Prioritizing Their Health: Historicizing the Making of Others in U.S. Colonial and Metropolitan Science Education

• In Event: Paradoxes of Inclusion in STEM Education: Making Up Cultural Others Through “Natural” and “Neutral” Spaces

Abstract

Prioritizing health literacy in K-12 science education has recently been promoted as a win-win strategy for all students, but especially marginalized groups (see e.g., NASEM, 2016; Roth, 2014; Zeyer & Kyburz-Graber, 2012). Obesity and type 2 diabetes are cited as culturally relevant science topics with the potential to redress health disparities, close achievement gaps, and empower youth as change agents in their communities. The hope of such reforms—to include all citizens by applying science to issues of community well-being—is not entirely new. A century earlier, U.S. educational scholars designed a science course to focus on pupils’ immediate health needs. The general science course aimed to improve public health in part by bettering the hygiene habits of those racialized as not-yet-American. By juxtaposing past and present, this paper asks: How did health become constituted as a culturally neutral site for improving the physical well-being, scientific reasoning, and social inclusion of minoritized groups?

Interweaving science studies and (post)colonial theories, I explore how U.S. science education has historically participated in the making and unmaking of citizenship—in ways that have rendered the category conditional, precarious, or unattainable for some. Methodologically, the article is an “entangled history” (Sobe, 2015) of how early 20th-century science pedagogies intertwined with practices of urban public health and colonial governance. The analysis draws on archival documents, including scientific journals, education reports, textbooks, and teachers’ manuals. I highlight three pedagogical imperatives targeting the health of “urban,” “foreign-born,” and “native” populations in the U.S. colonial Philippines and continental United States. At issue is how science education has contributed to making up different “kinds” of people (Hacking, 2007) through enmeshed distinctions of healthy vs. pathological, scientific vs. superstitious, and citizen vs. threat to the nation. This matters, because today’s reforms tend to uphold health as a universal good that is both culturally neutral (because grounded in the biochemical body) and also culturally relevant (because those labeled “culturally diverse” face both health disparities and science achievement gaps).

I argue that early 20th-century science pedagogies marked exclusionary boundaries of “biomedical citizenship” (Anderson, 2006), as assessments of health were reconfigured as indices of civic potential along an evolutionary scale. This scale linked the adoption of culturally specific eating habits (among other bodily functions) to the development of scientific reasoning and civilizational uplift. I demonstrate how science curricula projected the American citizen as a model of fitness, rationality, self-restraint, and benevolence—cultural norms that relied on the “fabricated presence” (Morrison, 1992) of pathological Others in need of diagnosis, tutelage, and rescue. Highlighting how science pedagogies changed as they traveled between colonial and metropolitan schools is a strategy to sharpen attention to how they are also changing in time. The article contributes to recent efforts in curriculum history and (post)colonial studies to ask with greater precision: what of the past has been fully abandoned, and what may persist as what Stoler (2016) calls imperial durabilities in our times?

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, The University of Kansas