The Deakin University Social Studies of Science course was established as an interdisciplinary major in the School of Humanities in the mid-1970s. From the beginning, it sought to present to students ideas and approaches for exploring different knowledge systems and interrogating the social and cultural dimensions of science and technology. Emphasised within the subjects was the role of indigenous knowledges. Describing their approach to developing course materials and teaching methods, David Wade Chambers wrote:
The arts and the sciences and indigenous modes of knowing were to be compared directly in relation to their ways of seeing and understanding nature. The idea was not to seek final resolutions, or to prove one way of knowing better than another, but to explore the cogencies and contributions of each along with the problems and limitations of each (Chambers 1999, p. 634)
Seeking to experiment with traditional pedagogic structures, Chambers and his team (which included David Turnbull, Helen Watson Verran, Max Charlesworth, and more) created materials that would intentionally draw on alternative educational strategies. The textbooks they created were presented as ‘virtual museum exhibits.’
They entirely eschew the didactic or authoritative tone and make little reference to philosophical or cultural theory; instead they incorporate techniques designed to stimulate visual thinking and intellectual problem solving. This is accomplished in a series of interactive exercises based on paintings, drawings, photographs, film and audio clips, scientific diagrams and charts, dances and chants, landscapes and maps, animal and plant depictions, optical illusions, textual descriptions, and the numerical delineation of nature (Chambers 1999, p. 635)
A feature within these exhibits were a series of bark paintings created by Yolngu artist Djamika Munungurr.
The paintings and their interpretations were produced through conversations between Helen Watson Verran and the artist Djamika Munungurr and his wife Gulumbu Yunupinu and daughters Nalawurr Munungurr and Wuyuw Munungurr in April 1988. The discussions were held with the specific intention of generating information for the Deakin Social Studies of Science course publications.
This paper was published by David Wade Chambers and describes a comparison between two STS curricula: the Imagining Nature Project at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria and the Native Eyes Project at the Institute of American Indian Art at Sante Fe, New Mexico.Read more
This publication is a review of published textbooks created by the Deakin Social Studies of Science course team. It was published in 1983 and written by George Bindon. Read more
From ‘Maps are Territories’:
This dhulaŋ [design] portrays the episode in which a Dhuwaplace, Balana, was created and named by the Ancestors, the two Djan'kawu sisters. In this place, a green eat grove, the two sisters, the water goannas, made the water holes with their walking sticks. The name of the water holes is Mirrana. The sisters both enter and re-emerge from the ground here, shown by the fact that the holes are at both ends of the animals. The background patterning, the miṯtji, represents the ‘water dreaming', which is a metaphor for the way knowledge continues in its structure unchanged – it continually bubbles up in the same place. The pattern carries the idea that, while for each generation knowledge is revealed anew, the structure of the knowledge is always there, continually bubbling up.
From ‘Maps are Territories’:
The bark shown [is] a large-scale portion of [Crocodile and sacred fire dreaming]: it is one side of the river. The name of the place represented here is Badaymirriwuy. If you stand at the mouth of the river facing the land, it is on the left-hand side. Beside this sandy stretch of river bank are the crocodiles' water holes. The name of that place is Buykala.
The central white area is the sand bank Ṉayawaŋu. It stretches out at the mouth of the river, the area of the crocodile's tail. The dugong (two Ancestral Beings) feed on the sea grass on the edge of the sand bar Gamata. In doing so they leave the holes depicted around the white area.
Like all knowledge practices, this unique and innovative approach to teaching was shaped by its social and cultural contexts. David Wade Chambers describes the diverse cohort of students who attended the courses:
From its establishment in 1977, Deakin University’s student body was culturally diverse, reflecting Australia’s high post-war immigration policies. It also included a contingent of Aboriginal Australians from the university’s Koori teacher education program. Furthermore, more than half of the Arts students were ‘off-campus’ and ‘mature-age’, generating special teaching imperatives. Both this heterogeneity and the particular requirements of the interdisciplinary curriculum were to prove important in how we structured the teaching program (Chambers 1999, p. 634)
Over the 1970s to 1990s, the Deakin Social Studies of Science course team developed dozens of textbooks, many of which are still held in the Deakin archives. These books received wide acclaim and in 1979 and 1984 were presented with the National Book Awards by the Australian Books Publishers Association.
Deakin University in Geelong, a satellite industrial town outside Melbourne, is on the periphery of the periphery. But in the development of teaching materials in the science, technology, and society field, it must be viewed as the center. (Bindon 1983, p. 548)
While written in 1983, the sentiment expressed in the above quote still resonates today. Indeed, the materials continue to be a valuable (if under-utilised) resource for methods, designs and approaches for teaching STS.
From ‘Maps are Territories’:
The dhulaŋ [design] represents a specific place where the crocodile (an Ancestral Being) lives, and the graphic elements are organised on spatial principles: that is, they are intended to correspond to elements of the landscape. Hence it is a map. However, it is obviously a highly unconventional map. In order to able to read it, you have to know something of the stories, songs and dances of the creation of this landscape by this Ancestral Being and his kin.
The background pattern, or mittji, is 'the fire dreaming', a design owned specifically by the Gumatj. The irregularities of the 'diamond design' indicate flickering flames going in all directions.
From ‘Singing the Land, Signing the Land’:
Yolngu people see a powerful metaphor in the meeting and mixing of two streams which flow-one from the land, the other from the sea-into a mangrove lagoon on Caledon Bay in NE Arnhemland. The theory of this confluence, called gaṉma, holds (in part) that the forces of the streams combine and lead to deeper understanding and truth. It is an ancient metaphor, one which has served Yolngu people well in the past. In recent discussions among the Yolngu and those non-Aboriginal Australians they have chosen to work with them, gaṉma theory has been applied to the meeting of two cultures–Aboriginal and Western....This bark is a Wangurri text that represents some aspects of the Ganma metaphor among other things
The barks themselves are still being used as a part of Deakin’s curriculum. James Lynch, curator of Arts Collections and Galleries at Deakin University, describes the continued significance of the paintings for teaching and learning:
The barks by Djamika Mununggurr and Thelma Mununggurr gifted by the Yolngu people from Yirrkala to Deakin University in the early 1980s and the fourth bark by artist Munandjiwui Munyarryan purchased by Deakin 1986 were used last year (2017) as part of the Australian Studies unit Indigenous Australians in 20 - 21 Century. As part of a larger discussion around the political and cultural revival of First Nations peoples, the barks were a starting point for a conversation around land rights, the Yirrkala church panels and the bark petitions of 1963. Second year students looked at the works in the flesh and myself as curator of the Collection led an informal conversation around the acquisition of the works, their provenance, attribution and meaning, as well as the various research and discoveries that have been made around them. The discussion lead to thoughts around fishing and water rights and bigger questions of mapping, inhabiting and understanding Country.
These barks are just one example of the many efforts by the Deakin Social Studies of science unit to put into practice a pedagogic sensibility that gave equal valence to different knowledge systems.
This paper describes the content, approach and rationale of the courses in social studies of science taught at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria from the 1980s-1990s.Read more