Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

– Jessamyn West

‘Nature’ as a nonhuman domain, distinct from our social world, is seen as an objective reality by most people. For much of the twentieth century scientists also thought along these same lines. That changed, however, in the final decades of the last century as scientists increasingly began to understand ‘Nature’ as a primarily social construction. That is, the New Ecology Paradigm that now dominates ecology and environmental sciences research, does away with the notion of ‘Nature’ as a distinct entity and dissolves the nature-social dualism. It instead posits our planet as an intrinsically socioecological world in which humans and the non-human biophysical world mutually influence and constitute each other.

Yet based on the Cartesian–Newtonian mechanistic Scientific Discourse and the environmental discourses of Ecological Modernization and Green Governmentality, school science continues to portray a human exceptionalism based view of our world that partitions it into two distinct social and natural domains. The social dominates over the nature which is commodified, consumed and managed for the benefit of the humans. Unfortunately, this view is not only dated, but also, extremely dangerous for the future of human and nonhuman life on Earth. In fact, I am increasingly of the view that the dominance of this perspective is a big contributory factor to the ongoing commodification of all forms of life on earth and the ensuing ecological peril that has engulfed this planet.

So, what can be done? Of course, not all world problems can be solved through school-based solutions. Yet at least in terms of shaping our perceptions, perspectives and understanding of life on earth, I find that schools in general and science education in particular indeed play a big role. If we just talk about science education as the first priority, then we should be able to update school science with the current scientific knowledge about our socioecological world. But that in and of itself may not be enough. What is also needed are creative ways that will help children reimagine our relationship with the world. It is here that stories can play an important role. As the Jessamyn West’s quote at the beginning of this foreword indicates, stories have unique and powerful ways of conveying critically important perspectives and truths about our world that can scarcely be matched by scientific facts and conceptually oriented school science curricula. This book is a case in point. It beautifully showcases how stories can discursively produce a reimagined world that does away with the nature-social dualism while also positioning us in a coequal and ethical relationship with the rest of the living world. As children slip into this re-imagined socioecological imaginary while reading or listening to such stories, we can easily imagine how they can begin to have a different and much needed appreciation of our place in and relationship with the world.

But that’s not all. Stories centred on our relationship with the world can enable students to see how they can live on this planet differently in ways that are more hope inspiring for our future. They also have the unique ability to take them back in time so that they can get acquainted with and establish a living relationship with the traditional cultural wisdom and knowledge gleaned from their own societies as well as different parts of the world. This is because for much of human history, stories were used as the primary medium for creating and preserving our knowledge, ideas and perspectives about the world. To get acquainted with a society’s folklore is to know how people in that society saw themselves in relation with rest of the world since time antiquity.

For instance, India like all ancient cultures has a long tradition of passing on cultural ecological knowledge to the younger generation through folktales. Compilations of ancient Indian stories for children such as the Panchtantra, Hitopadesa and Jataka tales readily come to my mind. Like most children in India, I grew up reading these tales and came to acquire, without any explicit instruction, important foundational environmental knowledge about South Asian continent, such as key environmental phenomena, seasons, local flora, and fauna. More importantly, through these stories children in India since antiquity have also seen how the world can look like when perceived in terms of a socioecological relational ontology where humans and non-humans co-exist as equal and mutually dependent entities in networks of nature-culture collectives. It is critically important for the future of life on Earth that children continue to be exposed to such perspectives. Traditional school science cannot offer such perspectives. Indigenous knowledge traditions from all over the world can do this job. But, unfortunately, they get delegitimized by the school science discourse in the school and technological, instrumental discourses outside the school boundaries. Therefore, it stands to reason that science teachers should give due legitimacy to indigenous knowledge traditions in their teaching practices. They should indeed make it possible for their students to access this precious font of ecological knowledge and perspectives through traditional stories and folktales. Further we, who work in solidarity with science teachers, should make it easier for science teachers to include traditional stories as critical curricular resources in their teaching plans.

I am much pleased to see that this book will be immensely valuable in this regard. Rouhollah has done an excellent job at persuading scholars and teachers from different parts of the world to share beautifully delineated portraits of traditional story telling in science classrooms. Here we see a brief but perceptive glimpse of the enormous wealth of indigenous knowledge that is housed in stories from different parts of the world and how this knowledge can be made available to the students. Further, given the fact that many of these stories and the chapters in this book come from parts that were till recently colonized by the West, we can also value this book as a worthy and rare example in science education world in which “the Empire writes back.” That is, in this book we see postcolonial subjects writing back to their erstwhile colonial masters to challenge the traditional scientific discourse that has long been complicit in the colonization of the indigenous people all over the world. As I moved from one chapter to the next, I could hear the different voices from far corners of the earth telling the children and their teachers in the West how we can see reimagine the world in ways that can engender more hope for our collective future. Hearing this mellifluous polyphony rekindled hope in me. I hope this beautiful book does the same for you.