Science Classroom as Clinic: Paradoxes of Edu-Health-Equity Intervention Spaces

• In Event: Redressing Health Inequities in Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

Responding to calls for science educators to teach the virus, this paper offers a much-needed contextualization of how science classrooms have become sites to discuss, investigate, or remediate health disparities. By examining COVID-19 curricular materials alongside a literature synthesis of researcher and practitioner journals, I map how science-classrooms-as-clinics tend to bound their intervention space in ways that naturalize disparities and responsibilize target populations.

The paper draws theoretically from Science & Technology Studies, curriculum studies, and social epidemiology to analyze edu-health-equity intervention spaces. I conceptualize edu-health-equity interventions as those enrolling education- and health-related expertise (Callon, 1986), and emphasize spaces to examine intersecting techniques that demarcate problems and delimit apparent solutions (Rabinow & Rose, 2006). While medical anthropologists study assumptions embedded in biomedical interventions (Marsland & Prince, 2012) and curriculum scholars do likewise for educational interventions (e.g., Popkewitz, 2020), the rise of cross-sector strategies to address educational and health disparities in tandem remains largely unexamined (cf. Sjödin, 2019).

Methodologically, the paper presents findings from a systematic analysis of major science education research and practitioner journals (1985–2020), such as Studies in Science Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, The Science Teacher, and Journal of Science Teacher Education. Criterion sampling is used to examine how disparities cited in COVID-19 science curricular resources (e.g., those included in a National Science Teachers Association database of COVID-19 lesson plans and webinars) have been approached in U.S. science classrooms through either: (a) explicit instruction about health disparities; or (b) efforts to address health disparities via instruction. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I derive emergent codes by examining which theories and techniques were used to characterize the target population for intervention (Rabinow & Rose, 2006), and what was displaced as a result of the intervention, such as health-disparities curricula appearing outside college-preparatory course sequences (Alonso Luaces et al., 2019; cf. Morales-Doyle, 2017).

The analysis suggests that science education has contributed not only to naturalizing disease to racialized bodies (see Mutegi, 2013; Weinstein, 2010), but also to naturalizing ‘learning difficulties’ to minds racialized as needing health-focused instruction to make science more ‘concrete’ and ‘accessible.’ In addition, I illustrate how science education has tended to responsibilize target populations (Wright & Harwood, 2009) by ascribing health disparities to personal lifestyle or cultural attitudes, and ascribing STEM career disparities to personal disinterest or cultural discontinuity. In repurposing science classrooms as public health clinics, many studies inadvertently reify hierarchies of expertise, disregard racialized social determinants of health, and elide ongoing histories of community health activism (cf. Morales-Doyle et al., 2019; Varelas et al. 2018).

Too often, equity-oriented research has presumed a win-win scenario in redressing health and educational inequities in tandem. This paper contributes to justice-centered science pedagogy by mapping how educational and health equity have been operationalized in ways that either re-inscribe or interrupt processes of racialization via knowledge hierarchies, curricular depictions, and pedagogical prescriptions.

Author

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison