We provide an analysis of some of the factors involved in this hybrid science. Through a series of vignettes, we focus on the activists’ use of landscape and spatial arrangements, the importance of multiple representations of the same entity (e.g., a local creek), the relational aspect of knowing and becoming part of a community, and discursive formations that insert scientific into moral discourse. Our analysis raises questions about learning, citizenship, and the complex and mediated relations between community, citizenship, politics, and science as played out on a local scale.