A Wynter Approach to Reconstructing Human Cognition and Human Action in Science Education

• In Event: The Intellectual Struggle to Be Human: Reading Wynter for Rethinking/Reimagining Equitable Educational Opportunity in STEM

Abstract

Grounded in beliefs, approaches and mindsets espoused by Sylvia Wynter, this work cobbles together a pastiche of suggestions by which pedagogical understandings and practices can be used to address academic inequities that give rise to science achievement disparities existing within the diversity of marginalized youth populations in underserved learning environments. While this work is steeped in post-colonial thought, Wynter’s approach serves as an overarching bricolage of theoretical frameworks, including, for example, critical race theory, culturally responsive pedagogy, identity theory, perspectives embedded within phenomenology and hermeneutics, multicultural and urban education, and feminist perspectives. Through using a variety of lenses, we are able to come to know a richer way of understanding the impact that Sylvia Wynter’s work can have on mediating the teaching and learning, and learning how to teach science innovatively in racially and culturally diverse learning environments. David Scott (2000) notes that Wynter sheds insights into the importance of developing the awareness of our “ideological hegemonies – race principal among them” – a practice that will help us to become more conscious of how our schema and practices impact the ways that teaching and learning unfold in these settings (Scott, 2000). Wynter offers to us a reconstructed understanding of the grounds of human being – the phenomenology of what it means to be human in the world – “a reconstruction that entails a deeper grasp of the dimensions of human cognition and human action” (Scott 2000, p.121). William Sewell’s notion of culture becomes enveloped in Wynter’s approach, as it is described by Sewell as being the dialectical relationship between schema and practices (Sewell 1999), whereby culture is done by individuals, and is simultaneously produced, reproduced and transformed to meet specific goals. The examination of creating a renewed culture in science education – a shift from the traditional paradigm that has existed and adhered to so fervently throughout history – along with a movement to more critically analyze the purpose or telos of science education in our ever changing diverse world – is timely, and used in this work to underscore the actualization of Sylvia Wynter’s renewed vision of the human in relation to the teaching and learning of science. This analysis, in alignment with Wynter’s ethos, is an effort to both individually and collectively “restore” the framework of science education in our contemporary era – to shift the ways that we think about and practice how science is taught and learned, so as to uncover and/or create foundational tools that will enable us to confront deterministic views that are widely held in positivistic science.

Author

• Gillian Ursula Bayne, Lehman College - CUNY