The Royal Science of STEM

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

Abstract

Like the GERM (global education reform movement) contagion that it is, STEM officially (and finally) reached the shores of Australia when in 2012 our Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb began a series of utterances that purposefully included this acronym. It was a long time coming given the term seems to have been coined in 2001 by Judith Ramaley a then director at the US National Science Foundation (Mohr-Schroeder, Cavalcanti & Blyman, 2015.) This is not to say that that Australia lacked science and science education policy and processes prior to 2012, but recently the Chief Scientist’s Office has delivered position papers, reports, policy proposals, and media promoting STEM as vital for Australia’s competitive future. In this paper, I interrogate the ideologies and assumptions in several of the Chief Scientist’s utterance including the 2014 position paper Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: Australia's Future, and a May 2015 panel discussion at a public policy think tank, the Grattan Institute, where experts argued the importance of STEM skills. I utilise Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rich concept of nomadology or nomadism, as one from their ‘toolbox,’ which names ‘royal science’ as a state science that is official, proceeds from universals, and is heavily codified in terms of its processes, practices and concepts. I argue that the STEM in the Chief’s Scientist’s utterances is a royal science whose “legislative and constituent …. primacy is taken for granted” (p. 367) and has at its disposal “a metric power that can define a conceptual apparatus or an autonomy of science” (p. 374). By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) nomadic science describes nomadic groups as those whose organisation is not imposed from above, is not rule bound or compliant, is not determined in advance and resists reproduction. As such, nomadism refers to distributive networks of individuals and organizations like some science educators/ion, who are involved in a shared political struggle, as they produce and improvise from the work itself (Holland, 2005). This paper asks then, about the generative possibilities in nomadic science education practice as deviations in the plane of royal STEM. I describe experiences from one school initiative that promoted ‘STEM’ careers using non-white, non-western female activist scientists like Vandana Shiva as an instance of ‘nomadic science education’

Author

• Lyn Catherine Carter, Australian Catholic University