Other Worlds Are Possible: Marking and Challenging the STEM Project

• In Event: 56.073 - Slowing Down the STEM Train: Questions, Critiques, and Reflections About the STEM Education Movement

Abstract

This paper uses discourse analysis to analyze STEM in government policy and educational practice. I demonstrate how STEM intentionally erases humanistic and democratic-egalitarian framings of the sciences. STEM, in this analysis, is not merely an amalgam of static fields but an active project articulating (Hall, 1986) particular social fields and political powers. These articulations are the other side of Thomas’s Gieryn’s (1999) theory of boundary work. The questions of what is now connected to what (science to engineering) as well as of how science is cleved from other discourses (ethics, sociology,, etc.) are both important. I analyze these boundaries/articulations within the Next Generation Science Standards and its Framework (NRC, 2011) as well as in federal policy in education, esp. those operating under the slogan of “Educating to Innovate” (White House, ND). In the first case we see the insinuation of engineering into every science, so that biology morphs into bioengineering, etc.; a curricular sequence that mostly precludes the lived experiences of students; and a technocratic separation of science from ethics, sociology, etc., which would locate science within students’ lives. In the second case we see deployed a deeply redundant financial and leadership structure positioned to enforce what I identify as the logics of STEM against other ways of doing science in schools.

Through this analysis I show how STEM connects to the grammars, logics, and values of “neoliberalism,” the complex ideologies and policies that offer markets as the preferred social structure. In particular I show how STEM replaces descriptive and analytic science with a “translational” mentality geared towards practices of marketization and identities of entrepreneurship, with an obsessive focus on innovation. This occurs at the expense of ethics; technical, cultural and ecological maintenance and respect; as well as collective obligation. STEM foregrounds the technical fix (Robins & Webster, 1989): the short term engineering of well bounded problems to delay or displace the crisis at hand. STEM is, as a result, shallow (does not seek causes), consumerist (commodified solutions are preferred), and short term (solve the problem at hand, not the systemic relations that create the problem).

I conclude with two strategies for subverting the discourse., I draw on the literature around technology and democracy (Sclove, 1995), to suggest that even if forced to STEM-ify our sciences, we can push back on the consumerist, short term logic, by both highlighting STEM’s problems (not letting STEM become commonsense) and pointing to more democratic alternatives for the cooperation between the letters of STEM. Alternatively, I explore insisting on ethics as a primary concern for science. On the one hand this means adopting ethical practices at the outset, e.g., acknowledging “do no harm” as a precondition for science, which means that there are limits on science and that human rather than technical relations must take priority. A second ethical framing means embracing sciences’ histories of challenging power through of distancing itself from both markets and power (Moore, 2008). Both are ways of doing science otherwise than STEM.

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma