Orienting to "the Researched" in Secondary Science Classrooms: Negotiating Emotional Subjectivities and Cultural Conflict

• In Event: 72.019 - Disrupting Intersecting Systems of Oppression in Science Education

Abstract

Given its key role in the secondary school science experience, dissection can serve as a microcosm for analyzing the intersecting systems of oppression in which scientific practice and science education have been constituted. Weinstein & Brody (2009) point out how one teacher, by engaging girls in the “public” handling of pig organs “broke taboos, even if unconsciously held, of public performances of gender” where “the girlishness of the students was directly challenged” (p. 771). On the other hand, Richardson Bruna (2010) relays how Mexican newcomer students negotiate the disgust they experience during a pig dissection--contextualized by their teacher as something that “should be interesting to the students because their families cut hogs at the plant” (p. 73; see also Author, 2011). Feminist scholars argue that the objective detachment of scientific practice is masculinist, and marginalizes (even serves to “weed out”) students who take up a more relational or empathetic subjectivity regarding “the organism” (Birke, 1991; Fox Keller, 1984). Few scholars, however, have addressed how race, gender, culture(s), and materiality intra-act for female students of color within masculinist and colonizing contexts of science and science education (see Author, 2013).

Using a diffractive approach, and drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study, I convey the experiences of two young women of color, Feona, who is Mexican American, and Lei’lani, who is Pacific Islander, and their science teacher, Ms. Ford (pseudonyms), who is White, and a former pathologist. Feona and Lei’lani reported feeling most troubled not by the actual dissection itself but by the treatment of the deceased animals during and after the dissection. Feona remarks feeling repulsed by the cavalier nature of dissection and not by the slaughtering of animals in general, e.g., for celebratory events, a practice common in her familial and cultural history, given that in the latter cultural practice the parts are not wasted, but eaten. The young women concluded that the dissection taught them that “you have to cut off your emotions for this situation…” The teacher in this study, on the other hand, viewed the dissection experience as a critical and empowering science activity, and, despite the lack of sufficient laboratory resources at the school, had used crowdfunding to purchase the cats.

I use diffractive methods to generate implications from the experiences and perspectives of Feona, Lei’lani, and Ms. Ford. Acknowledging their contrasting orientations can help us better understand the ways that the discursive and material contexts of school science (and scientific practice) intra-act to constitute subjectivities that simultaneously reproduce and disrupt intersecting systems of oppression. In this case, the dissection activity was designed to provide access to a college-level activity, but for two female students of color, access required that they “cut off their emotions.” I raise questions about how science teachers can become, rather than representatives of scientific communities, interlocutors of/within a more critical, multilogical socio-scientific practice(s) such that students’ multiple gendered, cultural, and ethical subjectivities are nurtured as well as critically transformed (Authors, 2016; Bazzul, 2016; Gutierrez, 2013).

Author

• Sara E. Tolbert, Te Whare Wangana o Waitaha University of Canterbury