Toward Eco-Justice Through STEM Education Dispositifs

• In Event: The Emerging Politics of STEM Education: Policy, Discourse, and Governance

Abstract

It recently has become de rigueur to promote integration of and/or interrelationships among fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) (Rennie, Venville & Wallace, 2012). A major emphasis in this regard is to encourage students to enter STEM education programs and careers and, eventually, to contribute to jurisdictions’ economic prosperity that would feature individuals’ enjoyment of commodities — such as electronics, automobiles and medical technologies. A key emphasis linked to such prosperity appears to be individual entrepreneurship; continuous competitive personal adaptations linked to for-profit innovation (Means, 2013). Nevertheless, promotion of such for-profit STEM education is highly collectivist — engaging a wide range of actants, including certain governments, transnational corporations, educators, think tanks, business administrators, engineers, financiers, transnational trade organizations, banks, computer systems, transnational trade agreements, universities, etc. (Ball, 2012; Hardt & Negri, 2009). This kind of aggregate of actants, perhaps comparable to Foucault’s (2008) concept of dispositif (apparatus performing a particular purpose), appears to be extremely powerful, orchestrating numerous living, non-living and symbolic entities in ways conducive to profit-maximization for relatively few members of societies. For authors like Pierce (2013), it is apparent that far fewer STEM jobs will be needed than claimed and, moreover, many of those created will be much more precarious — temporary, unpredictable and, often, without sufficient labor benefits. Meanwhile, many STEM products and services appear linked — particularly through associations with capitalist dispositifs — to a range of personal, social and environmental harms, including human health problems linked to household products (Leonard, 2010); pesticides (Hileman, 1998); tobacco (Barnes, Hammond & Glantz, 2006); and, pharmaceuticals (Angell, 2004). Many people also expect a range of serious harms associated with dramatic increases in average global temperatures often linked to excessive fossil fuel uses (Klein, 2014).

Despite concerns like those above, STEM education programmes seem to de-emphasize them — prioritizing, instead, selection and training of relatively few highly-skilled STEM workers and large masses of faithful laborers and consumers (Blades et al. 2014; Gough, in press; Means, 2013; Zeidler, in press). There seem to be needs, therefore, for STEM education approaches that help enlighten students about problematic relationships among STEM fields and powerful societal entities and, linked to those, possible harms to individuals, societies and environments; and, moreover, expertise, confidence and self-motivation to take informed actions to address harms they perceive (Author1 & Collaborator1, 2014; Hodson, 2011; Levinson, 2010). In this article, we describe a case (using qualitative and quantitative data from various actants) involving citizen actions to address perceived health and environmental threats linked to metallic dust from an urban port that processes nickel ore (Author2, in development) — a case that should provide youth with a ‘real-world’ example of an activist dispositif, a range of actants aligned to challenge power structures with a view towards rectifying a number of ecojustice concerns, such as: commodification, individualism, and progress (Lowenstein, 2010). This case seems congruent with pedagogical approaches described by us providing students/citizens with expertise, confidence and self-motivation for research-informed and negotiated actions to address socio-scientific problems (Author1 & Collaborator1, 2014).

Authors

• John Lawrence Bencze, OISE/University of Toronto

• Chantal Pouliot, Université Laval