Deconstructing a Discourse: Navigating and Negotiating "Equity in STEM Education" Within Preservice Elementary Teacher Education

• In Event: 67.059 - Enacting Social Justice Through Transformative Science Education Research in Various Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
‘Equity in STEM’ is utilized so often that educational researchers and STEM educators can easily overlook the ways in which ‘equity in STEM’ becomes understood, taken-up, and mobilized.. As a response, our research identifies an ethical imperative to move beyond surficial understandings of ‘equity in STEM’ toward a complex discourse of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016)..

Perspectives
Educators, administrators, and other education advocates frequently align equity with monetary resources or classroom outcomes (Carlone, Haun-Frank, & Webb, 2011). While the aforementioned engagements are one aspect of pursuing ‘equity in STEM’ there are larger socio-political underpinnings worthy of ethico-political hesitations (Wallace, 2018). To avoid the “fast-moving ‘STEM’ train… full of buzz and political slogans [and] not quite delivering on what it promises” (Rodriguez, 2015, p. 1032), this research resides within (while also following) desires for ‘equity in STEM’ education. Like Chesky and Wolfmeyer (2015), we delve beyond utilitarian aims to unpack deeper ideological assumptions circulating throughout the discourse of ‘equity in STEM’. Employing feminist poststructural (St. Pierre, 2000) and critical posthuman theories (Braidotti, 2013) we pay specific attention to the productive prowess of discourse. By merging post-humanist and post-structural perspectives the agentic characteristics of discourse to make certain ideas, and thus also ways of being, legitimate and others illegitimate are revealed.

Modes of Inquiry & Data Sources
We put theory to work (Strom, & Martin, 2013) in the context of one pre-service elementary teacher preparation course thinking with/in the complex discourse of ‘equity in STEM’. Specifically, we employ a feminist poststructural deconstruction to examine a complex thread of questions: (a) what counts as ‘equity in STEM’? (b) under what conditions? (c) according to whom? and (d) for what purposes? Such questions invite educators to “not [point] out an error but [look] at how a structure (i.e., ‘equity in STEM’) has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces” (St. Pierre, 2000, p. 482). Re-reading a series of IRB approved data sources (i.e., classroom artifacts, written reflections, and semi-structured interviews) from 10 pre-service elementary teachers alongside discourses of ‘equity,’ we gleaned insight into multifaceted assumptions underpinning the discourse of ‘equity in STEM’ education.

Findings & Conclusions
The lack of any ‘silver bullet’ (e.g., precise funding formula, instructional technique, recruitment program, or computer software) to ensure ‘equity in STEM’ is made apparent through our discursive deconstruction. Specifically analyzing pre-service teachers’ conceptions of ‘equity in STEM’ diverse emotive responses (e.g. anger, frustration, paralysis, love, empathy, confusion) materialize. Upon weaving together theoretical and lived accounts, ‘equity in STEM’ is distinguished as a dynamic discourse that is continually maintained and confronted with innovative interrogations.

Scholarly Significance
Our deconstructive analysis of ‘equity in STEM,’ illuminates complex sociopolitical relationships (and implications) inherent to this pervasive discourse. When pre-service teachers (and their teacher educators) can distinguish the dynamic complexities (e.g., across manifestations of communication, collaboration, and community) of ‘equality and equity,’ the needs of their students can be appropriately nurtured. By illuminating ‘equity in STEM’ as a dynamic discourse a critical community can become possible.

Authors

• Kasi Matthews, Millsaps College

• Maria Ferris Greene Wallace, University of Southern Mississippi