Spaces of Transformation: Connections to Inform and Transform Students and Society With Social Justice

• In Event: 46.024 - Creating Spaces to Transform Social Justice Dissertation Research Into Teaching Practice

Abstract

Relationships between students and teachers, students and the curriculum, and teacher and the curriculum will “flourish through the joined efforts of individuals who invent spaces for creating values for all so that all humans might live more robustly, develop capacities more fully, and become humane and educated in an increasingly diversified, complicated, and contested cosmos” (He, 2013, p. 63). The standards posted on the concrete block wall in my classroom fail to produce “an increasingly diversified, complicated, and contested cosmos” (He, 2013, p. 63). Instead, they are characterized as a “linear sequential, easily quantifiable ordering system”, combined with expectations of “clear beginnings and definite endings”, a neat and tidy package for teaching complete with guidelines for delivery (Doll, 1993, p. 3). The predetermined standards lack dimension, as well as meaning for teachers and students. As students and educators, we can realize the potential of finding a “complex, pluralistic, unpredictable system or network” upon which to build a foundation for educational experiences for students and teachers alike (Doll, 1993, p. 3). Nothing about curriculum is “neat and tidy”; curriculum includes “interrelations between students, teachers, and texts” (Morris, 2001, pp. 95-96). Curriculum is a collection of noise in the classroom; not physical noise such as 32 students talking at once or potential disruptions over the classroom intercom but the “process where we feed off one another, we interrupt taken-for-granted knowing’s, we generate new orders out of disorders” (Morris, 2001, p. 103).
In order for “noise” to be made, one must introduce something situated between two loci disturbing each opposing end (Serres, 1982, 2007, p. 14). This third place is a “space of transformation” (Serres, 1982, 2007, p. 73). It is in the learning that all things become new. It will be in this place that we can understand how the history, culture, philosophy of science, science education, and social justice intersect. Transformation cannot take place without venturing outside boundaries and crossing predetermined borders. A scientific system inside the black box, left for only scientists must be opened and made available to the world. The world can gain understanding and social justice by constructing connections to the contents in “spaces of transformation” (Serres, 1982, 2007, p. 73).

Author

• Dana Compton McCullough, Georgia Southern University