Scientific Discourse in the Academy: A Case Study of an American Indian Undergraduate

摘要

This case study explores how an American Indian woman experienced sci-entific discourse and the issues of language, power, and authority that occurred while shewas an undergraduate student at a university in the southwestern United States. This ethno-graphic research, using a phenomenological perspective, describes her experiences as shesearched for the discursive resources she required to cross-cultural borders between her tra-ditional worldview and Eurocentric science. Data from interviews, participant observation,and artifacts offer a narrative of how she became aware of the "game rules" of scientific dis-course. The findings are expressed in terms of a cartographic metaphor where the student'sworld became less of a list of categories and more of a map outlining where she ventured andthe ways in which she oriented herself to scientific language. To facilitate the border cross-ing and reduce the obstacles that some students experience in crossing between worldviews,educators can look at cross-cultural perspectives and explore with students how languagefosters or hinders their progress. This research suggests that we allow room in our peda-gogy for students to learn the rules of using scientific language, make explicit the culturalnorms associated with this practice, thereby promoting a "metaknowledge" of how scientificdiscourse functions in the academy.