The Cultural Politics of Health/Pathology in STEM Education Reforms Past and Present

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores a paradox. When education assumes responsibility for public health crises, efforts to redress inequities and promote well-being have simultaneously generated new forms of hierarchical distinction and exclusion. The studies examine how STEM-related pedagogies have embodied national anxieties of health/pathology, in part through biopolitical strategies to diagnose bodies and surveil populations. Bringing together ethnographic and historicizing analyses, the papers illustrate how distinct formulations of health have circulated in transnational STEM-related education reforms. The purpose of the session is to spark more robust dialogue about how pedagogies have demarcated healthy bodies from those ableized or racialized as requiring prevention or treatment. In so doing, the session reopens ethical and political questions historically foreclosed by the biomedicalization of diversity.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 2: Exploring Past, Present, and Future Curricular Questions

Chair

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Presumed Pathological? Questioning Premises of Nature Education as a "Win-Win" for Immigrant Health and Integration - Camilla Safrankova, Malmö University

• Hierarchies of "Real-Life Needs": Humanitarian Techniques and the Racialized Tracking of Science and Mathematics Education - Ayse Yolcu, Hacettepe University; Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Making a Healthier and Safer Mathematics for Children in the New Republic - Ryan Ziols, Georgia State University

• Building the Health of Nations Through School Mathematics: Math Anxiety and the Fear of Disease - Jennifer Diaz, Augsburg College

Discussants

• Nathalie Sinclair, Simon Fraser University

• Tia C. Madkins, The University of Texas at Austin