Adapting Science Education for Everyday Needs: The Production of Pathologized Populations

• In Event: 25.013 - Traveling Discourses of "Democracy": Unsettling Stable Promises and Making Difference Transnationally Through Inclusion

Abstract

This paper explores how efforts to make science education relevant to students’ everyday needs have been productive of pathologized populations. Recent U.S. science education policy calls for adapting instruction to make science “accessible” to “non-dominant racial groups.” Cited as a “democratic ideal” is the goal of ensuring all citizens acquire a baseline of scientific literacy needed to make decisions about human health. A century earlier, U.S. science educationalists designed a course to adapt instruction for the “urban masses.” For these reformers, to democratize science was to Americanize students by helping them adopt scientific rules for healthy living. Whether healthy decision-making in the 2010s or hygienic habits in the 1920s, health has become a primary goal of school science for those marked as outside mainstream society. Attempts to democratize science education have targeted these subgroups by designing curricula around problems assumed to exist in their home lives. The danger, I argue, is that instead of simply responding to the needs of “diverse groups,” such reforms inadvertently produce new distinctions. Classificatory techniques reconfigure racial categories as different “kinds” of students requiring pedagogies focused on immediate needs versus academic preparation. In the effort to empower students through science, such reforms may reinscribe difference by marking populations as not yet exhibiting culturally specific health habits presumed to indicate their capacity for scientific reasoning.

Methodologically, the paper is an “entangled history” (Sobe, 2013) in two respects. First, I trace how discourses of hygiene, science education, and democratic empowerment are already entangled as they circulate across sites of schooling and governance. Second, I strategically entangle two historical moments when U.S. science education recommended distinct pedagogies for racialized groups in the name of democratic empowerment. The argument relies on a variety of sources, including educational research journals from the 1920s, analyses of U.S. colonial interventions and public health movements, and recent science education research and policy. In tracing this entangled history, I attend to how boundaries around “American” have been contested and policed by demarcating populations as a threat to the health and progress of U.S. society.

Analytically, I trace how classificatory techniques traveled across domains of natural science, social science, and schooling. In the early 1900s, sociological surveys were deployed by U.S. colonial authorities in the Philippines to gather data on the unscientific beliefs and unhygienic habits of an “uncivilized” population. Similar surveys entered use by public health officers to classify the “needs” of immigrant groups in U.S. cities. Simultaneously, home surveys became a staple of 1920s science education research to identify the “needs” of the immigrant masses. In recent science education standards, home surveys are proposed to make science culturally relevant for non-dominant racial groups. Juxtaposing past and present, my analysis raises critical questions about how reforms have formulated empowerment as changes required in the daily lives of pathologized groups. By putting science education into conversation with curriculum studies, postcolonial studies, and the history of science, my study seeks to contribute to rethinking the limits of current approaches to equity and diversity.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas