Deakin Centre for Education and Change

This paper arises from my curiosity about the educational implications of the ways in which our increasing familiarity with virtual terrains may be changing our understandings of ourselves as embodied, located and positioned in relation to those territories, boundaries and borders that we assume to be other than (or more than) virtual. Our apprehension of a virtual geography often seems to me to be more ambiguous and liminal than Wark’s assertion suggests. For example, John Barlow’s aphorism that ‘cyberspace is where you are when you’re talking on the telephone’ (quoted in Rucker et al 1993: 78) implies that our subjectivities can be dislocated or relocated at will, but the extent to which we understand ourselves (at any particular time) to be inhabiting imaginary and/or virtual and/or ‘real’ spaces may be barely perceptible, at the thresholds of our sensory awareness.

When I first proposed this paper, I intended to explore some of the implications for literacy research that might arise from new conceptions of spatial location and of the liminality of our perceptions of space(s). For example, given that technologies such as mobile phones and the internet now provide many people (especially young people) with ready access to a complex global cyberspace, how should we think about the cybernetic equivalents of physical geographic literacies? How do we learn to ‘map’ cyberspace and its features and to develop the skills of ‘navigating’ in it? How do we learn the political geographies of cyberspace—maps of how power over information is distributed—and reach understandings of how the geographies of cyberspace and the ‘real’ world are interrelated and inform one another?

These questions still interest me. However, shortly after submitting the abstract for this paper, my attention was diverted by a more pressing need to consider how different genres of texts, including digital texts, might be mobilised in the development of scientific literacies. This tangential train of thought was stimulated by the serendipitous juxtaposition of two sequences of events.

First, during the second week of May 1999, Catherine Beavis (Deakin University) and I commenced a pilot study of the uses of computer games in English classrooms. At one of the schools, children in year 8 were appraising games such as ‘Prince of Persia’ in the context of reading Ursula Le Guin’s (1968) fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea. As I observed (and listened to) these children, and read the texts (print and electronic) they produced in response to the games and the novel, I was struck not only by the ease and fluidity with which they read, manipulated and transformed the available visual and verbal semiotic resources, but also by their active manipulation of each text’s diverse generic codes and conventions in ways that enabled them to read and construct stories in different and/or multiple narrative genres. For example, ‘Prince of Persia’, like many computer games, can be read and performed as both a heroic adventure and as an exploration of a labyrinthine space. These storylines are tightly coupled in ‘Prince of Persia’, because the opportunities to open and explore new screens and spaces depend on the Prince advancing his quest, but other games (such as ‘Blade Runner’) offer players more variation in their narrative choices. Students also posted electronic reviews of their games, many of which were composed as collages of images, excerpts from instructions and descriptions, and their own appraisals. I read some of these as purposeful bricolage and others as haphazard pastiche but, again, I was struck by the confidence with which they juxtaposed disparate styles and modes of representation.

While I could appreciate that many of the students we observed in the pilot schools were performing the ‘new literacies’ associated with computer-based technologies, a second sequence of events foregrounded, for me, their functionality in areas of learning beyond English. These events began on 13 May 1999 with the news (reported on the front page of many newspapers) that the Australian Museum possessed a preserved Tasmanian tiger pup. The news was accompanied by speculation (much of it apparently orchestrated by the Australian Museum’s management) that the tiger’s genetic material might be able to be cloned so that the species could be rescued from extinction. As this happened to be a time when many of our preservice teacher education students were on practicum placements, I sought as much anecdotal evidence as possible from them concerning the ways in which this issue was (or was not) being taken up in schools. There were very few sightings of the extinct marsupial in VCE Biology classes, although one teacher was reported as conscientiously clipping the news items for reference later in the year when students would be ‘doing genetics’. None of the teachers of Science in years 7-10 with whom our students had contact showed any interest in this news. When prompted, several teachers commented that it was ‘not relevant’ to the topics they were teaching or planning to teach at that time. A more disturbing response, from a teacher who also happens to a current member of the Executive of the Science Teachers Association of Victoria, was to the effect that he would ‘never base a science lesson on a news item’ because such reports were ‘usually too unreliable’. A number of primary teachers responded to their students’ expressed interest in the possibility of cloning a Tasmanian tiger by encouraging class discussions and debates around some of the practical and ethical issues involved. Without exception, these teachers also encouraged students who wanted more information to ‘look up the Australian Museum’s website’. Searching the internet and reading the hypertexts it contains is another popular activity among young people that can be understood as developing ‘new literacies’ but the textual genres that tend to be accessed by students, at least in relation to science topics, are more formulaic (e.g. encyclopedic) and less encouraging of the kind of active textwork that computer games and simulations invite.

I now want to push my reading of the implications of juxtaposing these two sequences of events a little further by imagining what might happen if science teachers and their students were disposed to graft some of the structural and functional attributes of digital literacies onto their conceptions of scientific literacies. I suggest that a useful way of thinking about what this might entail is to imagine teaching science in the world represented by a children’s television series, The Crash Zone.

I work from a position that privileges the mode of storytelling sometimes known as ‘science fiction’ (see Gough 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1998b). As Donna Haraway (1989: 5) explains, the term ‘science fiction’ has in recent years been displaced by a more embracing (and more ambiguous) term, ‘SF’:

I also work from a position that takes the generativity of metaphor for granted. Metaphors matter, and they matter in the literal sense that they have material effects. As Norman Fairclough (1992: 195) writes, ‘when we signify things through one metaphor rather than another, we are constructing our reality one way rather than another. Metaphors structure the way we think and the way we act, and our systems of knowledge and belief, in a pervasive and fundamental way’. In this paper, The Crash Zone represents a generative metaphor that structures some of the ways I think and act as a science educator.

If I followed Michel Foucault (1970 [1966]: xviii) I might speak of ‘teaching in heterotopia’, because I imagine teaching science in an ‘impossible’ discursive space characterised by ‘the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately… without law or geometry’. But I prefer to represent this space in terms of the ‘zone’ that Brian McHale (1992: 250-1), Scott Bukatman (1993: 163-82), and a number of other literary scholars identify as a pervasive trope in postmodernist fiction, a site in which multiple worlds are projected and ontological shifts are enabled by fragmenting, reassembling, and/or imploding familiar spaces. Readers of my generation will recall the portentous words that opened each episode of a well-known 1960s television series:

There are many other examples. In the space age mythology of William Burroughs’s (1964, 1966 [1961], 1967 [1962]) apocalyptic Nova trilogy, the ‘Interzone’ is the region in which anything is permitted and everything coexists. The reconfigured Germany of Thomas Pynchon’s (1973) novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is called ‘the Zone,’ as is a part of Canada mysteriously transformed by alien visitation in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s (1978) Roadside Picnic (filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker in 1979). ‘Zones’ are also the names that Doris Lessing (1980) gives to the parallel dimensions of the cosmos she creates in her ‘Canopus in Argus: Archives’ series, explicitly introduced in the second novel of the sequence, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five.

While the name may be absent, spaces which serve similar functions to these zones often appear in postmodernist fiction. These include the burgeoning evocations of cyberspace, such as the virtual ‘Metaverse’ of Neal Stephenson’s (1992) Snow Crash and the near-future megalopolises in which the technologies of human-machine interfaces are domesticated, such as the gigantic urban ‘Sprawl’ of ‘BAMA… the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis’ in William Gibson’s (1984: 57) Neuromancer, and the similarly immense but even more densely inhabited ‘Glop’ of Marge Piercy’s (1992) Body of Glass. The imaginary town that provides the title of Le Guin’s (1996: 103) short story, ‘Ether, OR,’ serves as an ontologically ambiguous zone in which the ordinary is almost imperceptibly fused with the fabulous, as its middle-American inhabitants adapt to its shifting configurations and relocations (‘People come through here say how can you stand living in a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time, but have they been to Los Angeles? It’s anywhere you want to say it is’. McHale (1987: 45-6) notes that authors typically fashion such zones by ‘introducing an alien space within a familiar space, or between two adjacent areas of space where no such "between" exists’ (author’s emphasis), and that even if the zone contains allusions to historical terrestrial spaces (Canada, occupied Germany, Oregon), it ‘in fact is located nowhere but it the written text itself’. The ‘reality’ of the zone, as J.G. Ballard (1984 [1964]: 106) writes of Burroughs’s novels, ‘is not some pallid reflection of a hypothetical external scene, its details and local color stitched into the narrative…, but the self-created verbal reality of the next sentence and paragraph, like a track-laying train free to move about in all directions on a single set of rails’.

Thus, ‘teaching in the zone’ signifies that teaching, for me, is a textual practice shared with the many SF writers who, in Samuel Delany’s (1988: 31) words, ‘posit a normal world—a recognisable future—and then an alternate space, sometimes largely mental, but always materially manifested, that sits beside the real world.… conflicts that begin in ordinary space are resolved in this linguistically intensified paraspace’. My use of The Crash Zone also gestures towards Ballard’s (1985 [1973]) novel, Crash, which I admire as one of the most intensely realised examples of the rhetorical heightening that can be achieved through such paraspatial textual strategies. Jean Baudrillard (1991: 319) describes Crash as the ‘first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on’, and advances his own theorising as a similarly evocative exercise:

Baudrillard practices what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (1991) calls ‘the science fiction of theory’ by inviting us to assume that ‘the system that surrounds us’ is (has ‘real affinity with’) a paraspatial zone. In this respect he implicitly accepts Ballard’s (1985 [1974]: 8) hypothesis that ‘we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind’ and, therefore, that ‘the most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction.… We live inside an enormous novel’.

As I have argued at length elsewhere (Gough 1998b), I am convinced that we can initiate and sustain worthwhile inquiries in education by taking Ballard’s proposition seriously. By this I do not necessarily mean that Ballard’s assertion is an hypothesis to be tested ‘scientifically’. Rather, I am suggesting that in practicing curriculum inquiry as a narrative art, I have sufficient reason to believe that Ballard’s formulation refers to ‘real’ conditions, with particular reference to the conditions under which I might need to judge my own and others’ actions to be ‘prudent and effective’ (or not). Rather than struggling with academic distinctions between stories of imagination and ‘reality,’ I choose to situate myself in the world-as-fiction as a ‘researcher-narrator’ whose subjectivity is author of (that is, authorises) his methodology.

Thus, in this paper, I will elaborate and argue a case for adapting Ballard’s and Baudrillard’s assertions to science education. I will argue that the most prudent and effective method for teaching and learning science is to assume that the world in which science education is performed and represented is a fiction—a paraspatial, heterotopian zone; we should imagine that we are teaching and learning inside an enormous SF novel (or movie, or computer game, or…), that we are taking science curriculum into a hyperspace of simulation—metaphorically, into a zone in which we can push propositions and suppositions beyond their limits.

The Crash Zone is a 13-episode television series produced by The Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF) in 1999. The series follows the adventures of five young people with a shared enthusiasm for computers, gaming, and the internet who are hired by a small, struggling software company to test its computer games after school—‘The Crash Zone’ is their name for the space in which they work (they spray paint the initials ‘CZ’ on the door). I not only enjoyed viewing The Crash Zone with my then 10-year-old son, but also the ACTF invited me to write teaching activities for upper primary and lower secondary students to accompany the series. While the teaching activities I prepared (see, for example, Gough 1999a, 1999b) were targeted to learning areas other than science education, writing them provided me with an opportunity to enact some of the orientations to curriculum work that I privilege here. One of these orientations, which I was pleased to see exemplified by The Crash Zone series itself, is expressed succinctly by Donna Haraway’s (1991: 149) assertion that ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’. The Crash Zone is in the genre of socially-realist comedy-drama and its only ‘science fictional’ element is the inclusion of ‘Virgil,’ a virtual persona (an artificial intelligence program), as a character with whom the young people interact (a little like a Mario Brother that talks back incessantly). But Virgil is not depicted in a way that ‘objectively’ separates him from the social reality of The Crash Zone—he is neither deus ex machina nor an object of X-Files-like investigation. Rather, he is seen as one among several actors—or as Bruno Latour (1988, 1993) might say, ‘actants’—in a specific socio-technological assemblage.

‘A manifesto for cyborgs,’ in which Haraway’s (1985) formulation of the illusory boundaries between SF and social reality first appeared, has been described as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘iconoclastic’ (see, for example, Csicsery-Ronay 1991: 393) because it presented and performed a new language for a socially democratic, materialist, and feminist politics. But Haraway’s implicit pedagogical strategy is also continuous with, and complementary to, the call Marshall McLuhan (1960: 2-3) issued some 25 years previously for ‘a basic strategy of culture for the classroom’ in which ‘mass media’ and ‘mass entertainment’ are ‘carefully set beside other kinds of art and narrative’:

Similarly, ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ do not exist in separate domains but are culturally connected. This is not simply a matter of science and literature finding common meeting places in SF and other forms of popular media. Nor is it just a matter of scientific theories being translated into literary themes, a practice which long preceded the emergence of science fiction as a distinctive literary mode (for example, Copernican cosmology permeates the poetry of John Donne and concepts of disease formation are a distinctive feature of Emile Zola’s novels). As Katherine Hayles (1984: 10) demonstrates, ‘literature is as much an influence on scientific models as the models are on literature’, insofar as there is a two-way traffic in metaphors, analogies and images between them.

I have described elsewhere (Gough 1991) some of the pleasures of learning with SF. My account is autobiographical and focuses on a small number of specific stories—by Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin—that have significantly influenced my work in curriculum studies and teacher education. It was not written as an argument for using SF but, rather, as an example of its generative potential that might whet readers’ appetites and motivate them to undertake their own inquiries. Nor is my account intended to demonstrate the ‘relevance’ of SF to the subject matters and methods of conventional school science education. Like Nunan and Homer (1981: 317), I do not advocate studying SF for the ‘textbook science’ it may illustrate: ‘To do so would amount to little more than presenting the school-science orthodoxy in a slightly unorthodox way’. Rather, I believe that SF is a storytelling practice that science educators should welcome into the conceptual territory of science education with the deliberate intention that it should trouble the conventions and categories assumed by standard textbooks and ritual classroom activities.

The insights that can emerge from deliberately blurring distinctions between science and literature, and ‘fact’ and fiction, are convincingly demonstrated in Primate Visions, Haraway’s critical history of the development and cultural effects of primatology. The introduction to Primate Visions is subtitled ‘the persistence of vision’, and it is no coincidence that this is also the title of a story by John Varley (1978). Haraway (1989: 384) writes:

Haraway exposes the ‘violence’ that arises from the relationship between our vision—what, how, why, who, when and where we choose to see—and those others (human, animal) who are the subjects and objects of (and who are subjected to and objectified by) our vision. In primatology, as in other disciplines, this violence is both literal and symbolic. As Haraway (1989: 1) notes, ‘the commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives’. Some of these meanings bear ‘the terrible marks of gender and race’ because primatology has been a particularly important legitimating discipline for patriarchal, Eurocentric and anthropocentric mythologies. Haraway (1989: 4-5) is thus concerned to elucidate the ways in which the story-telling practices of science, as exemplified by primatology, ‘structure scientific vision’ and, in turn, construct myths of gender, race and nature in our culture:

Many of the ‘narratives about origins, natures, and possibilities’ to which Haraway refers are sustained by popular media, such as the numerous film and video documentaries about Jane Goodall’s work and various versions of the life and death of Dian Fossey (as in the movie, Gorillas in the Mist). Other recent examples include novels such as William Boyd’s (1991) Brazzaville Beach and Peter Høeg’s (1996) The Woman and the Ape. SF has also produced many primate stories. For example, the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s (1895) The Time Machine are described as an ‘ape-like’ evolutionary ‘degeneration’ of humans and were inspired, in part, by a picture of a gorilla in an illustrated book of natural history which Wells read when he was seven (see Geduld 1987: 2). Wells (1934: ix) himself describes The Time Machine as ‘a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time [the late Victorian era] that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind [sic]’. In similar ways, monkeys and apes have inspired numerous images of human fears—including fears of what humans might become—in SF stories and movies such as the Planet of the Apes series.

The inspiration of Varley’s SF story explicitly foreshadows one of the ways in which Haraway (1989: 5) ‘reads’ primatology, that is, ‘as science fiction, where possible worlds are constantly reinvented in the contest for very real, present worlds’:

I would describe the ‘transformed field’ produced by ‘placing the narratives of scientific fact within the heterogeneous space of SF’ as a heterotopian zone and, in later publications, Haraway (1994, 1997) coined the term ‘diffractions’ as an optical metaphor for the ‘resonances’ that may be set up within this textual space. Haraway (1997: 16) writes:

By diffracting the primatology story through SF (and vice versa), Haraway also demonstrates the effectiveness of a McLuhanesque learning strategy: ‘Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967: 10).

The results of adopting such a strategy are particularly apparent in the final chapter of Primate Visions which alternates between ‘reading primatology as science fiction’ and ‘reading science fiction as primatology.’ Haraway begins this chapter by using Isaac Asimov’s (1964 [1952]) The Second Foundation to recapitulate the themes of Primate Visions. She then reviews the work of several women SF writers in the light of her reconstructed narratives of primatology. Haraway (1989: 370) reasons that:

Primate Visions testifies to the potential effectiveness of SF in deconstructing, demystifying, and diffracting contemporary orthodoxies—in this case, the social, textual and material history of primatology. Clearly, SF has mediated Haraway’s own learning in important ways. The type of learning that Haraway models in Primate Visions is as applicable to school science education as it is to research in the history and philosophy of primatology. In my experience, school students require little encouragement to mix and juxtapose the narratives of ‘scientific fact’ with the narratives of SF. Indeed, they may be more willing than their teachers to mix and juxtapose these ‘seemingly disparate elements’ in critical and creative ways. The difficulty for science teachers is that many seem to have cast themselves in roles as ‘defenders of the faith’—defenders of the privileged status of science and technology—rather than ‘understanders’ of the myths, narratives and rituals which constitute science as a social and cultural practice in the contemporary world.

In pedagogical terms, Haraway is modelling a strategy for good teaching that Garth Boomer (1982: 119-20) calls ‘connecting’:

In Laboratories in Fiction: Science Education and Popular Media (Gough 1993b), I argued that it might be preferable for much of the routine work of science education (including much laboratory work) to be replaced by such ‘connecting’ activities that would involve deconstructive readings of the cultural texts of scientific production, including primary sources (such as scientific reports), historical accounts of scientific work, the biographies and autobiographies of scientists, scientific journalism in print and electronic media, and images of science in the fine arts and popular media. In regard to the latter, I emphasised the significance of SF in its many and various forms as a ‘laboratory of ideas’ in which meanings are subjected to experimentation. More recently, I have offered another alternative that arises from rereading school laboratory work as a theater of material representations (Gough 1998a). My purpose here is to demonstrate some ways of deconstructing and diffracting stories of science in their everyday manifestations. In the following section, I rehearse a reading of a recent news story that, following Haraway’s example, deliberately mixes and juxtaposes the ‘reading conventions’ of science and SF in such a way that neither is ‘reduced’ to the other. My pedagogical strategy is to work to sustain a textual space in which diffractions of the narratives of science are enabled, that is, to deliberately position these stories in a heterotopian ‘zone’.

As Tyrone Slothrop wanders through the segmented Germany of Pynchon’s (1973: 353) Gravity’s Rainbow, he observes: ‘here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly’. In a similar vein, I find it easy to think of teaching science in a zone in which the boundaries between science, SF and social reality are illusory because I see that these categories have been blurred (though I would prefer to say goodly rather than ‘badly’) within the discourses of our everyday social experience.

For example, as noted above, ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ was headline news on the front page of Melbourne’s daily broadsheet, The Age, on 13 May 1999. Under this headline, and dominating the upper center section of the page, a large (16 x 27 cm) color photograph shows a tall cylindrical preserving jar holding a young specimen of what is identified as the now-extinct Tasmanian tiger. Behind the upper portion of the jar, an unidentified woman looks down at the slumped corpse, her face partly obscured and distorted by the curved glass. The photograph’s caption states: ‘Back to the future: A perfectly preserved baby Tasmanian tiger offers the amazing prospect that the unique species could be rescued from beyond extinction.’

The accompanying story, by reporter James Woodford (1999: 1), includes the following passages:

There are no boundaries between science, SF and social reality in this article. Both the journalist and the scientists deploy explicit and implicit references to well-known science fictions for their respective purposes. Not surprisingly, the journalist’s appropriations—such as his references to the popular movies Back to the Future and Jurassic Park—are more obvious, but the scientists (assuming they have been quoted or paraphrased with reasonable accuracy) are complicit in authenticating the article’s most persuasive message: that if scientists could possess an extinct organism’s complete and perfectly preserved genome, its entire DNA code, then bringing a thylacine (or a dinosaur) back to life is merely a technical problem. Archer seems to suggest that if ‘there’s a way to get the DNA out,’ if the ‘time capsule’ can be opened, then the problem is almost solved, since the preserved cells are ‘just waiting to pop back into life.’ Both the journalist and the scientists reinforce the popular fiction that represents DNA as a list of instructions, analogous to a recipe in cookery or a computer program.

I doubt if either Archer or Westerman would defend this interpretation if pressed, since they are very unlikely to be ignorant of the flaws in the assumptions and reasoning they support with such enthusiasm here. Indeed, my 10-year-old son refuted their reasoning with very little prompting, since he had read (of his own choosing) Rob DeSalle and David Lindley’s (1997) book, The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World or, How to Build a Dinosaur (the title of this book is a little misleading, because it actually is a rather smug litany of the science that is absent from Stephen Spielberg’s movies and of how dinosaurs cannot be built Jurassic Park-style). My son thought that it might be possible to get the DNA out of the preserved thylacine, but he wondered where they would get the mother thylacine to put it in. As Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (1994: 288, 290, 307) point out, the belief that fossil DNA could be used to reconstruct a dinosaur (or, in this case, that embalmed DNA could be used to reconstruct a thylacine), is predicated on the view of DNA as ‘a genetic message transmitted from parent to offspring, a list of instructions like a glorified knitting pattern’. However, ‘the DNA message is not transmitted, but copied—subject to the complications of sexual reproduction—and the process whereby DNA code is turned into offspring also involves a parent’. Thus, dinosaur DNA ‘prescribes a dinosaur, within the context of another dinosaur’. If the meaning of DNA is, like any other message, dependent on context, then hopes for ‘unleashing the thylacine’ must presently be regarded as extremely slim.

I must emphasise here that I have no interest in arguing that Archer and Westerman are ‘wrong’ in any sense of the word, but I believe that as a science educator I should be able to deconstruct (that is, lay bare their construction of) the Jurassic Park-style spin they put on finding the preserved thylacine, and that I should be able to facilitate learners’ capacities to do likewise. Elucidating a less partial and less simplistic understanding of what scientists currently claim to ‘know’ about the functions and effects of DNA in reproductive and developmental biology is only one aspect of such a deconstructive analysis. I am ambivalent about using books like DeSalle & Lindley’s (1997) as a resource for such a purpose, especially with children, because I do not want to undermine any child’s belief in the possibility of restoring thylacines and dinosaurs to the world. In any case, I deplore the approach to using movies like Jurassic Park exemplified by Dubeck, Moshier and Boss (1988: x) in Science in Cinema: Teaching Science Fact through Science Fiction, a book that is devoted to exposing scientific ‘misconceptions’ and ‘pseudoscience’ in more than thirty science fiction movies. Their approach devalues the educative potential of SF by suggesting that it is deficient unless it illustrates the ‘one true story’ of modern science ‘correctly,’ and also occludes the possibility of reading the films as critical and creative probes of issues in science, technology and society that their makers and consumers consider to be problematic.

‘Unleashing the thylacine’ is the type of topical news story that students might reasonably be expected to use in both developing and demonstrating their ‘scientific literacy’. For example, Australia’s national curriculum profile for Science includes a number of outcome statements at all levels of schooling that are concerned with evaluating the findings of scientific investigations, using science, and acting responsibly (see Australian Education Council (AEC) 1994). Table 1 displays a selection of these outcomes, together with examples of relevant issues that I suggest could be raised by the article.

I constructed Table 1 principally to demonstrate that the prospect of cloning the Australian Museum’s thylacine pup could function as both a plausible and defensible focus for teaching and learning activities in school science education at several year levels. However, I chose ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ as a focus for this paper because it is a ready-made interface with an imaginative ‘zone’ that cannot be reduced to the terms in which curriculum statements and conventional school science textbooks are framed. Although I am wary of essentialising or caricaturing my colleagues, I know that many science educators are likely to be tempted to categorise, and draw boundaries between, the ‘scientific’, ‘science fictional’ and ‘socially realist’ elements of this story—I found myself doing precisely that on first reading—but I will argue here that we should reject this ‘optical illusion’ and deliberately cultivate the pleasures of their coexistence, including the diffractions produced by their juxtapositions.

Put crudely, the temptation for many science teachers is to encourage learners to ‘mine’ articles like ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ for their ‘science fact’ content—to proceed in the direction suggested by the title of Dubeck et al’s. (1988) book, cited above, of ‘teaching science fact through science fiction’ and leave the zone of blurred boundaries behind them. As with the primary school teachers I referred to earlier, when I brainstormed ideas for classroom activities that might be used to follow up this news story with my first year teacher education students, one of their most common suggestions was to ‘check out the Australian Museum’s website’ (some saw this as an activity for students, whereas others saw it as an aspect of teacher preparation). The Australian Museum’s thylacine web pages are indeed a very useful resource for pursuing the types of outcomes and activities listed in Table 1, but they are very explicitly located in the unambiguous space of encyclopedic ‘science fact’ and cautious speculation. There are no references to Jurassic Park, no references to people owning Tasmanian tigers as pets within 50 years, and no open invitations to other biotechnology researchers to help themselves to the Museum’s thylacine DNA.

One part of the site provides a brief natural history of the thylacine, its recent extinction, and its interrelationships with Tasmania’s indigenous peoples. Another set of pages deals with fossil evidence of the thylacine and reports and rumours of recent sightings. A third series of pages presents ‘The cloning debate’. The first of these pages, ‘Could the thylacine be cloned?’, provides information about ‘three things that could be done in the foreseeable future with the thylacine genetic material’ in much less optimistic terms than the Museum director’s speculations. One of these options involves extracting the DNA in short pieces and putting it into bacteria to ‘make a genetic library’. The DNA sequence ‘could be determined by techniques in current use’, but ‘it would be very difficult to put the various pieces in the correct order’. This is the only one of the three options that ‘can be done now’, but this ‘is most unlikely ever to lead to anything remotely resembling a thylacine except in conjunction with the other approaches’. The other two approaches ‘cannot be done yet’ and ‘to be possible would require a lot more knowledge… and an investment in research into other species that would cost a great deal of money’. In contrast to the director’s generosity, this page asserts that should these new approaches be developed, they should ‘be proven on non-valuable specimens before using the Australian Museum pup’. Rather than any researcher being ‘told instantly’ to ‘help yourself’, the page that deals with the question, ‘Should the thylacine be cloned?’ asserts that ‘thylacine specimens are so valuable that work should not be commenced without extensive consultation with both internal and external scientists and collection managers’ and, further, suggests that ‘it could be argued… that the Museum’s pup is so valuable as an object that it should not be damaged even to revive a species’. The last page of the Museum’s thylacine site invites visitors to cast their vote on the issue of whether or not the thylacine should be cloned.

It is all too easy for teachers and students to restrict their examination of the plausibility and defensibility of cloning the thylacine to the types of ‘factual’ information that can be obtained via the Australian Museum’s website. But to do so also makes it far too easy to ignore many of the social implications of current trends in biotechnology that the ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ article invites us to consider. To analyse ‘the interactions between scientific developments and the beliefs and values of society’ (see Table 1) demands that we also examine what Hayles (1990: xi) calls ‘the assumptions that guide the constitution of knowledge in a given episteme’. The juxtaposition of science, SF, and social reality that turns the prospect of resurrecting thylacines from extinction into front page news is ‘culturally conditioned, partaking of and rooted in assumptions that can be found at multiple sites throughout the culture’ (Hayles 1990: xi). For example, Hayles (1990: xi) demonstrates that ‘different disciplines, sufficiently distant from one another so that direct influence seems unlikely,… nevertheless focus on similar kinds of problems [at] about the same time and base their formulations on isomorphic assumptions’. The operation of such isomorphic assumptions is implicit in Cohen & Stewart’s (1994: 290) assertion that ‘our current obsession with information technology and messages as bit strings has led us to focus almost exclusively on DNA as software and to ignore the contextual hardware in which it produces actions’. However, evidence for the existence of a cultural isomorphism between information understood as bits and bytes and DNA understood as software is not obvious when issues such as cloning a thylacine are presented in the careful languages of textbook science and the Australian Museum’s website. But that evidence is clearly signposted in stories such as ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ where the extravagant claims of a media-savvy scientist pursuing his enlightened self-interests are juxtaposed with Jurassic Park. Neither Archer nor the journalist need to justify or explain the connection between extinct thylacine DNA and having a Tasmanian tiger ‘pop back into life’ because, like the majority of the newspaper’s readers, they tacitly acknowledge the cultural currency of Jurassic Park’s central fiction. Mention dinosaurs and DNA in the same breath and many of us will mentally replay the scene where the cartoon-animated ‘Mr DNA’ explains: ‘a DNA strand, like me, is the blueprint for building a living thing, and sometimes animals that went extinct millions of years ago, like dinosaurs, left their blueprints behind for us to find. We just had to know where to look!’

I would not want students simply to compare Archer’s exaggerations with the more restrained approach taken on the Museum’s website and dismiss them as scientifically naïve or opportunistic attention-seeking. Archer’s eminently quotable media bites are part of a smart sales pitch, exploiting the potential ‘domestication’ of the research he promotes (‘people could own Tasmanian tigers as pets within 50 years’), and invoking a ‘moral imperative’ (‘For Australians to turn their backs on this opportunity would be "immoral"’) with evangelical zeal (‘It’s not God’s will that the thylacine went extinct’). Inviting students to consider the relationship between public interest and financial support for scientific research is an important aspect of analysing ‘the interactions between scientific developments and the beliefs and values of society,’ but these are rarely dealt with in the idealised (and frequently heroic) accounts of scientific achievement recounted in textbooks.

I would also invite students to consider the wider ramifications of the biological determinism that is projected by the contiguity of Archer’s assertions and the Jurassic Park-style message of DNA as the blueprint for life. I am reasonably confident that Archer would, if asked, explicitly reject an absolute genetic determinism—just like the scientists who speak and write about the Human Genome Project (which is mentioned as a significant resource in connection with one of the ‘things that can be done’ with thylacine DNA on the Australian Museum’s website). But, as R.C. Lewontin (1994: 110) concludes, these scientists ‘seem to be writing more to acknowledge theoretical possibilities than they are writing out of conviction’. While mapping the human genome seems likely to be very useful in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses with a unitary genetic cause, such as Huntington’s chorea and cystic fibrosis, many scientists seem to expect much more of the project. For example, the molecular biologist Christopher Wills (1991: 2) writes that ‘the outstanding problems in human biology… will all be illuminated’ (my emphasis) by the Human Genome Project. Similarly, Cohen & Stewart (1994: 463) quote from the program of the British Institute of Biology’s 1993 symposium on Recent Advances in Human Genetics the assertion that mapping the human genome will provide ‘the prime reference material for all biological and medical science’ (emphasis in source). Cohen & Stewart (1994: 463) comment: ‘Biologists will tell you that they don’t say such naive things. They do’.

However, I suspect that such exaggerations are more a matter of cultural conditioning than individual naïvety. Lewontin (1994: 120) summarises some of the conditions under which the Human Genome Project promotes a deterministic ideology:

Evelyn Fox Keller (1992: 290) traces the circulation of this consciousness through the social milieux of the state, the universities, biotechnology corporations, and the media, producing an unquestioned consensus that ‘the model of cystic fibrosis is a model of the world’. In a disturbing example of how a medical model that begins with a genetic explanation for cystic fibrosis is transformed into an explanation of all social and individual variation, Keller (1992: 282) quotes Daniel Koshland, then editor of Science, who was asked why the Human Genome Project funds should not be given instead to the homeless; he replied: ‘What these people don’t realize is that the homeless are impaired… Indeed, no group will benefit more from the application of human genetics’.

The parallel point I want to make here is that analysing ‘the interactions between scientific developments and the beliefs and values of society’ in the context of ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ would entail encouraging students to consider how the allure of a Jurassic Park-style resurrection of the thylacine becomes not only irresistible to geneticists but also becomes part of a more general social consciousness. This means keeping students’ attention focused on the cultural traces of such a consciousness and the diffractions that their juxtapositions with ‘scientific developments’ produce. For example, on the day following the publication of ‘Unleashing the thylacine,’ a cartoon by Michael Leunig on the editorial page of The Age (14 May 1999) whimsically alluded to other cultural images of the thylacine, such as their use in labelling and marketing a well-known brand of Tasmanian beer.

More significantly, one week later, a very prominently located, half-page feature article by Martin Flanagan (1999b: 13), again in The Age, captured some of the social history of the thylacine since the European settlement of Tasmania. Titled ‘Tiger! Tiger! burning bright’ the article begins: ‘Officially, the only Tasmanian tigers in existence are those in photographs. But…the animal lives on, burning into the collective consciousness a sense of irrecoverable loss, dread of an alien past and now, fantastically, hope of a comeback’. Flanagan notes that in addition to names such as tiger, hyena, dingo, native wolf, marsupial wolf, zebra wolf and zebra opossum, in one location ‘the females of the species were called sluts’ (at a time when ‘Aboriginal people were called crows’). He quotes a newspaper report from early this century that depicts the tiger as ‘Too Stupid to Tame’, and the circumstances that led to a bounty being placed on the thylacine’s head in 1888 which resulted in it being hunted to extinction. Flanagan’s story concludes:

When this article is juxtaposed with ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ we see another set of cultural imperatives being brought into play. Archer claims that ‘It’s not God’s will that the thylacine went extinc’ and Flanagan brings on some literary heavyweights—William Blake and Samuel Coleridge—in solemn support. If, as Jonathon Porritt (1991) asserts, between 50 and 100 species of plants and animals become extinct each day, we might well ask what the thylacine did to get God, Blake and Coleridge on its side? I am reminded of a Monty Python parody of a well-known hymn that (from memory) began as follows:

Would similar media attention have been given to the Australian Museum finding some perfectly preserved spores of the fabled Melanoswartus glabrocapitus if it was assumed to have been extinct for more than 60 years? If ‘Unleashing the blackhead fungus’ seems unlikely to be frontpage news, we might well ask what this means for analysing ‘the interactions between scientific developments and the beliefs and values of society’.

From where I stand, some of the most vivid diffractions of the thylacine story in the ‘zone’ of blurred boundaries are enabled by Julia Leigh’s (1999) novel, The Hunter, which at the time of writing had just been shortlisted for a major Australian literary award. In Leigh’s story, a man known only as M is hired by a biotechnology company to find and kill what may be the last thylacine and to retrieve its genetic material for the company’s exclusive use. After several weeks alone in the Tasmanian wilderness, M wonders about the company’s insistence on his mission being a one-man job when two might have been more efficient, and considers the possibility that he is being set-up for failure. M’s thoughts, as Leigh (1999: 50) imagines them, capture the motives behind the company’s ruthlessness:

Passages like this are powerful reminders that any analysis of ‘the interactions between scientific developments and the beliefs and values of society’ falls short if it rests with sociological abstractions and generalisations. Science and society are connected through embodied knowledges and expressed in stories that capture the particularities of existence, including fairy tales, computer games that borrow plots and tropes from fantasy and SF, and TV series like The X-Files and The Crash Zone.

As a science educator, the questions that ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ raise for me do not really concern the plausibility or probability of the kind of genetic engineering imagined in Jurassic Park or the sinister operations of biotechnology corporations dramatised in The Hunter. Rather, the questions I would prefer to explore with learners are concerned with identifying the present circumstances and conditions—including any theoretic and technical knowledges that may be relevant and available—that make the events portrayed in these stories even thinkable. Who presently has power over and control of these circumstances, conditions, knowledges and technologies? How is this power exercised? What safeguards exist against irresponsible uses of this power? What does it mean to be ‘responsible’ or ‘irresponsible’ in the circumstances and conditions made possible by these new knowledges and technologies?

Teaching science in ‘the zone’ means enacting a pedagogy in which the truth claims of scientists are constantly rubbed up against the fictions that embody the relations of these claims with other cultural narratives that enrich and/or trouble their meanings. Relevant fictions are often suggested by science journalists, as in the suggestion that cloning a thylacine involves a Jurassic Park-style resurrection, but we should also be alert to other possibilities. With younger children, as the above quote from The Hunter suggests, we could equally well diffract ‘Unleashing the thylacine’ with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I would also like to see the Australian Museum’s ‘Could the thylacine be cloned?’ webpages replaced, or at least supplemented, by digital texts that were constructed more like computer games than pages from an encyclopedia. Imagine SimThylacine, or ‘Save the Tiger’, a platform game in which your task is to stop the biotech corporation’s hunter before he kills the last thylacine, or …