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Racist, Classist, Colonizing Neoliberal Fuckery Within STEM Eduspeak: Counterstories From the Front Lines

Mon, April 8, 4:10 to 6:10pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine, Chestnut East

Abstract

This study ethnographically examines the detrimental impacts of Eurocentric, Patriarchal, and Capitalistic approaches to STEM and STEM education (Harding, 1998), and critiques the current neoliberal emphasis on testing accountability and measurement of narrow definitions of STEM knowledge in our society and especially in our schools. Neoliberalism in education is an ideology that has led to a surge in public schools towards competitive individualism and quantified accountability through standardization of knowledge, high-stakes testing, and sanctions for failure, informed by capitalistic free-market perceptions of “success” in a financialized business setting (Giroux, 2005). This has led to a devaluation of creativity and innovation (even as it claims to increase these practices), focusing instead on dispassionate, contrived approaches to "doing STEM" that subtract the human- and community-centeredness of these approaches for the sake of promoting "21st century skills" or "competition in the global marketplace."

This neoliberal eduspeak has especially detrimental impacts on schools serving communities of color who struggle with poverty. The dialogic trend in public schools is moving toward notions of education “reform” that frame STEM as a tool for economic gain and STEM learning as a quantifiable commodity: employing behaviorist notions of "intelligence" and “success” and assessment in the name of "accountability." This dehumanizes students, teachers, and understandings of education and of the humanistic purpose of engagement with science, technology, engineering or math. This paper endeavors to re-emphasize the human face and expose the human traumas that this kind of eduspeak inflicts in schools by sharing ethnographically collected stories of an African-American high school science teacher and her students of color in a Title 1 public high school. Critical ethnography (Madison, 2011) and Critical Race Theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) ground our understanding of how students and their teacher navigate the disparities between narratives of STEM educational “success” with the dearth of narratives from/about people who look like them, all the while critically noting issues of access to STEM learning resources and quality hands-on instruction. Their situation is juxtaposed with those available at predominantly White schools serving affluent communities. The counternarrative told here counters dominant narratives of “achievement” in educational eduspeak, by naming systems of racial and economic oppression within today’s neoliberal landscape in public schools.

This paper also shares the frustration surrounding the pervasiveness of this neoliberal trend within educational discourse by naming it as a destructive and entrenched form of "fuckery" that has its tentacles in many aspects of our educational stage all at once. Fuckery is here operationalized as an intentional and systematic warping of education and of STEM, through manipulating the language surrounding these endeavors, the purpose for education, the players involved, the policies surrounding it, the praxis of how it is taught, and what counts as successful within its narrowly constructed and gerrymandered borders. Naming the fuckery of today's STEM eduspeak, as unapologetically and forthrightly as possible, with full intention as to the terms used to describe its harm, is necessary to combat the onslaught of its unchecked destruction.

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