Science Teacher Education as a Praxis of Being Human: Retheorizing Critical Science Teaching Through Sylvia Wynter

• In Event: Toward Critical Public Consciousness in STEM Education: Inter/Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

This paper weaves together a line of argument about entanglements of institutions of modern schooling and the sciences (Montgomery, 1994; Author6, 2004) and Sylvia Wynter’s critiques of the deep structural nature of colonialism (McKittrick, 2015b). In the first literature, science is not merely about the curriculum of a class called science education; it is incorporated into architecture, ideas of standardization, accounting practices of school, and management theories that govern the building. Each of those reify contesting visions of “the scientific.” I call these intersections of science and education “science/education,” and I will let “science education,” sans slash, reference the common use of that term as a particular subject of education. Because science/education constitutes so much of schooling, to imagine more democratic schools implies knowledge production itself (scientia) needs to be democratized.
I use Wynter to imagine a more democratic and public science and education. She traces how colonialism simultaneously is produced by and produces deep structures (what she calls “descriptive statements,” which resemble Foucault’s epistemes in their reach) about who is allowed to be human and who is seen as other or failed in their humanity. Science (i.e., public knowledge) is very much implicated in her analysis of colonialism, from Darwinism to economic theory, knowledge is seen as a way of demarcating “Man” from those others who are not-quite Man (women, people of color, the poor, the occupied). Schools embody and transmit this descriptive statement in their management, in their sorting and selecting, and in their naturalizing of some knowledge and habituses and not others. But Wynter’s work is generative; it always works towards imagining a better, more inclusive and just descriptive statement. This is taken up explicitly by writers building on her oeuvre (McKittrick, 2015a; Mignolo, 2015).
Finally the paper explores how my institution has tried to create a science teacher education that builds on these threads. I outline how we have operationalized a concept of democracy around three practices: inclusion, care, and participation. These are theorized as ongoing struggles for members of any collectivity, not as simple or accomplishable tasks. I map how these practices recur throughout our program and how Wynter’s theory and the science/education analysis are embedded in our curriculum/pedagogy. This includes developing understandings of how science operates as a popular practice of making sense of nature and simultaneously an institutional one of a professional class linked to global state and industrial power, and the contestations between these two frames.
Central to our work of moving the world towards a better descriptive statement are the opportunities we find to link our preservice teachers to social struggles. These are activisms of different sorts and scales. In particular, we link them to 1) struggles for civil rights and justice in a broad sense, 2) struggles over the nature of science and how science becomes a site of public struggle, and 3) in struggles over schools and more democratic (as defined above) educations.

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma