Exploring a "State-Critical" STEM Educational Literacy

• In Event: 51.034 - STEM and Literacy Education: Critiquing What Counts as Knowledge From the Perspectives of Black Youth

Abstract

Students’ narratives can tell us more about the nature of STEM education within the status quo and point us toward forms of STEM education that could foster a critical citizenry for a democratic society. I will review Sheldon Wolin (2008) and Wendy Brown’s (2015) work on the corporate-state and neoliberalism and discuss the nature and roles of education within this milieu. Brown’s figuration of the contemporary subject as “homo oeconomicus” will inform my subsequent discussion of students’ perceptions of STEM education at a STEM-focused middle school. I will explore the extent to which students’ narratives indicate their hegemonic socialization as economized subjects under conditions of neoliberal political rationality. I will conclude that although data suggests evidence of such socialization, it also points to students’ ideological indeterminateness and the possibility that educational intervention could stymie hegemonic socialization and cultivate subjectification as “homo politicus” instead. To explore a conceptualization of STEM education that could foster such critical subjectification, I will review Nataly Chesky and Mark Wolfmeyer’s (2015) alternative conceptualization of STEM education, one that expresses a social justice orientation. I will then draw upon the work of Judith Suissa (2010), Jennifer Logue and Cris Mayo (2009), and Abraham DeLeon (2006) to calibrate the extent to which Chesky and Wolfmeyer’s vision balances elements of social-anarchist education and critical pedagogy and argue that it expresses a closer relationship to the former than it does to the latter. I will contend that in doing so, it falls short of providing an approach to STEM education that would be capable of exposing and challenging facets of the corporate-state, like corporate malfeasance and the military industrial complex and its exploits. I will consequently propose a conceptualization of STEM education and literacy that is “state-critical” or focused on bringing the STEM disciplines to bear upon explicit and sustained critiques of state-capitalism and American imperialism in schools. This proposal will take the form of a review of several putative courses at the upper-high-school or undergraduate level that could enact the tenets of a state-critical STEM education. Ultimately, my paper will be an attempt to explore how students’ narratives can assist critical educators with leveraging STEM education into a potent means for cultivating within educational systems social imaginaries and political subjects that eschew the aims of a right-authoritarian status quo and embrace the aims of an egalitarian, left-libertarian society-to-be.

Author

• Jamie Teeple